Florida Pedestrian Accident Lawyers

Who Pays My Medical Bills If a Car Hit Me While I Was Walking?

Your own auto insurance pays first, through PIP, even though you were not in a car. Florida PIP follows the person, not the vehicle, so it covers you when you are struck as a pedestrian. If you do not own a car, the PIP policy of a relative who lives in your household can cover you instead.

PIP provides up to $10,000 in combined medical and disability benefits, and medical bills are paid at 80 percent of reasonable expenses. The rules are set out in Fla. Stat. § 627.736, the state’s no-fault law.

That is the floor, not the ceiling. Ten thousand dollars does not cover a broken pelvis. The rest has to come from somewhere else, in a specific order.

Where the Rest of the Money Comes From

Florida’s minimum insurance requirement is $10,000 of PIP and $10,000 of property damage liability, or PDL, which covers damage to property rather than injuries to people. Bodily injury liability is not required for ordinary private drivers under Fla. Stat. § 324.022, which is why your own UM and UIM coverage often decides what a pedestrian case is worth.

How Soon Do I Have to See a Doctor After Being Hit by a Car in Florida?

Within 14 days. If you do not receive initial medical care inside that window, Florida PIP pays nothing at all, no matter how badly you were hurt. The deadline sits in § 627.736(1)(a)3, and insurers apply it strictly.

There is a second trap inside the first one. Even if you treat in time, your PIP reimbursement is capped at $2,500 unless a qualified provider determines that you had an emergency medical condition, usually written as EMC. An EMC finding is a medical determination that your condition was serious enough to need immediate attention.

With it, you have the full $10,000. Without it, you have $2,500. The gap between the two is a piece of paperwork that a specific kind of provider has to sign.

Who Is Allowed to Make the Emergency Medical Condition Call

Not everyone treating you can make it. Under the statute, an EMC determination can come from a physician, a dentist, a physician assistant, or an advanced practice registered nurse.

A chiropractor may treat you under PIP, but a chiropractor may not make the EMC determination. This catches people constantly: someone gets hit, goes to a chiropractor because that was the fastest appointment, treats for a month, then learns their benefits stopped at $2,500 because nobody who could sign the EMC ever examined them.

If chiropractic care is all you have had so far, get in front of a physician. Then call us.

Can I Still Sue If the Driver Says I Stepped Out in Front of Them?

Yes, as long as you are not found more than 50 percent at fault. Florida uses modified comparative negligence with a 51 percent bar under Fla. Stat. § 768.81(6), so at 50 percent or less your recovery is simply reduced by your share. More than 50 percent at fault, and you recover nothing at all.

Most people assume partial fault just trims the number. In Florida, past a certain point, it deletes it. It is the highest-stakes rule on this page.

Expect the driver’s insurer to push your percentage up, because it is the cheapest defense they have. You were dark-clothed. You were looking at your phone. You appeared out of nowhere.

A Worked Example of the 51 Percent Bar

Say a jury values your case at $200,000.

At 20 percent fault, you take home $160,000. At 50 percent, you take home $100,000. At 51 percent, you take home nothing.

One percentage point, and the case is over. That is why the fault fight in a Florida pedestrian case is not a detail to be sorted out later. It is the case.

What Actually Moves the Number

Fault percentages are argued with evidence, and most of it has a short shelf life: signal timing data, business and doorbell camera footage that overwrites within days, the vehicle’s own event data, and skid and debris measurements that one rainstorm erases. Sight lines matter too. If a driver turned across a crosswalk with parked cars or a landscaped median blocking the view, that is not your inattention, it is the road.

We start pulling this material immediately, because the version an insurer writes down in week one is the version they will still be arguing in year two.

You do not have to accept the fault percentage an adjuster assigns you. Ask us to look at the evidence before it disappears.

When Does a Driver Have to Stop for a Pedestrian in Florida?

It depends on where you were crossing. At a signalized intersection where you have a permitted walk signal, and at any crosswalk where signs tell drivers to stop, the driver must stop before the crosswalk and remain stopped while you cross. Where there is no signal and no sign, the driver must yield, slowing or stopping if that is what it takes to let you pass safely.

Those duties are in Fla. Stat. § 316.130(7). The distinction between “stop and remain stopped” and “yield” decides a lot of pedestrian cases.

The stop-and-remain-stopped rule has been on the books since 2008, so no driver gets to claim it is new.

Two more provisions matter. Section 316.130(15) requires every driver to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian, even when you were not in a crosswalk, and Fla. Stat. § 316.1925 defines careless driving as the failure to drive in a careful and prudent manner with regard for conditions.

What the Law Asks of You When You Are on Foot

You should hear this from us before you hear it from a defense lawyer.

Florida law puts duties on pedestrians too. Section 316.130(8) says you cannot step off a curb into the path of a vehicle so close it cannot yield. Subsection (10) says you must yield when crossing outside a crosswalk. Subsection (11) says that between two adjacent signalized intersections, you have to cross in a marked crosswalk.

Violating one does not end your claim. It feeds the comparative fault argument, and that only ends a claim past 50 percent. A driver speeding through a downpour on a six-lane arterial can be far more at fault than a person who crossed 60 feet from the nearest painted line.

Can I Sue for Pain and Suffering After Being Hit While Walking?

Only if your injury clears Florida’s serious injury threshold. Because Florida is a no-fault state, Fla. Stat. § 627.737(2) lets you sue the driver for pain and suffering only when the injury falls into one of four categories.

Those categories are: significant and permanent loss of an important bodily function; permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability, other than scarring or disfigurement; significant and permanent scarring or disfigurement; or death.

The second category is the one most cases turn on, and the wording is doing a lot of work. “Permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability” means a qualified doctor has to say, more likely than not, that the injury will not fully resolve. Not that it hurts now. That some part of it is permanent.

