How do I get a copy of my Texas crash report?
Buy it from TxDOT's Crash Report Online Purchase System. A regular copy is $6 and a certified copy is $8, plus a small surcharge, and it arrives by email. The investigating officer has ten days from the crash to file the report, so allow at least that long before searching for it.
What you are buying
Form CR-3 is the Texas Peace Officer’s Crash Report, the same form statewide whether the responding agency was a city department, a county sheriff or DPS. It records the vehicles, the drivers and their insurance, the location and conditions, a diagram, a narrative and the officer’s coded contributing factors.
Copies are sold through TxDOT’s online purchase system and delivered by email. Have the crash date, the county and either the report identifier or a driver name to search on.
Who is allowed to get one
Access is restricted rather than open to anyone. People involved in the crash, their authorized representatives, the owners of damaged vehicles, insurers handling the claim and certain agencies may obtain a copy. A stranger with a name and a date cannot.
This restriction is also why unsolicited letters from firms quoting your crash details are worth reading sceptically.
Read it, then correct it
Two things on the report will be used against you later.
The contributing factor codes. An adjuster will quote them as though they settle fault. They do not. The officer arrived after the event, took statements from people in shock, and recorded an opinion. Fault is decided by evidence, and this is one piece of it.
The narrative. Check that the direction of travel, the lane positions and the sequence match what actually happened. Diagrams get drawn quickly at the roadside.
If something is factually wrong, contact the agency whose officer wrote it and ask about their correction or supplement process. Agencies differ, and an officer will generally amend a factual error such as a wrong vehicle or a misspelled name more readily than a judgment about who was at fault.
When there is no report at all
Officers do not attend every collision. If nobody came out, gather what a report would have contained yourself: photographs from several distances, the other driver’s license and insurance card, and the names of anyone who stopped.
The absence of a CR-3 does not end a claim. It shifts the work onto the evidence you collected, which is why the ten minutes spent at the scene matter so much.
Sources and further reading
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