Quebec SAAQ Claim Deadlines
The dates that govern a SAAQ claim in Quebec. Free. No email required. For drivers, passengers, cyclists and people on foot.
Quebec works differently from the rest of the country. There is one public insurer, the SAAQ, and there is no lawsuit. Whoever caused the crash, your claim goes to the same place.
THE SIX CLOCKS
Only one of the six falls inside your first month, and it is a wait rather than a deadline. The rest are long, and each one counts from a different day. Not drawn to scale.
Inside the first month Longer, and each counts from its own day
The headline number is generous. Three years to claim. The ones that catch people are the short clocks that start when a decision lands in the post, and the quiet structural dates at day 181, at two years and at the third year that nobody warns you about. Everything below sets out what starts each clock, and what to write down at the moment it matters.
How long do you have to claim from the SAAQ?
Three years, and the clock does not always start at the crash. Entitlement is prescribed by three years from the accident or from the time the injury appears. Where a person has died, the three years runs from the death.
That second trigger matters more than it looks. Injuries that surface weeks or months later, and psychological injury in particular, do not quietly expire three years after a date you had stopped thinking about. If you are reading this late, you are not necessarily out of time.
Three years is a long window, and it is the reason Quebec files go wrong in a particular way.
Nobody feels any urgency, so nobody writes anything down, and the claim is eventually built two years later out of memory alone.
See a doctor immediately anyway. The initial medical report is what connects your injuries to the accident. Say plainly which symptoms you relate to the crash, and make sure the report reaches the SAAQ.
Filing means arrival, not posting. A claim or an application is deemed filed on the date it is received at a SAAQ office, so the day you put it in the post is not the day that counts.
If a deadline falls on a day the offices are closed, it moves to the next working day.
What happens if you miss the three years?
The door is not automatically shut. The SAAQ may allow you to apply after the prescribed time if you were unable, for serious and valid reasons, to act sooner. A late claim has to arrive with a signed written statement setting out the reasons that stopped you.
The same relief exists for the sixty day review deadline, and the same written explanation is required. It is an argument you would rather not have to make, so treat it as a rescue and not a plan. What sinks a late application is an unexplained delay, not a long one.
Two smaller protections sit alongside it. No document is rejected because of faulty drafting or a procedural irregularity, and filing a claim interrupts the ordinary Civil Code prescription until a final decision is rendered.
If you are already past a date, write down today why the delay happened, while you still remember it clearly. Which months you could not manage your own affairs. Who was helping you. When you first understood you were injured rather than shaken.
That note is the signed written statement you will be asked for, and it is worth more written this week than reconstructed next year.
Can you sue the driver who hit you in Quebec?
No. Compensation for bodily injury is granted by the SAAQ regardless of who is at fault, and no action can be brought against the person responsible for the crash. A claim to the SAAQ is the only route available, for drivers and passengers alike.
One consequence follows.
There is no other party to blame and no settlement to negotiate, so the quality of your own file is the only variable you control.
An automobile in motion has to be involved. A pedestrian or cyclist struck by a car is covered. A collision between two cyclists, or between a cyclist and a person on foot, is not a SAAQ matter and goes to the health insurance plan instead. Power-assisted bicycles and motorized mobility devices sit outside the scheme unless another automobile in motion was part of the accident.
What if you do not live in Quebec?
You can still claim, but fault comes back into it. A victim who is not resident in Quebec is entitled to compensation only to the extent that they are not responsible for the accident. Residents are covered whether the accident happened in Quebec or outside it.
There is a separate deadline attached to that, and it is short. If you disagree with the SAAQ about your responsibility, that question does not go to the review office or to the Tribunal. It goes to the competent court, and the remedy must be exercised within 180 days of the SAAQ decision on responsibility.
It is the only deadline on this page that goes to a court rather than through the SAAQ's own review and Tribunal route, which is exactly why it is missed.
If a Quebec registration certificate was issued for the automobile and the accident happened in Quebec, the owner, the driver and the passengers are deemed to be resident in Quebec, which puts them back inside the ordinary no-fault rules.
How long do you have to contest a SAAQ decision?
Sixty days from the date you receive it. You file an application for review, and it has to set out your main reasons for challenging the decision.
The SAAQ does not send one decision. It sends a series of them, on your eligibility, on your income replacement, on your diagnoses, on your treatments, and much later on any permanent impairment. Each one carries its own sixty days.
