Tort thresholds by state — verbal, monetary or none (2026)

In a no-fault state a threshold decides whether an injury claim can go to tort at all. Some thresholds are verbal, some are a dollar figure, and the published comparisons get three of them wrong repeatedly.

A verbal threshold describes the injury in words — death, serious impairment of a body function, permanent serious disfigurement, and similar formulations. A monetary threshold sets a dollar figure of medical expense that must be exceeded first. A few states use both. The distinction matters because a verbal threshold cannot be met by spending more on treatment, and a monetary one can.

The most-published mistake in this topic is to attribute a dollar threshold to a state whose threshold is purely verbal. The figure usually quoted for that state is its personal-injury coverage amount, which is a different thing entirely: one is how much the policy pays, the other is the gate to a lawsuit.

Where a monetary threshold exists it is a small figure, set decades ago in some states, and it has never been indexed. That is worth knowing before treating it as a meaningful filter.

Source of record: each jurisdiction’s own statute text, corroborated against its insurance department or motor-vehicle agency. 45 jurisdictions carry values confirmed against primary text; the rest show no figure until the primary text is read.

Statutory records last verified against primary sources on 10 August 2026. Every cell in the table above is read from a committed record with its own citation; nothing here is copied from a secondary comparison.