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Indiana does not have a general strict liability dog bite law. For most people bitten in Indiana, the claim is a negligence claim: you show that the owner or keeper knew, or should have known, that the dog had a dangerous propensity and failed to use reasonable care, or that the owner was careless in how the dog was kept and controlled. The one exception is narrow. A state statute makes owners strictly liable when a dog bites, without provocation, a person who was there to carry out a duty imposed by law, which is the mail carrier’s statute.
This page covers both rules, what you have to prove, how local leash ordinances help, who counts as an owner, provocation and fault, a child’s case, landlords, filing deadlines and the government notice trap, damages, Indiana’s criminal dog statute, reporting and rabies, insurance, and what to do in the first days. Because Indiana starts from a presumption that dogs are harmless, the evidence about the dog’s past is usually what decides an Indiana case, and it disappears quickly.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases. Talk to us for free, and pay no fee unless we recover money for you.
Indiana starts from the common law. In Poznanski v. Horvath, decided May 30, 2003, the Indiana Supreme Court repeated the rule that “all dogs, regardless of breed or size, are presumed to be harmless domestic animals.” That presumption is overcome by evidence of a known or dangerous propensity shown by specific acts of that particular dog. A dangerous propensity is a tendency to do any act that might endanger the safety of people or property in a given situation, so it is broader than a prior bite.
The duty itself is reasonable care. The Supreme Court said in Ross v. Lowe (1993) that whether or not the owner or keeper knows of a vicious propensity, the duty owed is the same: reasonable care under the circumstances, with precautions that match the danger. An owner is also bound to know the natural tendencies of dogs in general. That is why calling Indiana a pure one bite rule state is not quite right.
The exception is IC 15-20-1-3. If a dog, without provocation, bites a person who is acting peaceably and who is in a place where they may be required to be to discharge a duty imposed by Indiana law, federal law, or United States postal regulations, “the owner of the dog is liable for all damages suffered by the person bitten,” even if the dog never behaved viciously before and the owner had no idea. In Cook v. Whitsell-Sherman (2003) the Supreme Court held this makes owners strictly liable when their dogs bite letter carriers and the other public servants the statute describes. It does not reach a neighbor, a guest, or a child walking past.
For most victims, the claim is ordinary negligence. You prove a duty, a breach of it, and an injury the breach caused. In a dog case that usually comes down to one of two routes.
Here is the hard part. Poznanski held that a jury may not infer that the owner knew or should have known of a dangerous propensity from a first unprovoked bite alone. It can draw that inference where evidence shows the dog’s breed is known for such tendencies, but otherwise you need the dog’s history. The Court of Appeals held in Royer v. Pryor (1981), and repeated in Baker v. Weather (1999), that a dog does not have a dangerous propensity merely because it barks at strangers, because someone is afraid of it, or because a city ordinance requires it to be restrained.
A recent case shows what that history can look like. In McElhany v. Grisham, decided May 7, 2025, a dog bit a store cashier in the face. The owner and others testified it had not bitten anyone before. The Court of Appeals reversed summary judgment for the owner anyway, pointing to animal control’s report that the dog had lunged at people, a trainer’s intake form marking aggression toward people, and two vet visits where the dog was muzzled after it tried to bite staff. Those records are exactly what a lawyer will ask for in your case.
The mail carrier’s claim is simpler. Under the statute, a bitten postal worker has only to prove who owns the dog and that it bit without provocation, as the Court of Appeals restated in 2023.
Indiana has a short statewide rule. Under IC 15-20-1-4(c), an owner commits a Class D infraction by allowing a dog to stray beyond the owner’s premises unless the dog is under the reasonable control of a person or is lawfully hunting with its owner or custodian. A nonaggressive dog wandering onto farm or forested land is excluded. That rule is an infraction, and it does not require a leash.
Leash rules are local. The same chapter says it does not limit a political subdivision’s power to adopt an ordinance that does not conflict with it. The Court of Appeals has applied restraint ordinances from Hammond and South Bend, and Indianapolis has one today: under Section 531-102 of the city code, an owner or keeper violates the code if an animal is at large, and at large includes not being on a leash under a competent person’s control or otherwise securely confined.
In Indiana a broken restraint ordinance can do real work in a negligence case. The Court of Appeals held in Plesha that an unexcused violation of a statute or ordinance is negligence per se if the rule was meant to protect people like the victim from the kind of harm that happened, and it upheld a judgment for a 14-year-old bitten by a dog that was neither fenced nor leashed in violation of Hammond’s ordinance. In Poznanski the Court of Appeals held that the same theory, based on a South Bend ordinance, raised questions a jury had to decide, and the Supreme Court summarily affirmed that part of the ruling.
