New York does not cap personal injury damages, but limits to your recovery depend on the policy limits of the insurance carrier that insures the vehicle that you were involved in the accident with. So for example, in New York, every vehicle to be registered in New York is required to have a minimum policy. The minimum in New York is $25,000 per person, $50,000 per occurrence. So, if you’re involved in an accident with a vehicle that only has a minimum policy, that means the max recovery that you would be able to obtain from that insurance company is $25,000. If there’s more than one person involved in the accident, that means the total recovery for everyone involved in the accident, whether there were two people or six people involved in the accident would be $50,000 per occurrence with no one person in that accident receiving more than $25,000.
So those, if you want to consider them as caps to your recovery, yes, you can only recover what the insurance policy covers. Then there’s different insurance policies. $25,000 is just my example as a minimum, but vehicles can have 1 million, 5 million, especially if it’s a commercial policy.