Car insurance claims in Michigan

Michigan pays motor-vehicle injury claims through chapter 31 of the Insurance Code of 1956, MCL 500.3101 to 500.3179, to which the compilers give the popular name No-Fault Insurance. Every owner or registrant of a vehicle required to be registered in the state must maintain three things in force, not one: personal protection insurance, property protection insurance, and residual liability insurance (§ 500.3101(1)). Personal protection benefits are due «without regard to fault» (§ 500.3105(2)) and cover reasonable charges for care, recovery and rehabilitation; loss of income from work for the first three years after the accident, reduced by fifteen percent; and up to twenty dollars a day for ordinary and necessary services the injured person would otherwise have performed (§ 500.3107(1)). Funeral and burial cover is whatever the policy says, within a statutory band of $1,750 to $5,000. The vocabulary matters when you telephone an insurer: ask about personal protection insurance, because that is what the statute calls the benefit, and the monthly work-loss ceiling is index-adjusted each year rather than fixed in the printed text.

The 2019 reform is what makes Michigan unlike anywhere else, and it turned an automatic benefit into a decision. For a policy issued or renewed after 1 July 2020 the applicant or named insured must select one of four levels of medical cover: $50,000 per individual per loss occurrence, available only where the person is enrolled in Medicaid and the household is otherwise covered; $250,000; $500,000; or no limit at all (§ 500.3107c(1)). A separate section lets a qualified person decline that medical cover altogether, but only where the person, their spouse and resident relatives all hold qualified health coverage, and if the health coverage later terminates there are thirty days to obtain motor cover again (§ 500.3107d(1), (6)(a)). Both sections were added by 2019 PA 21 and 2019 PA 22, both immediately effective 11 June 2019, and both default to unlimited cover where no effective selection was made. So the first question after a Michigan crash is not what the law allows but what was ticked on a form at renewal, and that form is worth finding before anything else.

Suing the other driver for pain and suffering requires death, serious impairment of body function, or permanent serious disfigurement (§ 500.3135(1)); outside those exceptions tort liability is abolished outright where the statutory security was in effect (§ 500.3135(3)). Serious impairment carries a three-part statutory definition — objectively manifested, an impairment of an important body function, and affecting the person’s general ability to lead their normal life, with no temporal requirement for how long it lasts (§ 500.3135(5)) — which Enacting section 2 of 2019 PA 21, printed on the statute page, says is intended to codify and give full effect to the opinion in McCormick v Carrier, 487 Mich 180 (2010); that opinion was not read for this page, so nothing is said here about what it holds. For vehicle damage there is a separate, small route: the mini-tort, capped at $1,000 and, for accidents after 1 July 2020, at $3,000, recoverable only to the extent the damage is not covered by insurance, assessed on comparative fault with the same fifty percent bar, unavailable to a vehicle driven without the statutory security, and to be brought wherever legally possible in the small claims division (§ 500.3135(3)(e), (4)).

The deadlines are where Michigan claims are lost. An action for the death of a person or for injury to a person or property carries three years after the time of the death or injury (§ 600.5805(2)) — one period for both, unlike most states. But an action for personal protection benefits against your own insurer may not be commenced more than one year after the accident unless written notice of injury reached the insurer inside that year or the insurer already paid, and even then recovery reaches back only one year from the date the action began (§ 500.3145(1), (2)). Property protection benefits get a flat year (§ 500.3145(5)), other contract claims on the policy six (§ 600.5807(9)), and an insurer may not shorten any of them by a policy clause — Mich. Admin. Code R 500.2212 forbids shortened limitation of action clauses in personal insurance and makes such a clause void. On the insurer’s side, personal protection benefits are overdue thirty days after reasonable proof of the fact and amount of loss, with twelve percent simple interest and sixty extra days where a bill arrives more than ninety days after the service (§ 500.3142); outside chapter 31 the insurer has thirty days to specify in writing what a satisfactory proof of loss consists of and sixty days after that to pay (§ 500.2006(3), (4)), and where the two conflict chapter 31 governs (§ 500.2006(6)). No statute fixes a day count for affirming or denying coverage: § 500.2026(1)(e) requires only a reasonable time, and only as a course of conduct rather than per claim, so no decision deadline is published on this row. Residual liability is 250/500/10 for policies issued or renewed after 1 July 2020, though a signed director’s form can take bodily injury down to 50/100 (§ 500.3009(1), (5)); the volume read for this page is complete only through Public Act 5 of 2025, so an act of a later session moving those amounts cannot be excluded. Any accident that injures or kills anyone, or that damages property to an apparent extent totalling $1,000 or more, must be reported immediately at the nearest or most convenient police station or to the nearest officer (§ 257.622). Two questions are left open rather than guessed: whether uninsured-motorist cover is compulsory in Michigan has not been verified against a primary text and is not stated here, because the full-text search of the Insurance Code that would settle it could not be run; and whether a Michigan court will award the lost value of a repaired vehicle is likewise unverified, because no statute or rule read addresses inherent diminished value and the state courts’ search covers case names and docket numbers rather than opinion text.