That matters because it can carry a case where the dog’s history is thin. Whether you were in the protected class, whether the ordinance was broken, and whether the violation caused the bite are still fact questions, so get the animal control report and any citation in writing.
The dog statute defines owner broadly. Under IC 15-20-1-2, “owner” means the owner of a dog and “includes a person who possesses, keeps, or harbors a dog.” The Supreme Court read that as adding people, not substituting them. In Cook, the dog was with caretakers when it bit the letter carrier, and the owner who was out of town was still liable, because the owner usually knows the dog’s temperament best and is best placed to give instructions about it.
The Court of Appeals defined harboring in 2023. In Fields v. Gaw, decided April 14, 2023, it held that the person harboring a dog is one “who directly lodges, shelters, or gives refuge to a dog,” not someone who merely owns and rents out the place where the dog lives.
For a negligence claim, the common law asks who had the dog in their care. Several people can fit:
If you are not sure whose dog it was, read what determines ownership of a dog, and name everyone who might qualify early.
Provocation is written into the strict liability statute. A mail carrier or other public servant recovers under IC 15-20-1-3 only if the dog bit “without provocation” while the person was “acting peaceably.” The chapter never defines provocation, so expect the owner’s insurer to argue about what the carrier did before the bite. We cover the general idea in our post on dog bite provocation.
In a negligence case, what happened just before the bite still matters. In Burgin v. Tolle (1986), a three-and-a-half-year-old was jumping over a dog on a porch, landed on it, and was bitten. The Court of Appeals affirmed judgment for the owner because there was no evidence the dog had ever shown a dangerous propensity, and it quoted an earlier ruling that imposing liability for a bite on a person who surprises a dog is contrary to Indiana law.
Trespass is less of a defense in Indiana than people expect. Normally a landowner owes a trespasser only a duty not to injure them willfully or wantonly. In Plesha the Court of Appeals called dog cases an exception: Indiana applies the ordinary negligence standard whether the person bitten was an invitee, a licensee, or a trespasser. It added that property owners may owe a higher level of care to children whose presence they have reason to expect.
Assumption of risk is folded into fault. Indiana’s comparative fault statute folds unreasonable assumption of risk not amounting to an enforceable express consent, and incurred risk, into the definition of fault, now found at IC 34-6-2.1-68 after a 2025 recodification. That means it counts toward your percentage of fault, which reduces the award unless your share passes the bar in the next section.
Indiana uses modified comparative fault. Under IC 34-51-2-5, your own fault reduces the award in proportion and does not bar it, except under section 6. Section 6 is the bar: you recover nothing if your fault “is greater than the fault of all persons whose fault proximately contributed” to your damages.
The jury instruction statute does the arithmetic. If your share is greater than 50 percent of the total fault, the verdict is for the defendant. At 50 percent or less, the jury figures your full damages and multiplies by the defendant’s percentage. So:
Two Indiana details matter. First, the jury considers the fault of everyone who contributed, including people who are not in the lawsuit, such as a dog walker or a second owner, when the defendant pleads them as a nonparty. That can shrink the defendant’s share. Second, the comparative fault statute does not apply at all to tort claims against government entities or public employees. The Indiana Supreme Court noted in Clay City Consolidated School Corp. v. Timberman (2009) that contributory negligence has been treated as a complete defense for government entities, including public schools, so even a small share of fault can matter if a city or school is involved. Ask your lawyer about that early.
Young children face the highest risk in Indiana’s own numbers. The state’s 2015 infectious disease report says the risk of being bitten was highest among children ages 1 to 9, counting bites from every kind of animal, about three quarters of them from dogs.
A child gets more time to sue. Indiana treats anyone under 18 as under a legal disability, and IC 34-11-6-1 lets a person under a disability bring the action within two years after the disability ends. In practice a child bitten in Indiana has until age 20. A parent’s own claim, such as the bills the parent paid, should be treated as running two years from the bite.
Indiana is protective about blaming young children. In Timberman the Indiana Supreme Court set out three tiers, quoting its earlier decision in Creasy v. Rusk, and confirmed the presumption for children 7 to 14:
Parents can sue in their own right. IC 34-23-2-1 lets the father and mother, a custodial parent, or a guardian bring an action for injury to a child. If an adjuster suggests your child brought it on, read whether a child can provoke a dog, and remember that in Plesha the Court of Appeals said property owners may owe a higher level of care to children whose presence they have reason to expect.
Indiana sets a high bar for suing a landlord over a tenant’s dog. The Court of Appeals test, repeated in Morehead v. Deitrich (2010) and again in 2023, has two parts, and you need both:
Missing either one ends the claim. In Morehead, a landlord who had been told the tenant’s dog was hostile to strangers still won, because he did not have control of the house when the dog escaped and bit a mail carrier on the public sidewalk. The court declined to treat a dog as a defect in the property and said the owner, not the landlord, is best placed to confine it. In Baker v. Weather (1999), knowing that tenants’ Great Danes had gotten out before was not knowledge that they were dangerous.
