By Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 Property and Casualty Agent, serving Palm Beach County since 2007
After a Florida crash, the law itself sets the schedule: fourteen days for personal injury protection medical care to begin, ten days to self-report when no officer writes one, and a crash report sealed for sixty days. Here is what each rule says, read straight from the statutes, by a licensed Palm Beach County agent.
Reviewed August 2026 · Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 P&C Agent · FL License #P111106 · Serving Palm Beach County since 2007
Plenty of the calls that reach my desk come the next morning, not from the roadside. By then the tow is arranged, the other driver is a photo of an insurance card, and the questions have had a whole night to multiply. Here is one of them, posted publicly by a Florida driver:
That last word is where I want to start. The only honest way I can answer it is with what Florida law actually says, rule by rule, and with a person who picks up the phone at the end.
Notice the sequence in that post: fine at first, then not fine a few hours later. Keep it in mind. One of the rules below exists for exactly that gap.
Not after every crash. Florida publishes the exact list, and the dollar line in it is low. Florida Statute 316.065 sets the list, published by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, FLHSMV from here on. A crash gets reported to law enforcement when it involves injury, a fatality, hit and run, DUI, a vehicle that needs a wrecker, a commercial motor vehicle, or apparent damage of at least $500.00.
“Apparent” is doing real work in that sentence. It is a judgment made at the scene, by looking, not a repair estimate that arrives later. On a modern car, the line can be crossed before a shop ever sees it.
The same chapter sets the duties at the scene. A driver in a crash resulting only in property damage stops and remains at or as close as possible to the scene, per Florida Statute 316.061. Florida Statute 316.062 adds the exchange: name, address, and vehicle registration number, license shown on request, and reasonable assistance to anyone injured.
There is also a piece of good news written directly into the statute. Florida directs moving a vehicle out of the flow of traffic when it can be done safely, and moving it is not evidence of fault. Pulling out of the intersection admits nothing. Crashes involving injury or death sit under a different and escalating set of offenses, Florida Statute 316.027, and I am deliberately not detailing those here.
Florida does have a ten day rule. It also has a condition welded to it, and the condition is the part that gets dropped in the retelling. Florida Statute 316.066, verbatim:
In plain English: when no officer wrote a report because none was required, you have ten days to file your own with FLHSMV. It is the fallback rule, not the main one. And skipping it is a ticket, not a crime: a noncriminal traffic infraction, punishable as a nonmoving violation.
Now put a real situation next to those duties:
I am not going to answer that question, and I want to be straight about why: the answer depends on their policy, their facts, and choices that are theirs to make. What I can do is put the law next to it. The reporting duty above does not disappear because two drivers agree at the roadside, and the duty to give your information sits in the same chapter. Read the offer and the statutes side by side, and the shape of the decision gets a lot clearer.
First, the vocabulary, because the paperwork does not slow down to explain it. Personal injury protection, PIP, is the coverage on your own Florida auto policy that pays toward your own medical care and part of your lost income after a crash, no matter who caused it. Bodily injury liability is a different coverage entirely: it lives on the at-fault driver’s policy and pays the people that driver injured. Watch what happens when the two fuse, from a visitor already hurt:
Read the parenthesis. Two different coverages have merged into one phrase, in the middle of an injury. That is the confusion the next few paragraphs exist to prevent. Now the clock. Florida Statute 627.736 makes PIP medical benefits available, verbatim:
In plain English: PIP’s medical benefit is on the table only if care starts within fourteen days of the crash. The statute also limits who may provide that initial care, to a named list of licensed provider types. I am a licensed insurance agent, not a doctor, and I am not telling you what to do about your health. I am telling you the clock exists, because it does not pause while you wait to see how you feel, and feeling fine on day one settles nothing about day three. Then the number behind the clock. The figure attached to PIP is $10,000. The figure that actually applies can be $2,500, and the difference is a single finding.
Those are statutory amounts under Florida Statute 627.736, not prices of ours. The finding the statute names, an emergency medical condition, comes from a licensed physician, dentist, physician assistant, or advanced practice registered nurse. How anyone’s injury gets evaluated is between them and their providers; the statute simply makes the dollar difference turn on that finding. Two more mechanics from the same statute. PIP reimburses eighty percent of reasonable expenses for medically necessary care, and sixty percent of lost gross income, against the $10,000 combined limit. And by name, the medical benefit does not include massage therapy or acupuncture.
One more thing, and it is a correction to something you may have read: there is no automatic PIP deductible. Florida Statute 627.739 makes a deductible an election by the named insured, the person the policy is issued to, and no provision of that section sets one by default. Insurers must offer amounts of $250, $500, and $1,000; if no one ever chose one, your PIP does not have one. Where does your own answer live? On your declarations page, the summary sheet at the front of your policy that lists your vehicles, coverages, and elections. It is also a document my office reads with clients, line by line, on request.