Pedestrian injuries frequently clear it. Being struck by a two-ton vehicle with nothing between you and the bumper produces fractures, joint damage, brain injuries and scarring that meet the threshold outright.

But it has to be documented, by the right specialist, in the medical record. Gaps in treatment are the most common reason a legitimate case fails this test. If you stopped going to appointments because you could not afford them, tell us. That is solvable, and harder to fix later.

The Roads Are the Reason, and That Matters to Your Case

Florida pedestrians are not being killed because Floridians walk carelessly. They are being killed on wide, fast, multilane arterial roads lined with the exact destinations people walk to, with long gaps between safe crossings and sidewalks that start and stop. That is a design outcome, and it is admissible context in a fault fight.

Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design 2026 report counted 3,726 pedestrian deaths in Florida from 2020 to 2024, the third-highest total of any state and the fifth worst rate per capita. That is an advocacy organization’s analysis of five years of data, not a government finding.

The federal government’s own count lands one place lower, and you should hear both rankings from us rather than only the worse one. NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, is the national traffic death database kept by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and its 2024 final figures rank Florida sixth among the states by pedestrian death rate. Fifth across five years, sixth in a single year: different windows, same conclusion.

What neither supports is the claim that Florida is the single worst state in the country for people on foot.

The Design Problem, and Where It Is Worst

Nine of the 27 most dangerous metropolitan areas in the country for pedestrians are in Florida, and Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater rank eighth nationally, the worst metro in the state. That is not nine unlucky places. It is one road design repeated across a state.

The Florida Department of Transportation, or FDOT, runs a Target Zero safety program aimed at eliminating these deaths. The gap between that goal and the road you were crossing is often part of the story a jury needs to hear.

Rain and Tourist Season Change the Risk, Not the Driver’s Duty

Weather and season change how dangerous a Florida street is on a given afternoon, but neither lowers what a driver owes you. A driver has to slow down for conditions, so a sudden downpour or a January full of unfamiliar seasonal traffic is context for a fault fight, not a defense to one.

Florida’s rainy season runs roughly May 25 to October 10, peaking from July into early September. A Gulf Coast afternoon downpour can collapse visibility in under a minute. A driver who holds 45 miles per hour through that is not unlucky, and “I never saw them” describes the problem rather than excusing it.

Then the season flips. From November through April, peaking in January, the snowbird and tourist population arrives, and Sarasota, Palm Beach, Collier, Lee and Martin counties absorb most of it. The crash pattern changes with it: left turns and red-light collisions on coastal arterials, and pedestrians struck at walking speed in parking lots by drivers who never looked.

How Long Do I Have to File a Pedestrian Accident Claim in Florida?

Two years from the date of the crash, for a negligence claim. The deadline is set by Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(a). Lawyers call this the statute of limitations, sometimes shortened to SOL, and it is a hard cutoff: miss it and the claim is gone regardless of how strong it was.

Note the subsection. It is § 95.11(5)(a), not § 95.11(4)(a). Chapter 2024-183 renumbered it, and a great many law firm pages still cite the old number.

One carve-out. HB 837 cut the deadline from four years to two effective March 24, 2023, for claims accruing after that date. A claim that accrued on or before then kept the old four-year window. For almost every current pedestrian crash, two years is the answer.

Two years sounds like plenty of time. It is not. The 14-day PIP window closes in two weeks, camera footage overwrites in days, and witnesses who saw how you entered the crosswalk stop answering their phones after a few months.

Government Vehicles and Government Roads Change the Timeline

Two kinds of pedestrian claims fall outside the ordinary two-year timeline: a crash involving a vehicle owned by a city, a county, a school district or a state agency, and a claim built on a dangerous condition on a public road. Both carry extra notice steps before a lawsuit can proceed, and the practical window is much shorter than two years.

The exact requirements depend on which entity is involved, so we will not put a single deadline in marketing copy. These claims need review within days, not months. If a government vehicle or a public road condition was part of your crash, say so on the first call.

Where Boohoff Law Represents People Hit While Walking

Boohoff Law handles pedestrian injury claims throughout Florida, with offices in Tampa, Brandon, Zephyrhills and North Port. Our headquarters is at 829 W Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in Tampa, and we answer 24 hours a day in English and Spanish.

Hillsborough County cases go to the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit at the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs St. in Tampa. Our Tampa personal injury lawyer page covers how we build these claims, and because Brandon crashes are Hillsborough County cases too, our Brandon personal injury lawyer page is the local starting point there.

On the Gulf Coast, our office at 14900 Tamiami Trail serves North Port, Port Charlotte and the Sarasota and Bradenton area, ranked fifteenth nationally and swollen with seasonal residents every winter. Start with our North Port personal injury lawyer page.

Pasco County cases from our Zephyrhills office at 6719 Gall Blvd go to the Sixth Judicial Circuit, where East Pasco matters are heard at the Robert D. Sumner Judicial Center in Dade City, not the West Pasco courthouse in New Port Richey.

Florida Pedestrian Accident Questions We Get Asked Most

These are the questions people ask on the first call, after the ones already answered above. If yours is not here, ask it directly.

Call before the 14-day window closes

If a car hit you while you were walking in Florida, two clocks started at impact. One runs two years. The other runs 14 days, and it decides whether your medical bills get paid while your case is built.

We can open your PIP claim, get you in front of a provider who can make the emergency medical condition determination, and pull camera footage and signal data before it is overwritten. Then we go after the driver’s coverage and your own underinsured motorist coverage for everything PIP was never going to reach.

Recovery is personal. Ours starts with getting your treatment paid for.

Reach Boohoff Law, any hour, or send your crash details through the contact form. The review is free, we speak English and Spanish, and if the crash happened in the last two weeks, make the call today.