The strict liability statute does not help against a landlord either. In 2023 the Court of Appeals decided two mail carrier cases, Fields v. Gaw and Buehler v. Bocanegra, holding that a lease permitting pets does not make the landlord a harborer, and so not an owner.
That is not a complete shield. Fields drew the line at a person who directly lodges, shelters, or gives refuge to the dog, so a property owner who does that is in a different position from one who only rents out the home. In Vetor v. Vetor (1994) a grandfather who owned the property and supervised both the dog and his granddaughter faced a jury on whether he was a keeper. And in Ross v. Lowe the Supreme Court said a landowner’s duty of reasonable care to an invitee extends to activities on the land, such as maintaining a domestic animal.
The basic deadline is two years. IC 34-11-2-4 requires an action for injury to a person to be started within two years after the claim accrues. Count that from the day of the bite.
The government notice is the trap. It is short, it can apply whenever a school, a city agency, or another public body may share the blame, and it must describe the facts, the extent of the loss, the time and place, the people involved, the amount sought, and your residence. A person too incapacitated to give notice has 180 days after the incapacity ends.
Treat all of these as outside limits. The dog’s observation period is at least ten days, and the animal control and veterinary records that prove what the owner knew are easiest to get in the first weeks. Our guide to the dog bite statute of limitations explains how these clocks fit together.
Indiana’s own data shows how common this is. The state recorded 7,112 bite cases from all kinds of animals in 2015, and dogs accounted for 5,412 of them. Bites were most common in spring and summer.
Indiana’s criminal code defines serious bodily injury to include serious permanent disfigurement, extreme pain, and permanent or protracted loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member or organ. That definition matters for the owner’s criminal exposure, not your civil damages: when the other elements of the criminal dog statute are met, a bite causing serious bodily injury raises the offense to a Class A misdemeanor, as the dangerous dog section explains.
Indiana lets a dog bite victim recover the usual categories of personal injury damages: medical bills now and later, lost wages and lost earning capacity, pain and suffering, scarring and disfigurement, and emotional distress. A few rules shape the number:
Fault reduces any of these by your percentage, as explained above. For the broader picture, see our guide to dog bite compensation.
Indiana’s state dog bite chapter, IC 15-20-1, does not set up a dangerous dog registry or a process for declaring a dog dangerous. What it has is a criminal statute aimed at owners. Under IC 15-20-1-4, an owner commits a Class C misdemeanor when three things happen together: the owner recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally fails to take reasonable steps to restrain the dog; the dog goes onto someone else’s property; and as a result the dog bites or attacks a person without provocation, causing bodily injury.
The penalty climbs with the record and the harm:
Police and military dogs owned by a government and working at the time are exempt. A separate statute, IC 35-46-3-1, makes it a Class B misdemeanor to harbor an unvaccinated dog over six months old that bites someone.
When an officer has probable cause of a violation, the dog can be impounded. The owner has ten business days to post a bond for its care, and the impound agency may euthanize it if a licensed veterinarian finds it is a serious threat to people or other animals.
Dangerous dog declarations can happen at the local level. In Indianapolis, the city code defines a dangerous animal to include one that has caused serious injury to a person without being provoked, and the animal care services director can determine that a dog is dangerous after an investigation, with a hearing if the director convenes one and a five day window for the owner to seek court review. A dangerous dog there must be registered, spayed or neutered, and microchipped.
For your civil case, the earlier incidents behind a citation or declaration are the kind of specific acts that, under Poznanski, can overcome the presumption that a dog is harmless, and proving the owner knew of them is usually the hardest part of an Indiana case. A declaration does not by itself pay you anything. Read how many times a dog can bite before being put down for the broader picture.
Indiana has two reporting rules. The state health rule, 410 IAC 1-2.5-80, says every case of a person bitten by a mammal “shall be reported within twenty-four (24) hours to the local health officer having jurisdiction,” and that a physician who treats the bite reports it. Separately, IC 35-47-7-4 requires the treating physician, or the hospital or outpatient surgical center, to report a dog bite to the Indiana Department of Health within 72 hours. You can and should report it yourself to the county health department where it happened. See what happens after a dog bite is reported.
The local health officer investigates right away. For a healthy dog that bit someone, the answer is usually observation: the dog is confined and watched for not less than ten days, under the supervision of the state veterinarian, a licensed accredited veterinarian, or someone the health official designates, at the owner’s expense. The dog may not be given a rabies shot during the observation period, any illness must be reported immediately, and you are to be told when the dog has passed the ten days in good health or when lab results are in. IC 15-17-6-11 gives the health officer the power to order that confinement. If the owner lets the dog break confinement, an officer must impound it on a sworn written statement signed by two people.
