How to Make a CTP Claim in NSW: A Step-by-Step Guide
A Compulsory Third Party (CTP) claim is the mechanism that pays for medical treatment, lost wages and other support after you've been injured in a motor vehicle accident in NSW. If you've just been in a crash and you're reading this from a hospital bed, a waiting room, or your kitchen table two days later, this guide walks you through exactly what to do, in the order you need to do it.
NSW runs CTP on fixed timeframes. Report the crash to police as soon as you can (within 24 hours if anyone was hurt and police did not attend); the insurer needs a report made within 28 days to verify the claim. Lodge your application for personal injury benefits within 28 days if you want weekly payments backdated to the day after the crash. You have 3 months to make the claim at all, and later than that you need a full and satisfactory explanation for the delay.
Source: Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017 (NSW), s 6.13, and SIRA's guide for people injured in a motor vehicle accident; NSW Road Rules 2014 r 287 (classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_reg/rr2014104/s287.html) (checked September 2026).
Our NSW car accident injury guide sets each of those dates out alongside the deadlines the insurer is held to once you have lodged.
Step 1: Get medical attention immediately
Before anything else, before phone calls, photos, or paperwork, get checked by a doctor. Even if you feel fine at the scene, adrenaline masks pain for hours and sometimes days. Whiplash, soft tissue injuries, concussion and spinal injuries often present 24 to 72 hours after the impact, and by then the insurer may ask why you didn't seek treatment earlier.
If the accident was serious, take the ambulance. If it seemed minor but you feel off, go to your GP or an emergency department the same day. Ask the treating clinician to document every symptom you mention, even the ones that seem small. That medical record becomes the foundation of your CTP claim.
Keep a short symptom diary for the first two weeks. Pain levels, sleep disruption, headaches, dizziness, restricted movement — note it all with dates. Insurers lean heavily on contemporaneous records when deciding what treatment to fund.
If you're not sure where to go, our team at the Got Injured page can point you to the right pathway based on the type of accident.
Step 2: Report the accident to police
If police did not attend, report the crash to police as soon as you can. The Road Rules require it within 24 hours when anyone is injured, except in exceptional circumstances. If police attended, that is the report. The CTP insurer needs the crash to have been reported to police within 28 days so it can verify your claim. Sooner is better, because the insurer works from the police record. Call the Police Assistance Line on 131 444, or go into a station. If anyone was badly hurt, triple zero (000) should already have been called at the scene.
When you make the report, write down the event number the police give you. The CTP insurer will ask for it when you lodge your claim, and without a police event number the insurer can pause the assessment until it's provided.
Do not agree at the scene to leave police out of it because the damage looks minor. If anyone is injured the report is required, and the CTP insurer will ask for the event number when it assesses your claim. And if police did not attend and more than 24 hours has already passed, report it anyway. The CTP insurer needs the crash to have been reported to police within 28 days so it can verify your claim, so a late report is far better than none.
Step 3: Exchange details at the scene
If it's safe to do so, gather as much information as possible before you leave the scene. You'll need this when you lodge your claim, and it's much harder to track down afterwards.
From every driver involved, collect:
- Full name and residential address
- Phone number and email
- Driver licence number
- Vehicle registration (rego) number
- Make, model and colour of the vehicle
- Name of their CTP insurer (the "green slip" insurer)
Then, if you can, document the scene:
- Photos of all vehicles from multiple angles
- Photos of the road, lane markings, traffic signals and skid marks
- Photos of any visible injuries
- A quick voice note describing what happened while it's fresh in your mind
- Contact details of any witnesses
If the other driver does not stop, leaves the scene, or cannot be identified, you can still claim through the Nominal Defendant Fund, which is managed by SIRA rather than by a green slip insurer. Report the accident to police straight away, and keep a record of the enquiries you made to try to identify the vehicle, because the claim requires them.
Step 4: See a CTP-experienced doctor for your Certificate of Fitness
Once you have had the initial medical assessment, your CTP claim needs a Certificate of Fitness. That is the motor accident document, and it is a different form from the Certificate of Capacity used in workers compensation. It tells the insurer what your injuries are, what treatment you need, and whether you are fit for work, fit for some work, or unable to work.
Two rules shape how the certificates run. The first one has to be written by a treating medical practitioner, so the chain starts with a doctor. Second and later certificates can be written by your treating physiotherapist or psychologist, and no single certificate covers more than 28 days. It is the practical reason to have a doctor, physio and psychologist on one plan behind a CTP claim: nobody has to wait on a single practitioner's diary for the next certificate.
Source: SIRA, Motor Accident Guidelines 4.68 and 4.69, and Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017 (NSW), s 3.15 (checked September 2026).
This is where we come in. We book you in with a doctor who writes Certificates of Fitness for CTP claims regularly, so the diagnosis, the capacity findings and the treatment plan are recorded in the detail the insurer needs in order to make a decision. What the insurer then does with it is the insurer's call.
The doctor will:
- Examine you thoroughly and document every injury linked to the accident
- Complete the Certificate of Fitness with the correct level of detail
- Recommend physiotherapy, imaging, specialist referrals or psychological support where needed
- Record your capacity from the examination, in terms an employer and an insurer can act on
- Provide ongoing certificates as your recovery progresses
On an accepted claim the CTP insurer pays for these consultations, so nothing comes out of your pocket. You can book a car accident appointment, or read more on our car accident injury service page.
