New Hampshire Truck Accident Claims
You have three years to file a New Hampshire truck accident claim, but the records that prove it can be destroyed legally in as little as three months.
New Hampshire gives an injured person three years from the act or omission to bring a personal injury action. Federal law gives the trucking company a far shorter obligation to keep the driver's logs, the inspection reports, and the electronic data from the truck itself.
That gap is an important fact about a commercial truck claim, and it is the reason these cases are not car cases with a bigger vehicle. This post covers the deadline, what the carrier must keep and for how long, and who can be held responsible besides the driver.
The rule in one sentence
A truck claim runs on two clocks at once. The first is New Hampshire's statute of limitations. Under RSA 508:4, I:
Except as otherwise provided by law, all personal actions, except actions for slander or libel, may be brought only within 3 years of the act or omission complained of, except that when the injury and its causal relationship to the act or omission were not discovered and could not reasonably have been discovered at the time of the act or omission, the action shall be commenced within 3 years of the time the plaintiff discovers, or in the exercise of reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury and its causal relationship to the act or omission complained of.
That opening clause, "except as otherwise provided by law," is not decoration. Other limitation periods exist and can displace the three years, so the three-year figure is the general rule rather than a universal one.
The second clock is federal. A commercial truck is a regulated vehicle. If it is used on a highway in interstate commerce and has a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 10,001 pounds or more, it is a commercial motor vehicle under 49 C.F.R. § 390.5, and the company operating it is bound by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. Those regulations tell the carrier how long a driver may work, what records the company must generate, and, critically, how briefly it must keep them.
What the carrier must keep, and for how long
Put the two clocks side by side. Every retention period below was read from the current text of the regulation on eCFR on September 12, 2026.
Driver vehicle inspection report and repair certification. Minimum retention: "three months from the date the written report was prepared," 49 C.F.R. § 396.11(a)(4). Destructible 33 months before the three-year deadline.
Driver's record of duty status and supporting documents. Minimum retention: "not less than 6 months from the date of receipt," 49 C.F.R. § 395.8(k)(1). Destructible 30 months before the deadline.
Back-up copy of the ELD records. Minimum retention: "6 months," 49 C.F.R. § 395.22(i)(1). Destructible 30 months before the deadline.
Inspection, repair and maintenance records. Minimum retention: "1 year and for 6 months after the motor vehicle leaves the motor carrier's control," 49 C.F.R. § 396.3(c). Destructible 24 months before the deadline.
Driver qualification file. Retained "as long as a driver is employed by that motor carrier and for three years thereafter," 49 C.F.R. § 391.51(c). This one survives the deadline, if the driver stays.
Read the first item again. The document in which the driver wrote down what was wrong with the truck is legally destructible ninety days after he wrote it. A person hit by that truck who waits a year to call a lawyer, still comfortably inside the three-year statute, may find the single most useful piece of evidence in the case lawfully in a shredder.
Nothing here obligates a carrier to destroy anything. These are floors, not ceilings, and a carrier on notice of a claim has a separate duty to preserve. The point is narrower and worse: once the retention floor passes, routine destruction stops being misconduct and becomes housekeeping.
If a commercial truck was involved in your crash, a preservation letter should go out to the carrier before anything else happens. Schedule a free consultation and let us send it.
How the other side plays this
The carrier's rapid response team gets there before you do. Large carriers and their insurers dispatch investigators to serious crash scenes within hours, sometimes before the vehicles are moved. They photograph, measure, download the engine control module, and interview witnesses while the injured person is still in an emergency department. By the time a claim is made, one side has a complete evidentiary record and the other has a police report.
The retention floor is treated as a permission slip. Ask for the driver's inspection reports eight months out and the answer is that the documents no longer exist and the company was not required to keep them. Both halves of that sentence can be true. This is why the demand has to be made in writing, early, and by specific regulation and paragraph.
Everything is pushed onto the driver alone. Naming only the driver caps the claim at the driver's own conduct and often at a thinner policy. The carrier's hiring, training, supervision, dispatch pressure, and maintenance practices never get examined, which is precisely where the company's exposure and its real insurance live.
