The 8 Types of Auto Insurance Claims and When Each One Applies
There are eight types of auto insurance claims you might file after a car accident. They split into two categories based on who you’re filing against: your own insurer (first-party claims) or the other driver’s insurer (third-party claims). This matters more than it might seem. A claim against your own insurance company plays by different rules than one against the other driver’s, and confusing the two is one of the fastest ways to leave money on the table.
The eight main types:
- Bodily injury liability claim – Filed against the at-fault driver’s insurer to pay for the injured party’s medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering.
- Property damage liability claim – Filed against the at-fault driver’s insurer to pay for your car repairs or total loss.
- Collision claim – Filed with your own insurer to repair your car after a crash, regardless of fault. Subject to your deductible.
- Comprehensive claim – Filed with your own insurer for non-crash damage. Theft, vandalism, fire, flood, a deer through the windshield.
- Medical Payments (MedPay) claim – Filed with your own insurer to cover medical bills for you and your passengers, no matter who caused the accident.
- Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist (UM/UIM) claim – Filed with your own insurer when the at-fault driver has no insurance or not enough of it. In California, this is often the coverage that actually pays you in serious injury cases.
- Wrongful death claim – Brought by a deceased person’s surviving family members, typically against the at-fault driver’s liability policy.
- Product liability claim – A claim against a vehicle manufacturer when a defect caused or worsened the crash. Not technically an insurance claim, though it often runs alongside one.
First-party vs. third-party claims: what’s the actual difference?
A first-party claim goes to your own insurance company. You’re the policyholder. There’s a contract between you and the insurer, and they owe you a duty of good faith under California law. Collision, comprehensive, MedPay, UM, and UIM are all first-party coverages.
A third-party claim is filed against another person’s insurance company, typically the other driver’s. Because you don’t have a contract with their insurer, you’re not making a policy claim. Instead, you’re filing a negligence claim, and their insurance company negotiates with you on behalf of their policyholder. Bodily injury liability and property damage liability are the most common types of third-party claims.
The distinction matters because of who’s actually on your side. Your own insurer has legal obligations to you: prompt investigation, fair communication, and timely payment. The other driver’s insurer has none of that loyalty. Their adjuster works for them, and every dollar they pay you is a dollar out of their file. Understanding which hat the insurance company is wearing in any given conversation is the single biggest leverage point most accident victims miss.
What are the 8 types of auto insurance claims?
1. Bodily injury liability claims
If you’re hurt in a crash caused by another driver, this is where most of your compensation comes from. Their BI policy pays for your medical bills, lost income, and pain and suffering. California now requires a minimum of $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident in bodily injury coverage, raised from the old 15/30 limits that had stood since 1967. Average BI claims run roughly $28,000 nationally, which means state-minimum policies are usually exhausted immediately in a serious case.
2. Property damage liability claims
Property damage liability pays for the other side of the wreck: your car, your bike rack, the fence you took out on the way to the curb. California raised the minimum from $5,000 to $15,000 in January 2025. For anyone who’s priced a bumper on a newer truck recently, that still isn’t much.
3. Collision claims
Collision coverage pays to repair your own car after a crash, whether or not you caused it. You file with your insurer. A deductible applies, usually $500 or $1,000, which you pay before coverage kicks in. Collision is optional in California, but lenders almost always require it if you’re financing or leasing.
4. Comprehensive claims
Comprehensive coverage protects your car from damage that isn’t caused by a collision – think falling trees, hailstorms, vandalism, or hitting an animal on the freeway. It covers the unexpected, non-collision incidents that can still leave your car in bad shape. If something out of the ordinary happens to your vehicle and you have comprehensive coverage, that’s the claim you’d file.
5. Medical Payments (MedPay) claims
MedPay is California’s version of first-party medical coverage. It pays medical bills for you and your passengers, no matter who caused the crash. This is where most articles on California insurance get confused. California is a fault state, not a no-fault state, so traditional PIP isn’t really sold here in any meaningful way. MedPay functions as the practical equivalent, according to the California Department of Insurance, though it’s narrower. No lost wages. No household services. Just medical.
6. Uninsured and underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) claims
The numbers on this one are ugly. Per the Insurance Research Council’s most recent study, about 15.4% of American drivers had no insurance in 2023, and 18% more were underinsured. One in three drivers, combined. California runs well above the national average on the uninsured side.
Uninsured and underinsured motorist is the coverage that pays when the at-fault driver can’t. Under California Insurance Code §11580.2, every auto insurer has to offer UM/UIM in every bodily injury policy, and you can only decline it by signing a written waiver. If your insurer never got that signed waiver from you, courts have treated the coverage as present at your liability limit, even if you never paid a premium for it. This is one of the first things a competent attorney investigates when an uninsured driver hits you in California.
