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Utah makes a dog’s owner or keeper pay for the injury the dog causes without any proof that the dog had bitten before. Utah Code 18-1-1 has imposed that strict liability since 1898, but it comes with a catch: your damages are measured under Utah’s comparative negligence statute, so anything you did, and in a child’s case anything a parent did, can be weighed against the owner and can cut the award or end it.
This page covers the statute and how Utah courts apply it, what you have to prove, local leash rules, who counts as a keeper, the trespasser exception the Legislature added in May 2025, the 50 percent fault bar, a child’s case, the Utah Supreme Court’s November 2025 landlord decision, deadlines including a statute of limitations question you should not ignore, damages, the optional arbitration route written into the dog chapter, dangerous dog rules, the rabies rule rewritten in June 2026, and insurance.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases. Talk to us for free, and pay no fee unless we recover money for you.
Utah has a dog bite statute, and it does not care whether the dog was friendly yesterday. Utah Code 18-1-1 says an individual who owns or keeps a dog is liable for an injury caused by the dog, regardless of whether the dog is vicious or mischievous and regardless of whether the owner knows it. The Utah Supreme Court has explained that the statute, first enacted in 1898, changed the common law rule that gave a dog its first bite. So Utah is not a one bite rule state.
The second half of the statute is what makes Utah different. Subsection (1)(b) says damages for the injury shall be determined in accordance with the comparative negligence statute, Section 78B-5-818. The Legislature added that sentence in 2019, in a bill that says it codifies case law on allocating fault when a person seeks damages for an injury caused by a dog. The leading case is S.H. v. Bistryski, a 1996 Utah Supreme Court decision holding that comparative fault applies to the dog statute. In that case a jury found the dog owner strictly liable for biting a three year old, then put 88 percent of the fault on the child’s mother, and the child received 12 percent of her damages.
Put plainly: in Utah the owner is liable, but the owner pays only the owner’s share. Everything else on this page, from what you say to an adjuster to who watched your child, matters because of that one sentence.
Two more details. When dogs owned by different people attack together, Section 18-1-2 lets you sue all the owners in one case, with damages apportioned among them. And a certified police dog used reasonably and carefully under a written agency policy is exempt.
The Utah Supreme Court put the statutory claim in one sentence: to establish liability, a plaintiff need only show that the defendant is the owner or keeper of the dog and that the injuries were committed by that dog. Today’s statute words this as an injury caused by the dog. You then prove your damages. You do not have to show the owner was careless, that the dog was aggressive, or that the owner knew anything.
The dog does not even have to touch you. In Sharp v. Williams, a mail carrier fell and fractured her back while backing away from a seventy pound bulldog that came off a porch toward her. The court held that the statute does not require physical contact between the dog and the injured person, only that the dog committed the injury, which was the statute’s wording at the time. If you were knocked down, fell off a bike, or were hurt running from a charging dog, the statute can still apply.
Here is the part that surprises people. Even though you do not need the dog’s history to win, it still matters a great deal. In Bistryski the court held that once the owner points at someone else’s fault, the victim may put in evidence of the dog’s disposition, its earlier bites, and what the owner knew, so the jury has something to compare. The trial judge there had kept out evidence of a prior bite, and the Supreme Court sent the case back for a new trial because of it.
So build two files. One proves the claim: who had the dog, your medical records, and wound photographs. The other goes to the owner’s share of fault: earlier complaints, prior bites, broken gates, and what the owner said. The second file protects your recovery when the insurer starts blaming you.
Utah has no statewide leash law in its dog title. Title 18 of the Utah Code has only two chapters, one on injuries by dogs and one on city regulation, and neither sets a leash rule. Leash and at large rules appear in city and county codes, like Salt Lake County’s.
Salt Lake County’s rules are a good example of how strict local law can be. Salt Lake County Code 8.06.020 makes it unlawful for an owner or handler to let an animal run at large, and treats a dog as running at large whenever it is off its owner’s property without a leash attached at both ends, unless it is in a designated off-leash area. A separate section makes it unlawful to let an animal attack, chase, or bite a person. Cities inside the county may have their own codes, so check where you were bitten.
For your claim, a leash violation is mostly corroboration. Section 18-1-1 already makes the owner liable without proof of carelessness, so you do not need the ordinance to win. Where a violation earns its keep is the fault comparison. The Utah Supreme Court has held that violating a safety statute may be treated as prima facie evidence of negligence, which a jury may weigh but which the other side can try to justify or excuse. A citation or an animal control report showing the dog was loose is evidence a jury can weigh in setting the owner’s share of fault.
