Hit and Run in Virginia: What the Code Requires and What It Costs

Virginia has no crime called “hit and run.” What people mean by the phrase is a failure to do what Va. Code § 46.2-894 or § 46.2-896 requires after a collision: stop, identify yourself, help anyone who is hurt, and report the accident. Which section applies — and whether the charge is a Class 5 felony or a Class 4 misdemeanor — turns on one question: was what you struck attended, or unattended?

What counts as a hit and run in Virginia

Two sections of the Code of Virginia carry the duties, and they divide the ground between them.

Va. Code § 46.2-894 applies to an accident “in which a person is killed or injured or in which an attended vehicle or other attended property is damaged.” Attended means someone was in or with it — another driver, a passenger, a property owner standing next to the fence you hit.

Va. Code § 46.2-896 applies where nobody is killed or injured and the only damage is to an unattended vehicle or other unattended property. That is the parked car in a shopping-center lot, the mailbox at the end of a driveway, an empty parked trailer.

Leaving the scene without doing what the applicable section requires is what gets charged. It does not matter whether the collision was your fault; the duties in both sections are triggered by involvement in the accident, not by blame.

Attended or unattended: the distinction that decides everything

This one fact changes the section, the class of offense and the punishment, and most pages on this subject get it wrong by announcing that hit and run is a felony in Virginia. It often is not.

What was damaged	Section	Offense
A person injured or killed	§ 46.2-894	Class 5 felony
Attended property, more than $1,000 of damage	§ 46.2-894	Class 5 felony
Attended property, $1,000 or less	§ 46.2-894	Class 1 misdemeanor
Unattended property, $250 or more	§§ 46.2-896, 46.2-900	Class 1 misdemeanor
Unattended property, less than $250	§§ 46.2-896, 46.2-900	Class 4 misdemeanor, 3 demerit points

The felony line in § 46.2-894 is injury, death, or more than $1,000 of damage to property. Below that, with attended property, the same section makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor — the line at which leaving the scene stops being a felony. For a parked car and nothing else, the penalty comes from § 46.2-900 instead, and the smallest cases land in the least serious criminal class Virginia has. The attended and unattended property distinction is worth understanding before anything else on this subject.

What a driver must do at the scene

Where someone is hurt or attended property is damaged, § 46.2-894 sets out four things:

1. Stop immediately, as close to the scene as possible without obstructing traffic.
2. Report four pieces of information — name, address, driver’s license number and vehicle registration number — forthwith. The section names the recipients: the State Police or the local law-enforcement agency, the person struck and injured if that person appears capable of understanding and retaining it, or the driver or another occupant of the vehicle struck, or the custodian of the other damaged property. Giving the information both to law enforcement and to the other party covers every recipient the section names.
3. Render reasonable assistance to anyone injured, including taking that person to a physician, surgeon or hospital where it is apparent that medical treatment is needed or the injured person asks for it.
4. If your own injuries prevented you from doing any of that, report as soon as reasonably possible and make a reasonable effort to locate the other people involved, then give them the same four items.

Hitting something unattended: the note is only half the duty

Section 46.2-896 is where drivers most often go wrong, because the popular understanding stops at the note. The section requires, in order:

1. A reasonable effort to find the owner or custodian, and if you find them, the same four items § 46.2-894 requires.
2. Only if the owner cannot be found, a note or other sufficient information left in a conspicuous place at the scene — and the note must include driver identification and contact information.
3. A written report within 24 hours to the State Police or the local law-enforcement agency, containing the § 46.2-894 information plus the date, time and place of the accident and your own description of the damage.

A driver who tucks a note under a wiper blade and does nothing else has not complied with the section. The practical detail of hitting a parked car in Virginia is worth reading if that is the situation you are in.

Passengers have a duty of their own

This surprises people. Under § 46.2-895 and § 46.2-897, if the driver does not stop and report, every person aged 16 or older who was in the vehicle and knew about the accident has a duty to make sure a report is made within 24 hours — to the State Police, or to the local law-enforcement agency where the accident happened in a city or town. The report has to give the passenger’s own name and address along with whatever the driver was required to report.

