Kentucky Accident Report: Confidential by Statute, and Sometimes Yours to Write

Most states reach crash-report access through a general public-records law with exemptions layered on top. Kentucky does the reverse. KRS 189.635(6)(b) states that accident reports and the information contained in them are confidential and exempt from public disclosure under the Open Records Act, releasable only under a properly executed subpoena or court order or as the section itself provides. The legislature then spends subsection (6)(c) naming, one category at a time, exactly who may have a copy.

That design changes what you are actually doing when you request a report. You are not exercising a citizen’s right of access. You are proving you belong on a list. It is why Louisville Metro Police can write on their own records page that accident reports are not public records and may only be obtained by an involved party with proper identification, an insurer’s representative, or an attorney for a listed party. It is also the exact opposite of the arrangement next door in New Jersey, where the statute declares police crash reports not privileged or confidential and invites any citizen to buy one at five cents a page.

The most useful entry on the list is the one nobody mentions. Subsection (6)(c)5 opens the report to any party to litigation who files a request together with a copy of the first page of a District or Circuit Court clerk-stamped complaint naming all parties. That is a concrete, checkable key: once a suit exists, the stamped first page is the credential.

Two oddities sit in the same statute and are worth knowing about because they show how deliberately Kentucky drew these lines. Subsection (10) bars the motor vehicle insurer of a train engineer or other train crew member from obtaining a report about a railroad accident the person was involved in professionally, without that person’s written consent, and forbids raising their rates on that basis alone. Subsection (11) requires motor scooters and autocycles to be counted as their own category, neither motor vehicle nor motorcycle. Kentucky legislates crash records in detail.

Verified against KRS 189.635 as amended effective July 15, 2024, and against 502 KAR 15:010, in July 2026.

The last two rows are where Kentucky gets interesting. Subsection (7)(a) says flatly that neither the department nor a law enforcement agency shall release accident reports for a commercial purpose. Subsection (7)(b) then carves out two exceptions: agencies may contract with an outside entity to release unredacted vehicle damage data, solely so the public can check a vehicle’s accident history, and may contract with a third party to provide electronic access to reports for the people already entitled to them. The commercial layer of Kentucky crash records is not an accident of procurement. It is written into the statute.

The news-media route has an edge to it too. Subsection (9) defines a news-gathering organization with real tests, a newspaper published at least 50 of 52 weeks with at least 25 percent news content, or a broadcaster with a valid FCC license, and then excludes any publication whose primary purpose is distributing advertising or publishing the names of crash victims that may be used to solicit them. Reports go to the recognized outlets unredacted, while the statute’s catch-all category receives them with addresses, license numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth and VINs removed.

In Kentucky the price of a crash report is set in an administrative regulation rather than left to each department’s own fee policy. 502 KAR 15:010 Section 4 lists exactly two numbers: paper copies cost five dollars, and reports obtained through the Kentucky State Police website cost ten dollars. The statute behind it, KRS 189.635(8), directs the department to promulgate that schedule and adds that these fees sit on top of anything charged for records under KRS Chapter 61.

Departments apply that schedule unevenly, which is the practical lesson. Lexington charges $10 online through BuyCrash, $10 in person at Central Records at 150 East Main Street, and $5 by mail. Louisville Metro Police charge $10 for an accident report by every method they offer, electronically or in person at 701 West Ormsby Avenue, and note that an online request takes 24 to 72 hours just to come back with an answer about availability. The gap between $5 and $10 is not a state policy difference. It is the convenience fee, and asking the originating agency for a paper copy is how you find out whether your department charges it.

The vendor lane exists because the statute allows it. Kentucky has 684 agencies on BuyCrash, second only to Georgia’s 691 and ahead of Indiana and Illinois, which makes it one of the platform’s deepest states. Our BuyCrash guide explains how the platform works and what happens when your report is not there yet.

One further route is worth knowing about even though it is rarely the fast one. The Kentucky State Police accept open records requests through a NextRequest portal, by mail to the Public Records Branch at 1266 Louisville Road in Frankfort, and by email, and their standard copying rate is 10 cents per page. Kentucky agencies must decide within five business days whether to comply. That clock governs records generally. For the crash report itself the confidentiality rule still applies, so the request succeeds because of who you are, not because the record is public.

This is the Kentucky scenario that sends people in circles. You call the police department a week after a parking-lot collision, and they have nothing, because no officer ever attended and no officer ever will. In Kentucky the missing report is not a delay. It is a job assigned to you.