Write the arrival date on every letter. Sixty days runs from when the decision reaches you, not from the date printed on the page. If several decisions arrive close together, you can list the others on the same review form as long as they fall inside the same sixty day window.
Contesting does not stop your money. An application for review, or a proceeding before the Tribunal, does not suspend payment of an indemnity.
If you are hesitating to contest for fear of losing your payments, that risk does not exist.
If your claim were decided tomorrow, what would your file say?
People who were genuinely hurt have lost benefits over a date nobody recorded, a form that arrived late, or a call nobody wrote down. Caught early that is fixable. A year on it is an argument you have to win. The Quebec MVA Companion Guide keeps every date on this page in one place, with the form that goes with each and room to write down what actually happened. $24.99, yours to keep.
How long does the SAAQ have to decide a review?
Ninety days, counted from receiving your application and the required documents. That period can be extended if you choose to submit new documents, or if the review officer asks you for further documents or for another medical examination.
A review officer must step aside where there is a reasonable fear of bias, including where they have already been an interested party in a like matter. Before the decision, the officer has to give you the chance to make your observations and complete your file.
If the outcome still does not work for you, you have a further sixty days from receiving the review decision to take it to the Tribunal administratif du Québec.
Which clocks run against the SAAQ rather than against you?
Several, and they are worth knowing because almost nothing in the process is written from your side.
- Ten business days. The review officer contacts you or your representative within ten business days of receiving your application, to clarify what you are asking for.
- Six days. Your employer has six days to give the SAAQ an attestation of your salary once it is requested. A treating health professional or institution has six days to send its findings, treatment and recommendations.
- Interest, in every case. Where a review or a Tribunal proceeding recognises an entitlement that was refused, or increases an indemnity, the SAAQ must order interest from the date of the decision that refused you.
- The cost of your expert. If your review or Tribunal proceeding is allowed and you filed a written expert report from a health professional, you are entitled to be reimbursed for that report up to a set amount.
- Payments already made stay made. The SAAQ may start paying before it decides entitlement where the claim appears well founded on its face. If it later refuses or reduces the claim, what you were paid is not recoverable unless it was obtained by fraud.
- Examinations. When the SAAQ asks you to be examined, it pays, and it must send a copy of the report to a health professional you name. Where an examination it required would end your income replacement, the payments continue until the date of the decision.
When does income replacement start, and what changes at 180 days?
The indemnité de remplacement du revenu is calculated at ninety percent of net income up to a maximum insurable amount that is adjusted each year. It is paid every fourteen days and it is not due until the seventh day following the date of the accident.
Day 181 changes the question being asked. If you held regular full-time work at the time of the accident, your entitlement is measured against that job. If you were in part-time or temporary work, or unemployed but able to work, that measurement only lasts 180 days. From the one hundred and eighty-first day the SAAQ determines an employment for you, and from then on the question is whether you are able to hold that job rather than the one you actually had.
The SAAQ has to take your training, work experience and physical and intellectual abilities as at the date of the accident into account when it does this. Those are the things your file either evidences or does not.
Recovering does not always end the payments. If you regain the ability to do your job but lost that job because of the accident, the SAAQ keeps paying for a run-off period set by how long you were disabled.
| If your disability lasted | Payments continue for |
|---|---|
| Between 90 and 180 days | 30 days |
| Up to a year | 90 days |
| Up to two years | 180 days |
| More than two years | A full year |
Payments do not simply stop at a fixed age either. The indemnity is reduced by twenty-five percent from your sixty-fifth birthday, fifty percent from your sixty-sixth and seventy-five percent from your sixty-seventh. From your sixty-eighth birthday until your death, the amount is worked out under a separate method set by regulation.
What happens in the third year?
From the third year after the accident, the SAAQ may determine an employment for you if you are able to work but can no longer hold the job you had. This decision is made on paper, from what your record shows about what you can and cannot do.
It does not cut you off on the day it is made. Entitlement ends one year after you become able to hold the employment the SAAQ has determined, which gives you a further year. If your injuries mean that job would pay you less than the income your indemnity was based on, you are entitled at the end of that year to the difference rather than to nothing.
Start recording the specific tasks you can no longer manage now, not in month thirty-five. By the time this decision is taken, the only version of your last three years that counts is the written one.
What happens if your injury comes back later?
Two years, and this one is easy to lose. If you suffer a relapse within two years of the end of your last period of disability, or within two years of the accident where you were never paid an indemnity, you are compensated from the date of the relapse as though your disability had never been interrupted.