Hit-and-run is its own wrinkle. California UM coverage reaches hit-and-run claims, but only if there was actual physical contact between the vehicles. Swerving to avoid a phantom car that never touched you isn’t enough. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reported in March 2026 that 15% of all police-reported crashes in 2023 involved a driver who fled the scene. A record high.
7. Wrongful death claims
When someone is killed in a crash, the surviving spouse, children, or, in some cases, parents and dependent family members can bring a wrongful death claim against the driver who caused it. Damages cover what the survivors lost: financial support, companionship, consortium, and funeral costs. The decedent’s own pain and suffering before death is a separate claim called a survival action. Worth noting: California’s temporary rule allowing survival-action pain and suffering expired on January 1, 2026, so the rules for newly filed cases have shifted back to a narrower framework.
8. Product liability claims
Sometimes the real cause of a crash isn’t driver error. A tire delaminates at speed. An airbag fails to deploy. Electronic stability control glitches and throws the car into oncoming traffic. Those are product defect cases, and they’re pursued against the manufacturer, not an insurance company. California has some of the most plaintiff-friendly product liability law in the country, going back to the state Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products. Product claims often run in parallel with a regular BI claim and can dramatically increase the total recovery in catastrophic cases.
What happens after a car accident? The claims process, step by step
The first 72 hours matter most. Call 911. Get a police report. Photograph everything. Exchange information. Don’t apologize, don’t speculate about fault, don’t try to sort out liability at the scene. That’s not your job.
Within 10 days, California requires you to file a DMV Form SR-1 if anyone was injured, anyone died, or property damage exceeded $1,000. Missing this deadline can get your license suspended independent of anything else about the accident.
Then comes the notification. Tell your own insurer no matter what, because your policy’s cooperation clause requires it. Contact the at-fault driver’s insurer only to open the claim. One thing that saves more cases than just about anything else: do not give the other driver’s insurer a recorded statement. You’re not required to in California, and doing one early, before you know the full extent of your injuries, is how insurers lock victims into lowball settlements.
The adjuster on the other side handles liability and damages analysis. Once you’ve reached maximum medical improvement or at least have a clear prognosis, your attorney sends a demand letter with medical records, bills, wage-loss documentation, and a liability narrative. Under California’s fair claims regulations, the insurer has 40 days to accept or deny after receiving proof of claim, and 30 days after acceptance to pay.
Before the money lands in your account, every lienholder gets paid first. Medi-Cal. Medicare. Your health insurer, if they have subrogation rights. MedPay, if you used it. Any hospital liens. Lien reduction is where a good personal injury attorney earns their fee several times over.
California-specific rules that change how your claim works
A few California quirks matter a lot for any type of auto claim.
First, Proposition 213 (Civil Code §3333.4) bars uninsured drivers from recovering non-economic damages, even when they weren’t at fault. Pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of consortium: gone. The medical bills and lost wages are still recoverable. The exceptions are narrower than most people think: passengers in uninsured vehicles who aren’t the owner, accidents on private property, and cases where the at-fault driver was actually convicted of DUI.
Second, California follows pure comparative negligence. If the accident was 30% your fault, you get 70% of your damages. No 50% or 51% cap as you’d see in most other states. Even a driver 99% at fault can recover 1%. That’s a real difference for borderline cases, and it’s one reason partial-fault settlements still produce meaningful compensation in California when they’d produce nothing elsewhere.
Third, the clock on filing a lawsuit is short. Two years from the date of the crash for personal injury. There are narrow exceptions (minors, delayed discovery of injury, claims against government entities), but two years is the default, and it runs faster than people think when you’re in treatment.
Fourth, your own insurer cannot raise your rates after an accident that wasn’t your fault. That’s written into California’s insurance regulations. You shouldn’t have to argue for it.
Do you need a personal injury lawyer for an auto insurance claim?
For property damage claims with clean liability and minor soft-tissue injuries, many people handle things themselves. That’s fine. Insurance companies usually pay what they owe on small claims because the cost of fighting them exceeds the cost of settling.
Things change when any of the following happen: you were hospitalized, liability is disputed, the at-fault driver was uninsured or underinsured, multiple claimants are sharing a limited policy, or the insurer has already made an offer that feels too low. In any of those scenarios, the gap between what you’d recover on your own and what an attorney can get is almost always larger than the attorney’s fee. This is especially true on UM/UIM claims, where your own insurer becomes, effectively, the adverse party the moment you file.
If you’ve been injured in a California car accident and you’re trying to figure out which type of claim applies, or whether the offer you’ve been given is fair, we’d be glad to walk through it with you. The consultation is free, and there’s no obligation. Just a clearer read on where you stand and what your case is actually worth.
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