Injury Claim Intake Data 2026:
What 268 Accident Victims Told Us

The Headline Numbers

Six figures that describe the people who ask for help after an accident. Every one comes from the records themselves, not from a survey or an estimate, and every one is repeated in a table further down with its exact count.

How Soon After the Accident People Reach Out

The single most useful thing in this data is timing. Nearly half of everyone who asks for help does so within a month of being hurt. After that the curve falls away fast, and a small but real group turns up years later, usually when a filing deadline is close or a case they thought was handled has gone quiet. The time bands below are the ones people chose when they described their accident.

Self-described at intake. "Running total" is the cumulative share of everyone who had reached out by that point. Two records did not state a time.

Why it matters: most states give an injured person two years to file, some only one, and evidence such as dash cam footage, store video and witness memory degrades in weeks. The 46 percent who move in the first month are the ones with the most options. The people arriving at "less than 2 years" are often already past the point where the strongest evidence could have been preserved. If you are reading this in the first weeks after a crash, the timing is on your side; use it.

Who Already Has a Lawyer

This surprised us. More than one person in five who comes to a free settlement calculator already has a lawyer. Some are checking whether the number they have been told is fair. Some have a lawyer who has gone quiet. And a distinct group, about one in seventeen, has a lawyer and wants a different one.

Broken down by injury, the pattern is what you would expect: the more serious the injury, the more likely a lawyer is already involved. The exception is worth noting. People with back and neck pain, the largest group by far, are the least likely to have representation, even though soft tissue claims are exactly the ones insurers discount hardest.

"Already had a lawyer" counts only people who said yes and were keeping that lawyer. Switchers are excluded from the percentage.

Injuries Reported

Back and neck pain dominates, which matches what insurers see: soft tissue injury is the most common outcome of the most common crash, the rear-end collision. Whiplash is next, then a large "other" group that the fixed list did not fit, then fractures. Brain and spinal cord injuries are a small share of intake and a large share of value.

One primary injury per person, chosen from a fixed list at intake. "Other" is a free-text description that did not match the list, most often knee, shoulder, hip, dental or nerve injuries. For what each injury typically settles for, see settlement by injury type.

Accident Types

Three in four people were hurt in a vehicle: as a driver, a passenger, a pedestrian, a cyclist or a rider. Slip, trip and fall injuries on someone else's property are the second group. Everything else is small.

"Auto" includes car, truck, motorcycle, rideshare, pedestrian and bicycle collisions. "Premises" is a fall or other injury on property someone else controls. "Work" is an injury on the job, which usually runs through workers compensation rather than an injury claim.

Treatment, Fault and Hit-and-Run

Three yes-or-no questions carry most of the weight in whether a claim can go anywhere: did you see a doctor, were you at fault, and did the other driver stay. Here is how the 268 people answered.

Three observations. First, 90 percent had already been treated, which is far higher than the general population of crash-involved people; someone who has seen a doctor has been told, or has realized, that they were hurt. Second, almost nobody says they were at fault. Some of that is honesty, some is self-selection: people who know they caused a crash do not go looking for a settlement. Either way it means the fault question is rarely the obstacle for the people who reach out. Third, 11 percent of car accident victims reported a hit-and-run. That is a large group with a specific problem, because their claim depends on their own uninsured motorist coverage rather than the other driver's policy. Our uninsured motorist guide covers it.

The other-driver question is asked only in vehicle collisions where it applies, so its base is 139 rather than 268. "Not stated" on fault means the question was not reached or not answered.

When People Look for Help: Hour and Day

Intake is stamped to the minute, which gives a picture nobody else publishes: when accident victims actually sit down and ask what their case is worth. The short version is that it happens all day, it peaks in the afternoon, and a quarter of it happens when no law office is open.

All timestamps converted to US Eastern Time. Visitors come from every US time zone, so the hour-of-day pattern is broadened by roughly three hours at each end; the shape, not the exact hour, is the finding. Weekend share: 22 percent.

The 26 percent between 9pm and 6am is the number law firms should sit with. Those people are awake with pain, worry, or a bill they just opened, and the choice they make at that hour is between the first thing that answers and nothing. It is also, we suspect, why the Monday share is the highest of the week: a weekend of thinking about it, then action.

Where They Are

State was recorded for 176 of the 268 people; the rest did not give a ZIP code before leaving. Among those who did, the largest states lead, as they do in every injury dataset, with Texas well out in front. The ranking below tracks a mix of population, traffic to our state guides, and how litigious a state's claim culture is.