One caution. In a 2003 case about a cat, the Utah Supreme Court declined to read Salt Lake County’s animal ordinances of that era as creating private strict liability in a lawsuit. The county’s current ordinance language is broader, but do not build a Utah case on the ordinance alone.
The statute reaches anyone who owns or keeps the dog. Owner is the easy part: the person the dog belongs to. Keeper is narrower. In Neztsosie v. Meyer, the Utah Supreme Court held that a keeper is someone who has assumed custody, management, and control of the dog, acting as dog owners in general are accustomed to do. The owner’s father-in-law, who only checked that the dog had food and water while the owners were away, was not a keeper, so the claim against him failed.
That means more than one person can be liable at once, but only if each one really had the dog in hand. The court said a person becomes a keeper when he undertakes to manage, control, or care for the dog as dog owners in general are accustomed to do. Merely checking on food and water for a limited time is not enough. If you are not sure who had the dog, read what determines ownership of a dog.
Two Utah details matter. First, since May 7, 2025 the statute says an individual who owns or keeps a dog, where it used to say a person. If the dog belonged to a business or other entity, ask a lawyer how that wording affects your claim. Second, local ordinances use broader definitions for citations. Salt Lake County treats feeding and sheltering an animal for 24 hours as harboring, which can help show who actually controlled the dog.
If you were pet sitting, walking the dog, or living with it when you were bitten, raise it with a lawyer on the first call.
Utah’s statute has no list of defenses. The Utah Supreme Court noted the difference itself: unlike dog statutes in states such as Minnesota and Ohio, Utah’s statute does not contain built-in statutory defenses. Instead, provocation and assumption of risk come in through Utah’s comparative fault law, which defines fault to include assumption of risk and strict liability. In practice, an owner who says you provoked the dog is asking the jury to put a percentage on you.
The Utah Supreme Court has rejected an inflated version of that argument. In Sharp v. Williams, where the mail carrier sued under both the statute and ordinary negligence, a jury found her 50 percent at fault for crossing a lawn, not seeing the dog, and falling as she backed away. The Supreme Court held the evidence for that finding so slight and unconvincing that the verdict was plainly unreasonable and unjust, and ordered a new trial. It observed that she did not provoke the dog or knowingly place herself in danger, the two kinds of conduct the court said are most often cited as contributory negligence in other dog cases, and that someone reacting to a perceived emergency is not required to do so gracefully. Read more about dog bite provocation.
The newest defense is narrow. On May 7, 2025, Senate Bill 101 added a trespasser exception. The owner is not liable for injury or death to a trespasser if all of these are true:
All three conditions have to line up. A bite on a sidewalk or anywhere else off the owner’s private property is outside the exception, and so is a bite by a dog that was not secured within a fence or enclosure. The same section also protects an owner whose fenced-in dog injures another animal that came onto the property without consent.
Utah uses modified comparative fault with the line at 50 percent. Under Utah Code 78B-5-818, your own fault does not by itself bar recovery, but you can recover only from a defendant or group of defendants whose fault exceeds yours. Exceeds is the key word. At 49 percent you recover 51 percent of your damages. At exactly 50 percent you recover nothing, which is what happened to the mail carrier in Sharp before the Supreme Court ordered a new trial.
Three features of Utah’s statute make the fault fight matter:
That is why the dog’s history matters: a jury cannot assign the owner a large share without hearing it. Expect the insurer to start building your percentage in the first phone call, which is a good reason not to give a recorded statement.
Children get more time. Under Utah Code 78B-2-108, the statute of limitations does not run while the injured person is under 18. A child’s claim is brought by a parent or guardian while the child is a minor, and the clock starts on the eighteenth birthday. Parents should not lean on that extra time for their own claim for the medical bills they paid, and should not lean on it at all where a city, county, or school district is involved.
The bigger Utah issue for children is parental fault. Utah law says children under seven are legally incapable of negligence, so an insurer cannot blame a toddler. But in Bistryski the court held that the jury could consider the mother’s supervision as the conduct of any person who contributed to the injury, and the jury put most of the fault on her. The court sent that case back for a new trial only because the jury never heard the dog’s bite history. For a parent, the lesson is to tell your lawyer exactly where you were and what you saw, and to make sure the dog’s history is in front of the jury.
Older children can be assigned fault for their own conduct, and adjusters will say a child teased the dog. Our article on whether a child can provoke a dog covers how that argument usually goes. A parent may also have a claim of their own for emotional distress. In Johnson v. Rogers (1988), a majority of the Utah Supreme Court adopted the Restatement’s zone of danger test for negligently caused emotional distress. Where the distress comes from harm to someone else, such as a child, that test requires that the defendant’s negligence also put the parent at unreasonable risk of bodily harm, and covers illness or bodily harm that results from the distress. Whether a particular parent qualifies depends on the facts.
