Do I Have to Report an Accident to Uber or Lyft?

What Uber and Lyft actually say

Uber's own instructions tell drivers to report a crash through the Driver app and to complete that process "as soon as it's reasonable to do so." That's a stated expectation, not a fixed number of hours or days.

Lyft's help center provides a similar accident-report form, framed the same way - as the first step toward a claim. Lyft's page does not state a timing expectation either way.

A '24 hours' figure shows up in some driver blogs and law-firm sites, but we could not confirm it against either company's own policy, so we're not repeating it as fact.

Why reporting yourself is still the safer move

Uber's published deactivation policy lists reports that a driver was involved in a crash during a trip as one trigger for an account safety review, under its "unsafe driving" category. That applies whether you report it yourself, a rider reports it, or Uber's own systems flag it. Not reporting doesn't remove that risk - it just means you have less control over how and when it comes up, and you may also miss the step that starts your own coverage.

We have not found an equivalent published Lyft policy that calls out an unreported crash specifically. That may mean Lyft's process is different, or only that we haven't found where it's written down.

Why was I deactivated after an accident? →