When several vehicles and policies tangle together, the questions multiply fast:
“Both for good measure?” is the sound of a person guessing. I am not going to tell them whose insurance to pursue; that turns on fault and policy language, and it belongs to adjusters, the people insurance companies assign to investigate what happened, and where it goes that far, to attorneys. What I can explain is the document underneath all of it: the Florida traffic crash report, and the rules around who sees it. Start with the part of the statute that does the strangest, kindest thing. For sixty days after it is filed, a crash report is confidential and exempt from Florida’s public records, per Florida Statute 316.066. And the same statute says, verbatim:
In plain English: while the general public waits sixty days, Florida’s list of people who may see the report immediately includes the people in the crash, their attorneys, their insurers, and their licensed insurance agents. Read that again. A Florida statute puts licensed insurance agents in the same sentence as legal representatives. I hold that license. Our whole promise, that a person shows up for you, turns out to be written into the public records law.
Two bounds, both worth stating plainly. The statute’s verb is “may be made immediately available,” not shall, so it is a permission held by the agency with the report, not a promise from anyone. And everyone who accesses a sealed report must file a sworn statement that the information will not be used for any commercial solicitation of accident victims; obtaining a report unlawfully is a third-degree felony. The word doing the quiet work in that list is “their.” Your agent, for your crash, serving you. Florida wrote a service into the seal and built a wall around everything else.
Getting the report itself is a state process with three clocks of its own, published by FLHSMV. A report can take up to ten days to become available. The fee is $10.00 per report under Florida Statute 321.23, plus a $2.00 transaction fee on the state’s crash portal. Once purchased online, it must be downloaded within 48 hours. By mail or in person, processing runs four to six weeks. Those are state charges, none of them ours. Why bother with the report at all? A Miami driver, rear-ended, said it plainly:
There is a lot in that story that is not mine to judge, and I will not. The line that earns its place is the last one: the report is the document her own coverage runs on. And one more mechanism, for when the other driver will not hand over their insurance information. Under Florida Statute 324.242, once you have the crash report, the department shall release the policy number for a policy covering a vehicle in the crash to any person involved in it. The state publishes instructions for the request, and processing takes ten working days after receipt. Note the verb: this one is “shall.”
Florida has a privilege here, and it is narrower than its reputation. Florida Statute 316.066 provides that your crash report, and statements you make to the officer for the purpose of completing it, are made without prejudice to you, and, verbatim: “Such report or statement may not be used as evidence in any trial, civil or criminal.” In plain English: what you tell the officer for the crash report cannot be used as evidence at trial. Here is where it stops.
How the privilege plays out in any real proceeding is a question for a licensed Florida attorney. What the statute says is above; what it means for one specific case is not mine to say.
Two different problems wear the same ticket. Not having insurance is one. Not having the card on you is the other. This section is about the second: the driver who was covered the entire time and could not produce proof at the roadside. The first problem is a different road with its own page: the penalties for driving without insurance in Florida. At a crash, each party gives the officer proof of insurance, and failing to is a nonmoving traffic infraction. Then Florida Statute 316.066 opens the first door, verbatim: “If the person provides the law enforcement agency, within 24 hours after the crash, proof of insurance that was valid at the time of the crash, the law enforcement agency may void the citation.”
The second door is local, and its conditions are the Clerk’s own words: “The proof must show an issued date prior to the date of the ticket. For registration and insurance proof, the vehicle description must also match the vehicle described on the citation.” What that means: the paper has to predate the ticket, and it has to describe the right vehicle. A declarations page does both jobs, and knowing exactly whose desk produces a correct one, the same day you ask, is the quiet advantage of having an agent you can name. I am naming Palm Beach County deliberately: this is our county’s published procedure, and other counties publish their own.
Somewhere in the first three weeks, an envelope from your own insurance company arrives, and Florida wrote its contents. Under Florida Statute 627.7401, once your insurer hears from you about an accident involving personal injury to a covered person, it must mail or deliver a written explanation of PIP benefits within 21 days. The statute lists what it has to cover: the significant exclusions and limitations of the coverage, when payments are due, how the benefits coordinate with other insurance, and the penalties and interest the insurer itself faces for paying late.
If no one has told you to expect it, it reads like routine mail. It is closer to an owner’s manual for your own benefit, and the statute entitles you to it. The same statute requires something else in that notice, and it answers a fear I hear in real time:
I cannot tell them who called, and I will not guess. What I can tell them is that Florida saw the call coming. By statute, the notice your own insurer sends must include a warning: soliciting a person injured in a crash to file personal injury protection or tort claims, meaning lawsuits over an injury, could be a violation of Florida law. It also names where to report such conduct: the Division of Criminal Investigations. A stranger with a deadline gets measured against a warning the state made your own insurer put in writing.