Scars change over months. Do not settle a child’s claim before a doctor can say whether revision surgery will be needed.
Utah’s highest court decided this question for the first time in late 2025, and the answer was not good for that victim. In Tesch v. Bonneville Property Investment, 2025 UT 58, filed November 28, 2025, a boy chasing a baseball into a rental house’s front yard was bitten by the tenant’s pit bull. Neighbors called the dogs terrifying, and the landlord testified he did not know dogs lived there. The court held the landlord owed no duty on that record and affirmed judgment for the landlord.
The reasoning matters more than the result. The court said a landlord is generally not liable for a tenant’s torts, and that allowing dogs in a lease and providing a fenced yard and dog run did not, without more, create a dangerous condition. It noted that other states hold landlords liable where the bite happens in a common area the landlord controls and the landlord knew of that particular dog’s vicious tendencies. Tesch lost on the first point: it was a single family rental with no common areas, and there was no evidence the landlord controlled the yard.
So, in Utah today:
A landlord who actually took custody and control of the dog could also be a keeper under the statute. Look into bites at apartment complexes and HOA common areas quickly, before complaint records disappear.
Utah’s general deadline for a personal injury claim is four years. That comes from the catch-all in Utah Code 78B-2-307, which allows four years for relief not otherwise provided for by law. The Utah Supreme Court applied a four year period to a personal injury negligence claim in Lund v. Hall (1997), a car accident case.
Utah also has a three year deadline, in Section 78B-2-305, for liability created by statutes of this state. Your strict liability claim exists because of Section 18-1-1, which the Utah Supreme Court has said changed the common law rule. A defendant could argue that the shorter period applies to it. The safe course is to treat three years from the bite as your real deadline for the statutory claim.
A government entity can even ask a court to appoint a guardian ad litem for an injured child, which starts that child’s one year notice clock. Our guide to the dog bite statute of limitations explains how these clocks interact. The deadlines that actually shape a case are shorter still: the ten day rabies quarantine and the weeks before witnesses forget.
Utah’s statute covers any injury caused by the dog, and Sharp v. Williams shows that includes fractures and back injuries from a fall with no bite at all. In real cases the injuries fall into a few groups:
A Utah specific note on where serious injuries are treated. Utah’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services lists three Level I trauma centers on its January 2025 trauma facility list: Intermountain Medical Center (listed as IMC), University Hospital and Medical Center, and Primary Children’s Medical Center. Emergency department photographs and records are often the best early evidence of how bad the injury was.
A Utah dog bite victim can recover economic damages, meaning medical bills, future medical care, lost wages, and lost earning capacity, and noneconomic damages, meaning pain, suffering, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life. All of it is then reduced by your own percentage of fault, if any, and each defendant pays only its share.
Utah’s best known cap on noneconomic damages, in Utah Code 78B-3-410, is written for malpractice actions against health care providers, not dog bites. Two situations do limit recovery in a dog bite case:
Punitive damages are available against a private owner, but they are hard to get. Utah Code 78B-8-201 requires an award of compensatory damages and clear and convincing evidence of willful and malicious conduct or a knowing and reckless indifference toward the rights of others. Strict liability alone does not show that; an owner who knew the dog had attacked people and kept letting it run loose might. Utah also splits the money: the first $50,000 goes to the injured person, and anything above that is divided equally with the state.
Now the arbitration option. Section 18-1-4 lets a person who has already filed a timely lawsuit elect binding arbitration within 14 days after the defendant answers. The trade is speed for size: recovery is limited to available insurance, the owner’s personal assets are off the table, punitive damages are barred, and either side can then ask for a new trial with its own caps and cost penalties. It can suit a modest injury against a small policy, not a serious one. For more on what drives value, see dog bite compensation.
Salt Lake County’s ordinance, described below, shows how a local dangerous animal designation works, and other cities and counties have their own animal codes. State law does three related things.
Salt Lake County shows what a designation looks like locally. The county defines a dangerous animal by reference to its animal services division’s written policies, and any animal designated dangerous needs a dangerous animal permit. The permit requires homeowners or renters liability insurance of at least $100,000 with no exclusion for animals, warning signs at every entry point, secure confinement, and a muzzle plus a leash no longer than six feet, held by an adult, whenever the dog leaves its enclosure.