A relapse after two years is treated as a second accident. That is a materially weaker position, because everything is assessed afresh from where you stand then rather than from where you stood before the crash.
Tell the SAAQ without delay. The instrument uses a word rather than a number here. Anyone claiming compensation must notify the SAAQ without delay of any change in their situation affecting entitlement to an indemnity or its amount.
The SAAQ may reduce, interrupt or end payment where a person refuses to produce information it has asked for, declines recommended treatment or a rehabilitation programme without valid reason, or delays their own recovery.
Did the SAAQ deadlines change in 2026?
No date on this page moved in 2026. The limits above are the ones in the Automobile Insurance Act, and this page was checked in August 2026 against the Act as consolidated to 1 April 2026.
What changes every year is money rather than time. Dollar amounts under the Act are revalorized every 1 January, and the maximum insurable income your indemnité de remplacement du revenu is calculated against is adjusted each year. That is why there are no figures on this page. A dollar amount quoted in an article written last year is very likely wrong now, and the deadline printed beside it is very likely still right.
That is the whole of it. Nothing in the Act as consolidated to 1 April 2026 moves the sixty days or the three years, so if you have been told that a date on an older letter no longer applies, check the letter rather than the year.
Do you need a lawyer to claim from the SAAQ?
Not to start a claim. There is nobody on the other side. Compensation is granted regardless of fault and no action can be brought against the person responsible, so there is no defendant and no settlement to negotiate down.
The process is built to accept imperfect paperwork. No document is rejected because of faulty drafting or a procedural irregularity. Before deciding a review, the officer has to give you the chance to make your observations and complete your file, and must step aside where there is a reasonable fear of bias.
You can name a representative, and the system expects it. The review officer contacts you or your representative within ten business days of receiving an application for review. If your review or Tribunal proceeding is allowed and you filed a written expert report from a health professional, you are entitled to be reimbursed for that report up to a set amount, so the cost of the one document that usually matters is not necessarily yours to carry.
What no representative can do afterwards is reconstruct the record you did not keep. Whatever you decide about help, the dates and the notes are yours to make.
Dates are only half of it. Knowing when something is due does not tell you how a SAAQ claim actually works, what the indemnité de remplacement du revenu really covers or what to do when a decision goes against you.
Recovering after a car accident in Quebec covers the whole process and is free to read. Hurt at work rather than on the road? The clocks are different, and they are set out at Quebec CNESST claim deadlines. Hurt in another province? Start from the guides by province and territory.
Last verified: August 2026
Checked against: the Automobile Insurance Act as consolidated to 1 April 2026, the Regulation respecting the processing of a claim for compensation or application for review, and the SAAQ page on contesting a decision. Dollar amounts under the Act are revalorized every 1 January, so we do not quote figures here. Confirm yours with the SAAQ.
Deadlines change. If you find something on this page that is out of date, write to Recovery@hurtsquare.ca and we will correct it publicly.
Keeping the record these deadlines depend on
Quebec gives you three years and no opponent. What it does not give you is a second chance on a decision you let sit for sixty-one days, or a way to prove in year three what you never wrote down in month two.
Two things decide how an injury claim goes. What you wrote down and whether you did the right thing at the right time for where you live. The National MVA Recovery Guide handles the first, the daily record of symptoms, appointments, calls and costs that a claim is eventually judged on. The Quebec MVA Companion Guide handles the second, the deadlines on this page and the forms, boards and appeal routes behind them. People who have only one tend to end up with a careful record aimed at the wrong process, or the right dates and nothing to put in front of them.
Recovery First. Pressure Last.
EVERYTHING ON THIS PAGE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT
The Quebec MVA Companion Guide
This page tells you the dates. The guide walks you through them, and gives you somewhere to write down what happened on each one.
- All six clocks, with what starts each one
- What to write down the day a SAAQ decision arrives, starting with the date it reached you
- The review route in order, from the application for review to the Tribunal administratif du Québec
- Fillable on your phone, at 11pm, in bed
$24.99 · instant download · yours to keep
See the Quebec MVA Companion GuideMost people take it with the National MVA Recovery Guide, the daily record of symptoms, appointments, calls and costs these dates hang on.
Not ready for that? The scene checklist for the first three days is at hurtsquare.ca/72. It is free and asks nothing of you.
This page is general information for people in Quebec. It is not legal or medical advice. Rules differ by province and change over time. Confirm anything specific to your situation with a lawyer, the SAAQ or the Tribunal administratif du Québec.