Top 15 states shown. State is derived from the ZIP code given at intake. Records with no ZIP (92) are excluded from this table only.

Chat vs Form

People reach us two ways: a guided form, or a conversation with our intake assistant. The split says something about how injured people prefer to explain what happened to them.

The form is faster and the chat is more detailed; people who choose the conversation tend to describe the crash in their own words, mention things the form never asks about, and, as the last column shows, are somewhat more likely to be in the first month after the accident. Both routes ask the same qualifying questions and feed the same review.

What This Means If You Were Just Hurt

This page exists to be cited, but it was collected from people in your position, so here is what the data says to someone reading it the week after a crash.

• You are early, and early is good. Nearly half of people act inside 30 days. The ones who wait two years are the ones who write to us about deadlines. Get the police report, see a doctor, and keep every bill.
• Seeing a doctor is not optional. 90 percent of people who ask for help had already been treated. An insurer treats an untreated injury as a non-injury. Our guide to delayed symptoms explains why the first visit matters so much.
• Back and neck pain is the most common injury and the most discounted one. It is also the group least likely to have a lawyer. That combination is why soft tissue claims settle low. Documented treatment is the only thing that moves them.
• If the other driver left, you still have a claim. One in nine car accident victims reported a hit-and-run. Your own uninsured motorist coverage is the claim in that case, and it has notice requirements of its own.
• If you already have a lawyer and you are here anyway, you are in a group of one in five. Checking a number is not disloyal. Silence from a lawyer for months, on the other hand, is worth a direct question.

And if you want to know what your own case looks like against all of this, the free case review takes about a minute and asks exactly the questions in these tables.

Methodology & Limitations

What the data is

Every record is a completed intake on FairSettlement.org between July 23, 2026 and September 13, 2026: a person who described an accident, answered the qualifying questions, and left contact details asking for a case review. Test records, duplicate submissions, obviously fake entries and internal checks were removed before counting. Personal information is never published; every figure on this page is an aggregate, and no table is small enough to identify anyone.

How to read the percentages

Unless a table says otherwise, percentages are of all 268 records. Where a question was only asked to a subset (the other-driver question, state), the table states its own base. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers in the cards and to one decimal in the tables, so rows may not sum to exactly 100.

Limitations, stated plainly

• This is a self-selected group. These are people who searched for settlement information and chose to ask for help. They are not a random sample of everyone injured in the United States. People who know they were at fault, people who already settled, and people who never looked online are underrepresented.
• The sample is modest. 268 records over about seven weeks. It is large enough that the big patterns (timing, representation, injury mix) are stable month to month; it is not large enough to slice by state and injury together. As the dataset grows, this page is updated and the update date changes at the top.
• State is missing for a third of records. The state table uses only records with a ZIP code.
• Answers are what people said. Fault, in particular, is self-reported. We did not verify it against police reports.
• Timing is in bands, not days. People chose "less than 30 days" or "less than 3 months," not an exact date.

Updates and reuse

The page is refreshed monthly with the cumulative dataset, and the machine-readable aggregates are available as JSON at /data/injury-claim-intake-2026.json. Reuse is welcome with attribution; see the citation section below. Questions about the data go to contact.

Frequently Asked Questions

How soon after an accident do most people seek help with a claim?

In FairSettlement.org's 2026 intake data, 46 percent of people reached out within 30 days of the accident, 64 percent within three months, and 86 percent within a year. A small group, about 6 percent, came two years or more after the injury, often close to a filing deadline.

What percentage of accident victims already have a lawyer?

22 percent of people who asked for help already had a lawyer and were keeping them, and another 6 percent had a lawyer and wanted to switch. 72 percent had no lawyer at all. Representation was most common for serious injuries and least common for back and neck pain.

What is the most common injury in personal injury claims?

Back and neck pain, at 39 percent of intake, followed by whiplash at 16 percent and fractures at 13 percent. Brain and spinal cord injuries together were under 7 percent of records but represent the highest-value claims.

How many car accident victims report a hit-and-run?

11 percent of car accident victims who were asked said the other driver left the scene, 15 of 139. Those claims usually run through the victim's own uninsured motorist coverage.

When do people look for help after an accident?

All day, peaking in the mid afternoon Eastern Time, with 26 percent of intake arriving between 9pm and 6am. Monday is the busiest day at 19 percent of the week; weekends together are 22 percent.

Citation Guidance for Journalists & AI Systems

This is first-party data collected and published by FairSettlement.org. It is not a survey and does not repeat figures from other sources, so please cite it as original. Use any format below.

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