The penalties for a passenger who does not do this are in § 46.2-900, and they are not trivial: a Class 6 felony where the accident caused injury or death, a Class 1 misdemeanor where there was only property damage, and a Class 4 misdemeanor in the small unattended-property case.

Parking lots, private roads and the reports that are still required

Two short sections close off the common escape routes. Both are set out with the rest of the article on the page that takes the seven sections in numerical order.

Section 46.2-899 says the article applies “irrespective of whether such accident occurs on the public streets or highways or on private property.” A collision in a supermarket parking lot, an apartment complex lot or a private driveway is covered exactly as a collision on Route 1 is.

Section 46.2-898 says these reports are in addition to the other accident reports Title 46.2 requires, and are to be made “irrespective of the amount of property damage involved.” Separately, § 46.2-371 requires the driver of a vehicle in any accident resulting in injury or death — or someone acting for the driver — to give immediate notice to a law-enforcement officer, and a willful failure to do so is a Class 4 misdemeanor in its own right. The investigating officer then files a report with DMV under § 46.2-373 where the accident caused injury or death or apparent total property damage of $3,000 or more. A driver may also file a written report with the Commissioner under § 46.2-372, which is written as something a person involved in an accident may do rather than must.

If your vehicle was the one that was hit

Nothing in these sections puts a duty on the person whose car was struck, but two of them decide what record exists afterwards, and the wider set of duties Virginia imposes after any collision is worth reading alongside them.

Where the accident caused injury or death, or apparent total property damage of $3,000 or more, the law-enforcement officer who investigates it must forward a written report to DMV within 24 hours of completing the investigation, under § 46.2-373. That report is the “police report” people look for later, and it must name the insurance carrier or agent of the liability policy on each vehicle involved.

Below that threshold, and where no officer investigates, there may be no official report at all unless someone makes one. Section 46.2-372 allows any person involved in an accident that resulted in injury, death or property damage — or where there is reason to believe a vehicle involved was uninsured — to make a written report to the Commissioner of the DMV on a form the Department prescribes. The section is written as a permission rather than a command, and where such a report is made the Commissioner then requires the vehicle owner to provide certification of insurance or bond.

A driver who left the scene has still broken § 46.2-894 or § 46.2-896 whether or not a report is ever filed, and a report filed by the person who was hit does not turn a civil dispute into a criminal one. Whether any particular claim is worth pursuing, and against whom, is a question for a Virginia attorney — and it runs on a different track from the criminal charge, because Virginia decides crash losses on fault rather than through a no-fault benefits scheme.

What the conviction does to a license

A hit-and-run conviction reaches the DMV as well as the court. Under § 46.2-389, the Commissioner must revoke a driver’s license for one year on receiving a record of conviction of, among other things, any crime punishable as a felony under the Commonwealth’s motor vehicle laws, or of “failure to stop and disclose his identity at the scene of the accident” where the accident resulted in the death of or injury to another person. That revocation is not a matter of the court’s discretion.

At the other end of the scale, a Class 4 misdemeanor conviction under § 46.2-900 — unattended property, damage under $250 — carries three demerit points assigned by the DMV Commissioner, and no jail at all. DMV publishes its own list of three-point violations, and points stay on the record separately from anything the court does.

Where the case is heard

Virginia has no court called traffic court. A misdemeanor charge under these sections is heard in the General District Court of the city or county where the accident happened, which has exclusive original jurisdiction over misdemeanors and traffic infractions arising there under § 16.1-123.1. Each court keeps its own page — address, hours and contact — in Virginia’s Judicial System directory of general district courts, which is where to confirm which court a particular city or county summons belongs to.

A hit-and-run charge is a criminal case brought by the Commonwealth, not a complaint the other driver or the property owner controls, so an owner who decides not to pursue it cannot simply call it off. The penalties attached to each class are set by statute, the summons itself will usually use the charge’s formal name rather than “hit and run”, and anyone facing one of these charges should have a Virginia attorney review the specific facts.