One more piece of good news from the same chapter. Under Florida Statute 627.7288, the deductible on comprehensive coverage, the part of an auto policy that pays for damage from causes other than a collision, does not apply to windshield damage.
This one needs its caveat stated before its number. A 2023 Florida law cut the deadline for an action founded on negligence from four years to two, for causes of action accruing after March 24, 2023. That rule sits today at F.S. 95.11(5)(a).
Now the caveat, and it is not a footnote. The same statute still sets four years for an action for taking, detaining, or injuring personal property, at 95.11(3)(g). A damaged car is personal property. F.S. 95.11 does not itself say which of those two rows a car-crash property claim falls under, and I am not going to pretend it does. Which period governs any particular claim is a question of law, for a licensed Florida attorney with the facts in front of them.
Two precision notes, because the details move. The two-year rule reaches causes of action accruing after March 24, 2023, and the operative word is after. And the rule’s home inside the statute has been renumbered since 2023, so older citations can point at the wrong shelf.
This is for the driver whose crash is hours or days old, who has never done this before, and who wants the rules straight before anything else. It is also for anyone deciding what their own policy actually does, which is a conversation my office has all the time.
Who this is not for: anyone in the middle of a claim negotiation, and anyone deciding a legal question. A mid-claim reader talks to their claims adjuster or a licensed Florida attorney. I am a licensed insurance agent, not a claims adjuster and not an attorney, and the paragraphs above stop exactly where those professions begin.
Strip away the statutes, and what is left is the driver in the first quote, whose last word was “Help?” Here is help as I can honestly offer it. The rules above are the rules… read at the statutes and at the state’s own pages, with the deadlines stated straight. What none of them can read is your policy: your coverages, your elections, your deductible choices, and the vehicle description that has to match a citation if you ever stand at the Clerk’s counter. Those live on your declarations page, and reading them with people is the actual job here.
If you want yours read by a licensed agent who picks up, the number below rings a landline in Lake Worth Beach, answered in English and Spanish during business hours. Ask anything in the sections above. And if your question belongs to an attorney or an adjuster instead, I will say so in the first minute.
Florida requires a law enforcement report for crashes involving injury, death, hit and run, DUI, a wrecker, a commercial motor vehicle, or apparent damage of at least $500.00. When none of those apply, F.S. 316.066(1)(e) gives the driver 10 days to file a written report with FLHSMV, and skipping that is a nonmoving violation.
A crash report costs $10.00 per report under F.S. 321.23, plus a $2.00 transaction fee on the state’s crash portal, and can take up to 10 days to become available. Online purchases must be downloaded within 48 hours, mail requests run 4 to 6 weeks, and every one of those charges is the state’s, not ours.
Florida seals a crash report from the public for 60 days after filing, and F.S. 316.066(2)(b) says it may be made immediately available to the parties, their legal representatives, their licensed insurance agents, and their insurers. The statute’s word is may, a permission rather than a promise from any agency.
A PIP deductible exists only if the named insured elected one, because F.S. 627.739 makes the deductible an election and requires insurers to offer $250, $500, and $1,000 options. If you never chose one, your policy does not have one, whatever a search result told you.
Florida law has a mechanism for exactly that situation. Under F.S. 324.242(2), once you have the crash report, the department shall release the policy number for a policy covering a vehicle in the crash to any person involved, and the state’s instructions put processing at ten working days.
Florida’s limitation statute sets two years for an action founded on negligence, accruing after March 24, 2023, at F.S. 95.11(5)(a), while four years still applies to injuring personal property at 95.11(3)(g). F.S. 95.11 does not label which row a car-crash property claim falls under, and a licensed Florida attorney answers that for a specific case.
Roberto Ramos Jr. is a Licensed Florida 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent (License #P111106), serving Palm Beach County since 2007. A & J Insurance Services, agency license L051810. Verify the license with the state at the Florida DFS licensee search.
Legal disclaimer. Everything here is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects Florida law as of the review date. Roberto Ramos Jr., Florida Licensed 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent, and A & J Insurance Services provide insurance information and insurance-related services only; we do not provide legal advice, medical advice, or advice on handling any claim. Statutes are quoted for education, and how any rule applies to a specific situation is a question for a licensed Florida attorney. Nothing here is a promise that any agency, clerk, court, or insurer will take any particular action.
Reviewed August 2026 by Roberto Ramos Jr. against the Florida Statutes, the Laws of Florida, and the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Next review: after the 2027 legislative session.