Two statutes create the duty, and they do not word it identically. KRS 189.635(5)(a) requires a driver involved in a crash resulting in property damage exceeding $500, where no law enforcement officer conducted an investigation, to file a written report with the Kentucky State Police within 10 days. KRS 189.580(7) states the same duty as covering a crash resulting in injury to or death of any person, or total property damage of $500 or more, again where no officer investigated and again within 10 days. Read together, the safer rule is the broader one: injury or roughly $500 of damage with no officer on scene means you file.

The state runs an online tool for it. The Online Civilian Collision Reporting site at kspportal.ky.gov lets you enter, print and submit the report, and carries a plain instruction in capitals not to complete it if a police officer investigated the collision. The Kentucky State Police FAQ says the same thing more gently: if an officer responded and indicated they will be completing the report, you are not required to complete a second one, and you should allow 10 days for theirs to appear.

Be clear about what this report is and is not. The Kentucky State Police describe their role as serving only “as a repository for civilian collision reports.” They state that they do not investigate civilian-reported collisions, do not collect, verify or maintain insurance information for the parties, and are prohibited from releasing personal identifying information except as permitted by law. Filing gives you an official report number for your insurer. It does not give you an investigation, and it does not give you the other driver’s details.

Then there is the trap. On submission the system generates a report number and offers you the file to download. Take it. The FAQ’s answer to people who forgot is to submit an open records request to the Custodian of Records, and it warns that submitted reports are retained for up to two years and may be accessible only through a valid open records request by an involved party. A report you wrote yourself is still a record you can lose access to.

If you follow Kentucky’s own paperwork to the civilian reporting tool, you will not arrive. 502 KAR 15:010 Section 2(2) tells you the tool is “located on the department Web site at https://kentuckystatepolice.org/civilian-collision-reports.us.” Tested in July 2026, that address fails over HTTPS because the certificate cannot be validated, and over plain HTTP it redirects to a Kentucky State Police address that returns a 404. The same dead domain appears in Section 6 of the regulation as the place to obtain the incorporated news-media form, and it is printed in the footer of the civilian reporting site itself.

The working addresses are the tool at kspportal.ky.gov and the department at kentuckystatepolice.ky.gov. Nothing about the underlying process has changed. The link simply outlived the domain, which is why so many older write-ups about Kentucky crash reports end in an error page.

The regulation is out of step in a quieter way as well. It was filed in March 2022 and took effect on July 5, 2022, while KRS 189.635 was amended again effective July 15, 2024, which renumbered the subsections. So the regulation sets fees for parties authorized under “KRS 189.635(5) and (8)” and routes news requests under subsection (8), while in the current statute the access list sits at (6)(c), the fee-schedule mandate at (8), and the news-media provision at (9). The prices and the process are current. The cross-references are not, and the civilian reporting tool itself still cites the pre-2024 numbering when it quotes your filing duty.

Kentucky recorded 12,744 hit-and-run collisions in 2024, including 27 fatal ones and 1,011 that caused injuries. City streets accounted for 5,181 of them, more than interstates, US routes and parkways combined. It is a common situation, and the state handles it better than most.

For the parked-car case, the civilian reporting FAQ gives an unusually practical instruction: enter your own details as Unit 1 and put “UNK” for the name of Unit 2, and no other information about the unknown unit is required. If you discovered the damage on a different day and cannot pin the location, you may enter the city or county, or “UNK” again. The point is to get a report number your insurer can work from rather than to stall on missing facts.

There is also a statutory remedy that almost nothing written about Kentucky mentions. KRS 189.635(6)(a)1 permits the department to disclose the identity of a person involved in an accident when that identity is not otherwise known, or when the person denies having been present at the accident. The confidentiality rule, in other words, was never meant to shield someone from being identified as a participant. Pennsylvania has a comparable provision pointed at insurance, covered in our Pennsylvania guide.

Finally, if you are the one who hit an unattended vehicle, KRS 189.580(2) sets out what to do: stop as close to the scene as possible without obstructing traffic, then either locate and notify the owner with your name, address and registration number, attach that information securely and conspicuously to the vehicle, or file a report with the local police department. Leaving a note is a statutory option, not a courtesy.

Kentucky is a no-fault state, but the way drivers enter the system is distinctive. KRS 304.39-060(1) provides that any person who registers, operates, maintains or uses a motor vehicle on Kentucky public roadways is, as a condition of doing so, deemed to have accepted the subtitle. Nobody signs up. Using the road is the agreement.