Comparative fault gets applied early, and the stakes are higher than "a discount." Under RSA 507:7-d, the injured person's own fault does not bar recovery "if such fault was not greater than the fault of the defendant, or the defendants in the aggregate if recovery is allowed against more than one defendant," and damages are then "diminished in proportion to the amount of fault attributed to the plaintiff." Read that twice. A percentage is not merely a reduction. Push the injured person past the defense's share and the claim is gone entirely. Adjusters routinely assert a number in the first conversation, before any download or log has been produced, because a number said early anchors the negotiation.
The aggregation language is why identifying every defendant matters in a truck case. Fault is measured against the defendants combined, so a claim brought against the driver alone can fail on a percentage that the same claim would survive with the carrier in it.
An out-of-state carrier suggests it cannot be sued here. A carrier headquartered in another state may imply that a New Hampshire court has no reach over it. That argument is weaker than it sounds, for the reason in the next section.
What New Hampshire courts have actually held
Hunter v. R. G. Watkins & Son, 110 N.H. 243, 265 A.2d 15 (1970)
The case that made employers answer for the driving of their employees, in the New Hampshire Supreme Court's own words:
[W]here it is agreed that a regular employee is sent upon a specific errand, using his own car with the knowledge and permission of the employer, and it is agreed he was acting within the scope of his employment at the time of the accident, the employer is liable for his acts whether it had control of his detailed operation of the motor vehicle or not.
Hunter expressly overruled McCarthy v. Souther, 83 N.H. 29, 137 A. 445 (1927), under which employers escaped liability for employees driving their own cars on company business because the employer had no control over "the management and operation" of the vehicle. The Court observed that "the control factor has been overemphasized in judicial reasoning" and that the real question is "whether on all the facts the community would consider the person an employee." In a trucking case this is the foundation: the company is not a bystander to its driver's conduct.
Cutter v. Town of Farmington, 126 N.H. 836, 498 A.2d 316 (1985)
The most useful case in a trucking file, and the least intuitive. A special police officer hired two weeks earlier, on his third or fourth night patrol, with no formal instruction, was issued handcuffs and a service revolver before any training in when or how to use them. He applied the handcuffs without double-locking them, they continued to tighten, and the plaintiff was left with permanent radial nerve damage. The jury found in favor of the officers and against the town, and awarded $55,000.
The town argued that was impossible: if its officers were not negligent, it could not be liable. The Court rejected the premise. A claim of negligent hiring, training and supervision "is not vicarious liability," and so "we do not find the negligence of Officers Stawecki and Burbine a necessary legal prerequisite to a finding of negligence in hiring, training and supervision on the part of the town."
The mechanism is the part worth carrying into a truck case, and it is not what most people assume. Working from Restatement (Second) of Agency § 213, a section the New Hampshire Supreme Court has, in its own words, "subscribed" to, LaBonte v. National Gypsum Co., 113 N.H. 678, 681, 313 A.2d 403, 405 (1973), the Court framed the question as whether the employees "were incompetent, inexperienced or unskilled in a way that caused injury, the risk of which was within the scope of their employment and was known to the employer," and said the inquiry "is not whether the harm occurred because of the policemen's inattention or negligence." Then the line that does the work: "Negligence is not synonymous with incompetence or inexperience."
Put a green driver in an eighty-thousand-pound vehicle without proper training and the carrier's exposure does not depend on proving the driver did something careless. It depends on what the company knew about his competence when it handed him the keys.
Marquay v. Eno, 139 N.H. 708, 662 A.2d 272 (1995)
Recognized a cause of action against an employer for negligently hiring or retaining an employee it knew or should have known was unfit, so as to create a danger to third persons. The claim does not arise merely because an unfit employee did something consistent with a known propensity; the plaintiff must establish a causal connection between the injury and the fact of employment. The driver qualification file required by 49 C.F.R. § 391.51 is where that showing is usually made or lost, which is another reason its three-year retention period matters.