Step 5: Lodge your application for personal injury benefits within 28 days
This is the formal step that starts your claim. The current form is the Application for personal injury benefits, published by the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) on its motor accident forms page. Older guides still call it the personal injury claim form, which belonged to the scheme that ran before December 2017. Lodge it with the insurer within 28 days of the accident if you want your weekly payments backdated to the day after the crash.
Which insurer do you lodge with?
- If the at-fault driver is known and insured: You lodge with the at-fault driver's CTP insurer (their green slip provider).
- If you were at fault, or partially at fault: You lodge with your own vehicle's CTP insurer. Under the current NSW scheme you can still receive treatment and weekly payments for up to 52 weeks, whoever caused the crash.
- If the other driver is unknown, uninsured, or left the scene: You lodge against the Nominal Defendant Fund, which SIRA manages.
The form asks for your personal details, the accident circumstances, details of every party involved, police event number, injury description, treatment to date, and employment and income details. Attach your Certificate of Fitness, any medical reports you already have, and a copy of your driver licence.
Lodge earlier rather than later. Even if you don't have every document perfectly ready, a lodged claim with a few items to follow is far better than a late claim. The 28-day clock does not pause while you gather documents.
Step 6: Keep records of everything
From the day of the accident onwards, treat yourself like a small business keeping tax receipts. Every expense connected to your injury can potentially be reimbursed, but only if you can prove it.
Keep:
- All medical bills, pharmacy receipts and treatment invoices
- Payslips from before the accident and any reduced-hour payslips after
- A letter from your employer confirming dates off work and lost income
- Travel receipts for every trip to a medical appointment (fuel, parking, tolls, rideshare, public transport)
- Receipts for any care or help you've had to pay for at home — cleaners, lawn mowing, childcare you wouldn't normally need
- Bills for assistive equipment, braces, crutches, heat packs
Snap photos of paper receipts and drop them in a dedicated folder on your phone. A shoebox of crumpled receipts three months from now is not a plan.
Step 7: What happens next — the insurer's liability decision
Once your claim is lodged, the insurer is on a clock too. It has 4 weeks from receiving your application to tell you whether it accepts liability for your statutory benefits in the first 52 weeks.
A treatment request lodged while that decision is still open is not lost. The insurer cannot park it until liability is settled, and the clock on answering it runs anyway. What does not happen is automatic funding. Until liability is accepted, or the insurer puts a without-prejudice offer to fund the treatment to you in writing, an account for treatment you go ahead with is yours personally. So the thing to have in hand before a block of physio is booked is the approval or the written offer, not just the request. Your Certificate of Fitness is what starts weekly income payments once liability is accepted, if you are unfit for work or back on reduced hours.
Beyond the first session, most treatment has to be requested and approved before it happens. Once a request is with the insurer, it has 10 days to answer, and a decision to decline has to come with reasons, the material the insurer relied on, and how to have the decision reviewed. This is why regular reviews with a doctor who knows the scheme matter. Each review produces the evidence that keeps the approvals coming.
Source: SIRA, Motor Accident Guidelines 4.106; Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017 (NSW), s 6.19(1); SIRA, Fees paid for motor crash health services (checked September 2026).
For a threshold injury, or if you were mostly at fault, weekly payments and treatment stop at 52 weeks. If your injury is not a threshold injury and you were not mostly at fault, weekly payments can run to 104 weeks and treatment continues while it stays reasonable and necessary. Our sister post, What is a CTP claim in NSW?, explains how that classification gets decided.
If your claim is denied or disputed
Not every claim is accepted straight away. Liability can be contested, injury causation can be challenged, or the insurer might cut off weekly payments before you're ready to return to work. If that happens, you have the right to dispute the decision through internal review and then through the Personal Injury Commission.
What decides most of these disputes is clinical evidence rather than argument. An internal review looks again at the same file, so what your records actually say carries more weight than anything else available to you. Your doctor, physio and psychologist write the reports and document the findings the decision turns on, and we make sure the insurer's questions get answered. Where a matter is genuinely legal, a damages claim being the clearest example, we put you in touch with a compensation lawyer.
Whether treatment is reasonable and necessary is the decision people most often ask CTP insurers to review, and about a quarter of those reviews are decided in the injured person's favour. A first "no" is not the end of it.
Source: SIRA, 2017 CTP Scheme Performance Report to 30 June 2025, Table 8 (checked September 2026).
Talk to us about your car accident injury
If you were hurt in a crash on a NSW road, the useful next step is an appointment rather than a form. Call us. We get you to a doctor who assesses the injury and writes the first certificate, line up physio or psychology from there, and deal with the CTP insurer. Our help is free, and the insurer pays for care within approved cover. Book a car accident appointment, and tell us it was a car accident so we start you on the right paperwork from the first call.
- Get medical attention the same day as your accident, even if symptoms seem minor — injuries can present 24 to 72 hours later
- Report the crash to police as soon as you can (within 24 hours if anyone was hurt and police did not attend). Keep the event number; the insurer needs a report made within 28 days to verify the claim
- Collect names, contacts, licence, rego, CTP insurer and photos from every driver and witness at the scene
- Your first Certificate of Fitness has to come from a doctor; second and later ones can be written by your treating physio or psychologist
- Lodge the application for personal injury benefits within 28 days to have your weekly payments backdated
- Keep every medical, travel and income receipt from day one
- The insurer has 4 weeks to decide liability, and 10 days to answer a treatment request
- If a decision goes against you, ask for an internal review and get the clinical evidence in first