What you receive in return is basic reparation benefits, capped by KRS 304.39-020 at $10,000 for all economic loss from injury to any one person in any one accident, regardless of how many people or insurers are involved, and payable without regard to who caused the crash. What you give up is the right to sue for pain, suffering, mental anguish and inconvenience unless you clear the threshold in subsection (2)(b): medical expense exceeding $1,000, or an injury consisting in whole or in part of permanent disfigurement, a fracture to a bone, a compound, comminuted, displaced or compressed fracture, loss of a body member, permanent injury within reasonable medical probability, permanent loss of bodily function, or death.

You can opt out, but only in advance. Subsection (4) lets any person refuse the tort limitation by filing a rejection form prescribed by the Department of Insurance, and it must have been executed and filed before the crash it is meant to apply to. A rejection stays effective until revoked, and a motorcycle owner may reject for motorcycles alone. Two groups never lose their full tort rights in the first place: people who are not owners, operators, maintainers or users of a motor vehicle, and passengers on a motorcycle. That last carve-out matters more than its length suggests. Pennsylvania runs the other kind of choice system, described in our Pennsylvania hub.

The practical link back to the report is direct. While you are inside the $10,000 of benefits, fault barely comes up and the crash report can feel like paperwork. The moment your medical bills pass $1,000 or a fracture appears on a scan, the case turns into an ordinary fault fight, and the officer’s findings, diagram and narrative become the evidence. Our crash-report decoder explains how to read those fields.

The 2024 Kentucky Traffic Collision Facts report, published by the Kentucky Transportation Center for the Kentucky State Police, counted 139,663 reported collisions. Of those, 707 people were killed on public roads and 29,235 were injured. The death toll fell 15 percent from 814 in 2023 and is the lowest figure in the report’s own 2015 to 2024 table, although Kentucky’s rate of 1.44 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled still sat above the national 1.36. One in every 21 drivers licensed in Kentucky was involved in a collision that year.

The figure that matters most for this page is easy to miss. Of those 139,663 collisions, 22,002 happened in parking lots or on private property, roughly one in every six. Those are precisely the crashes least likely to be investigated by an officer, which is why Kentucky’s civilian reporting lane is not an obscure corner of the law but the route a large share of drivers actually need.

On causes, the report is unsparing. Driver inattention was recorded in 42,363 collisions, about 36 percent of the total, and in 123 fatal ones. Alcohol involvement appeared in 3,447 collisions but 102 fatal ones, which is 15.5 percent of all fatal crashes, and drug involvement in 1,082 collisions but 73 fatal ones. Failure to keep the proper lane accounted for 109 fatal crashes. The pattern is consistent: the behaviors that cause the most collisions are not the ones that cause the most deaths.

Every fee, statute, deadline, address and statistic on this page was verified against the following official sources on July 29, 2026. Note that the Kentucky State Police website moved from kentuckystatepolice.org to kentuckystatepolice.ky.gov, and that the older address is still printed in 502 KAR 15:010 even though it no longer resolves.

• KRS 189.635: Vehicle accident reports by operators, law enforcement officers, and agencies (confidentiality, the access list, news-gathering organizations, the commercial-purpose bar, the 10-day filings)
• 502 KAR 15:010: Traffic collision reports (E-CRASH in KYOPS, originating-agency rule, the $5 and $10 fee schedule, KSP 029 news certification)
• KRS 189.580: Duty in case of accident (immediate notification, the interstate move-it rule, unattended vehicles, the $500 self-report trigger)
• KRS 304.39-060: Acceptance or rejection of partial abolition of tort liability (deemed acceptance, the $1,000 threshold, the rejection form)
• KRS 304.39-020: Definitions, including the $10,000 cap on basic reparation benefits
• Kentucky State Police: Civilian Collision Reports and the collision report FAQ (two-year retention, unknown-driver instructions, what KSP will not do)
• Kentucky State Police: Online Civilian Collision Reporting tool (the working address for the state civilian lane)
• Kentucky State Police: Open Records Requests (NextRequest portal, Public Records Branch address, the 10 cents per page rate, how parties obtain collision reports)
• City of Lexington: Traffic collision reports (eligibility, $10 online and in person, $5 by mail, availability five days after filing, Central Records address)
• Louisville Metro Police Department: Get a Police Report ($10 accident reports by every method, 24 to 72 hour response, and the statement that accident reports are not public records)
• 2024 Kentucky Traffic Collision Facts, report KTC-26-06 (PDF): statewide collision, fatality, injury, hit-and-run and private-property counts

This guide is informational and is not legal advice. FindAccidentReport.com is sponsored by personal-injury attorneys; see our editorial standards for how we research and fund our guides.