Rabies vaccination is mandatory. Under 345 IAC 1-5-2, all dogs three months and older must be vaccinated, and the owner is responsible. Even so, in Indiana’s 2015 bite data, 633 biting dogs were reported unvaccinated and the status of 2,485 was unknown. If that is your situation, read about being bitten by an unvaccinated dog.
According to the state’s rabies information page, bats are the most common species to test positive for rabies in Indiana. Wash the wound with soap and water, get medical care, and contact your doctor and county health authority. Whether you need rabies shots is their call.
No average can predict what your claim is worth. The closest real number comes from insurers. For 2025, the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm ranked Indiana ninth in the country, with 824 dog-related injury claims worth about $44 million, an average of $53,396 per claim. The national average that year was $65,450, so Indiana ran below it. The figures include dog-related injuries such as fractures from knockdowns, not only bites. That is an insurance average across claims of every size. It is not a settlement value.
What actually moves the number in an Indiana case:
Our page on the average dog bite settlement in Indiana works through these factors, and the dog bite settlement calculator gives a rough sense of ranges.
Insurance is often where the money comes from. The Insurance Information Institute says homeowners and renters policies typically cover dog bite liability up to the policy’s liability limits, usually $100,000 to $300,000, and that the owner is responsible for anything above the limit.
A few Indiana points:
Do not take the owner’s word that there is no insurance, and do not let a friendly adjuster take a recorded statement about how the bite happened. Your account will be used to argue fault under the 51 percent rule.
For the full sequence, read our guide on how to file a dog bite claim.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases, and Indiana is a state where the work happens before anyone files. Because the law presumes a dog is harmless, an Indiana claim usually depends on evidence the owner would rather you never see: the animal control file, earlier complaints, shelter intake notes, trainer records, and veterinary charts. We know where to look, and we move quickly, before records are purged and neighbors forget.
We also check the other routes. Was a city restraint ordinance broken, which can support negligence per se? Was the victim a mail carrier or another worker covered by the strict liability statute? Is there a second defendant, such as a keeper or a property owner who supervised the dog? Is a government body involved, so that a 180 day notice must go out now? Each of these can change the case.
We work on a contingency fee, so there is nothing to pay up front and no fee unless we recover money for you. Founding attorney Michael Agruss built the firm around injury clients who need someone else to carry the paperwork. We take dog bite cases across Indiana, including Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville, South Bend, Carmel, and Fishers. If you or your child was bitten, contact us for a free consultation, and we will tell you honestly whether there is a claim worth bringing.
Only for a narrow group of people. IC 15-20-1-3 makes an owner strictly liable when a dog bites, without provocation, someone acting peaceably while carrying out a duty imposed by Indiana law, federal law, or postal regulations, which covers mail carriers. Everyone else brings a negligence claim and must show the owner knew or should have known the dog was dangerous, or kept it carelessly.
Possibly. A first bite alone does not prove the owner should have known, under Poznanski v. Horvath. But a prior bite is not required. In McElhany v. Grisham, an animal control report of lunging at people, a trainer's note of aggression toward people, and a vet muzzling the dog after it tried to bite staff were enough to get past summary judgment, and an owner can also be negligent for letting a dog run loose in violation of a city restraint ordinance.
Rarely. Indiana requires proof that the landlord kept control of the property where the dog was and actually knew the dog had dangerous propensities, and both are required. A lease that allows pets does not make a landlord the dog's owner under the strict liability statute. A landlord who directly lodged or sheltered the dog is in a different position from one who only rented out the home.
Two years from the date of the bite for an adult. A child has until two years after turning 18. If a city, county, public school corporation, or other political subdivision may be responsible, a written notice of claim is due within 180 days, and a claim against a state agency needs notice within 270 days, or it is lost.
Yes, if a jury finds you partly at fault. Indiana reduces the award by your percentage and bars recovery only if your fault is greater than the combined fault of everyone else. A child under seven cannot be found at fault at all, and a child from seven to fourteen is presumed incapable of negligence unless the defense proves otherwise.
Report it to the local county health department, which Indiana's rule says must learn of every bite within 24 hours, and call animal control. A healthy dog that bit someone is usually confined and observed for at least ten days at the owner's expense, and you should be told the result. The treating doctor also reports dog bites to the Indiana Department of Health.
Indiana statutes set caps in specific situations: punitive damages are limited to the greater of three times compensatory damages or $50,000, a claim against a government body is limited to $700,000 per person, and certain wrongful death damages for an adult without dependents are capped at $300,000.
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