Weaver v. Stewart, 169 N.H. 420, 151 A.3d 70 (2016)
The modern negligent entrustment standard, stated in motor vehicle terms. A plaintiff must prove not only the driver's incompetence but the owner's knowledge of it. New Hampshire Civil Jury Instruction 6.11 sets out the elements: that the defendant expressly or impliedly permitted the person to use the item, that the defendant knew or should have known the person was unfit to use it, and that the person's fault was a proximate cause of the injuries.
Chick v. C & F Enters., LLC, 156 N.H. 556, 938 A.2d 112 (2007)
Answers the out-of-state carrier. A New Hampshire man was killed in a crash in Lebanon, Maine, with a commercial vehicle owned by a New York company that had never owned property or kept an office in New Hampshire. The trial court found it had no personal jurisdiction over the driver under the long-arm statute. It had jurisdiction over the company anyway, because the company had designated an agent for service of process here to comply with the federal Motor Carrier Act, 49 U.S.C.A. § 13304(a). The New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed, holding that by designating that agent the carrier "expressly consented to personal jurisdiction in our state courts."
Two limits worth stating. The consent runs, in the Court's words, "at least as to any cause of action arising out of its activities as a motor carrier in interstate commerce," and the Court was careful to say its ruling "does not, however, prevent a defendant from filing a motion to dismiss based upon the doctrine of forum non conveniens."
How a truck claim is actually built
The sequence is dictated by the retention periods, not by convenience. A preservation letter goes to the carrier and its insurer immediately, naming the categories by regulation: records of duty status and supporting documents under § 395.8, ELD data under § 395.22, driver vehicle inspection reports under § 396.11, maintenance and repair records under § 396.3, and the driver qualification file under § 391.51. A letter that asks generally for "all records" invites a narrow response. A letter that cites the paragraph does not.
Liability then gets built on two tracks that run at once. The vicarious track asks whether the driver was acting within the scope of employment. Porter v. City of Manchester, 151 N.H. 30, 40, 849 A.2d 103 (2004), following Pierson v. Hubbard, 147 N.H. 760, 766, 802 A.2d 1162 (2002), puts it in three parts: the conduct is within the scope of employment if "(1) it is of the kind she is employed to perform; (2) it occurs substantially within the authorized time and space limits; and (3) it is actuated, at least in part, by a purpose to serve the employer." The direct track asks what the company itself did: who it hired, what it knew, how it dispatched, and whether the truck was maintained. Cutter is what keeps the second track alive independent of the first.
The regulations do the work of a standard of care. Section 395.3 sets the hours: a driver may not drive without first taking 10 consecutive hours off duty, may not drive after a period of 14 consecutive hours after coming on duty, may drive a total of 11 hours within that period, and may not drive after 8 cumulative hours of driving without a consecutive 30-minute interruption. The weekly limits are 60 hours in any 7 consecutive days, or 70 hours in any 8, depending on whether the carrier operates every day of the week. Separately, 49 C.F.R. § 392.3 prohibits operation while the driver's "ability or alertness is so impaired, or so likely to become impaired, through fatigue, illness, or any other cause, as to make it unsafe" to begin or continue driving. Logs and ELD data are how a violation of any of these becomes provable rather than arguable.
What to do, and what to stop assuming
Treat three months as your real deadline, not three years. The statute of limitations protects your right to file. It does nothing to protect the evidence. The inspection report clock is ninety days.
Do not give a recorded statement first. The carrier's investigator may already have the engine download, the logs, and the driver's account. A recorded statement given before you know what is in those records is an answer given without the file.
Do not assume medical payments coverage is there. RSA 264:16, I requires a motor vehicle liability policy covering a private passenger automobile to carry medical payments coverage of at least $1,000 per person. Under RSA 264:16, V, that requirement "shall not apply to any commercial policy insuring more than 4 automobiles, nor to any commercial policy covering a garage, automobile sales agency, repair shop, service station, public parking place operation hazards, or trucking operation." The coverage you would expect in a car case may simply not exist on the truck's policy.
Find out who else is in the chain. The driver, the motor carrier, the owner of the tractor, the owner of the trailer, a broker, and a shipper can all be distinct entities with distinct insurance. Identifying them is an early task, not a late one, because the preservation letter has to reach each one that holds records.
Frequently asked questions
How long do I have to file a truck accident claim in New Hampshire?
Three years. RSA 508:4, I requires that personal actions "be brought only within 3 years of the act or omission complained of," with a discovery rule for injuries that could not reasonably have been discovered at the time. The practical deadline is much shorter, because federal law requires a carrier to keep the driver's vehicle inspection report for only three months under 49 C.F.R. § 396.11(a)(4), and the driver's records of duty status for only six months under § 395.8(k)(1).
Does New Hampshire have damage caps on truck accident settlements?
No. RSA 508:4-d purported to limit damages for non-economic loss to $875,000. In Brannigan v. Usitalo, 134 N.H. 50, 587 A.2d 1232 (1991), the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that it could not stand, following its earlier decision striking a $250,000 cap in medical malpractice cases in Carson v. Maurer, 120 N.H. 925, 424 A.2d 825 (1980), and concluded: "RSA 508:4-d (Supp. 1990) is hereby declared unconstitutional." A separate statutory limit applies only when the defendant is the State.
Is New Hampshire a no-fault state for truck accidents?
No. New Hampshire is a fault state, and a truck claim is proved by showing who was negligent. New Hampshire does require medical payments coverage of at least $1,000 per person on a policy covering a private passenger automobile under RSA 264:16, I, which is a first-party coverage sometimes loosely called no-fault. But RSA 264:16, V provides that the requirement does not apply to a commercial policy covering a trucking operation, so that coverage may not exist on the truck side of a truck crash.
Can I sue a trucking company that is based in another state?
Often yes, and sometimes even when the crash happened somewhere else. In Chick v. C & F Enters., LLC, 156 N.H. 556, 938 A.2d 112 (2007), a New York carrier was sued in New Hampshire over a crash in Maine. By designating an agent for service of process here to comply with the federal Motor Carrier Act, 49 U.S.C.A. § 13304(a), the company "expressly consented to personal jurisdiction in our state courts." Two limits: that consent reaches its activities as a motor carrier in interstate commerce, and a defendant may still move to dismiss on forum non conveniens grounds. Jurisdiction over the company is not jurisdiction over the driver.
Can the trucking company be liable if the driver was not at fault?
Yes. In Cutter v. Town of Farmington, 126 N.H. 836, 498 A.2d 316 (1985), a jury found in favor of two police officers and against the town that employed them. A claim for negligent hiring, training or supervision "is not vicarious liability," so the employee's negligence is not "a necessary legal prerequisite" to the employer's liability. The question is whether the employee was "incompetent, inexperienced or unskilled in a way that caused injury," and "negligence is not synonymous with incompetence or inexperience." A carrier that put an untrained driver on the road can be liable even where the driver's own conduct was reasonable.
External legal resources
Related pages on apislaw.com
Talk to a New Hampshire truck accident attorney
If a commercial truck was involved in your crash, the evidence is on a schedule and the schedule is short. Apis Law offers a free consultation to injured people in New Hampshire. Attorney Keith F. Diaz has been practicing in New Hampshire since 2003 and handles truck and commercial vehicle claims in Goffstown, Manchester, Bedford, Concord, Nashua, and throughout the state.
Call (603) 785-1013 or visit apislaw.com to schedule a free consultation.
About the Author
Keith F. Diaz, Esq. is the founder of Apis Law, PLLC, a New Hampshire personal injury and employment law firm. Attorney Diaz has been practicing in New Hampshire since 2003 and is admitted to practice in the State of New Hampshire (Bar No. 15831), the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals. He founded Apis Law in 2022 to provide dedicated, client-focused representation to individuals and families throughout New Hampshire.
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