A designation does not create your civil claim, since Section 18-1-1 already does. What it gives you is an official record that the owner was warned, which goes straight to the owner’s share of fault and to any punitive damages claim, and, in Salt Lake County, a reason to believe there is at least $100,000 of insurance.
Utah rewrote its communicable disease rule effective June 1, 2026, and the rabies provisions now sit in Utah Administrative Code R386-702-14. Under that rule, when an owned dog bites a person, the dog must be quarantined for ten days regardless of its vaccination status, and the dog’s owner or the local health department must notify an animal control officer. The owner can usually do the quarantine at home under strict conditions, animal control checks on the dog at least on days five and ten, and the dog may not be given a rabies shot during the quarantine.
What the ten days mean, stated carefully: under the rule, if the dog shows no signs of rabies at the end of the quarantine, the person bitten does not need rabies post-exposure treatment. A stray dog that bites someone is either quarantined for ten days at a shelter or similar facility, or euthanized and tested. Whether you need rabies shots is for your doctor and the local health department to decide. If the dog’s vaccination status is unknown, read about being bitten by an unvaccinated dog.
The 2026 rule also states that any cat, dog, or ferret in Utah shall be immunized against rabies, and requires any city or county that licenses dogs to require rabies vaccination for a license. In Utah, bats are the main rabies carrier, according to the state health department’s rabies quick guide.
Who reports depends partly on where you are. Statewide, the rule puts the notice duty on the owner or the health department. Salt Lake County goes further and requires a physician or other medical provider who treats a bite to report it to animal control within 24 hours. Report the bite to animal control yourself; the report lets animal control set up the quarantine and creates a dated official record. Here is what happens after a dog bite is reported.
Utah is not among the states named in the latest national insurance report on dog bite claims. For 2025, the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm reported a national average of $65,450 per dog-related injury claim, across 28,450 claims. That is an insurance claim average across every claim, small and large. It is not a settlement value and it does not predict any one case.
What actually moves the number in a Utah case:
Our overview of dog bite settlement amounts explains how injury levels affect value, and the dog bite settlement calculator gives a rough sense of ranges.
Look first to the owner’s homeowners or renters liability coverage, not the owner’s own pocket, and ask whether the policy also has medical payments coverage. Ask the owner for the name of their insurance company on the day of the bite, and if the dog lived in a rental, ask about the tenant’s renters policy as well as the landlord’s policy.
Two Utah points. First, where a local government requires it, a dog designated dangerous may come with mandatory coverage. Salt Lake County’s dangerous animal permit requires at least $100,000 of homeowners or renters liability insurance with no exclusion for animals. If the dog that bit you was already designated, ask animal control whether the owner filed proof of that coverage.
Second, because arbitration under Section 18-1-4 limits you to available insurance, know the policy limits before anyone elects that route.
Do not assume there is no coverage because of what kind of dog it was, and do not accept the owner’s word that there is no insurance. A policy can carry an animal exclusion, which is why Salt Lake County’s permit requires coverage without one; a lawyer can request the policy and check.
For the full process from start to finish, read our guide on how to file a dog bite claim.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases, and Utah is a state where winning liability is the easy part. The statute makes the owner or keeper liable. The hard part is the fault comparison that decides how much of your loss you actually recover. Our work is to identify every owner and keeper, get the animal control and quarantine records, find the dog’s history, answer the provocation story before it hardens, file inside the shortest deadline that could apply, and find every policy that might pay.
We deal with the insurer so that you do not have to, and we make sure a friendly phone call does not quietly turn into a percentage of fault assigned to you or your child. We work on a contingency fee, so there is nothing to pay to start 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 Utah, including Salt Lake City, West Valley City, West Jordan, Provo, Orem, Sandy, St. George, and Ogden. If you or your child was bitten, contact us for a free consultation. We will tell you honestly whether there is a claim worth bringing and which deadline applies to it.
No. Utah Code 18-1-1 makes the owner or keeper liable for an injury the dog causes even if the dog had never shown aggression and the owner had no idea it might bite. Utah ended the one free bite rule by statute in 1898. The catch is that the owner pays only its share of fault, so the dog's history still matters when the jury divides responsibility.
Yes, as long as your share of fault is less than the defendants' combined share. Utah reduces your award by your percentage, so at 30 percent you collect 70 percent of your damages. If a jury puts you at 50 percent or more, you recover nothing. Utah courts have rejected inflated blame before, including a 50 percent finding against a mail carrier who backed away from an approaching dog and fell.
Four years is the general personal injury period, but because the strict liability claim is created by statute, a defendant may argue Utah's three year period for statutory liability instead. File within three years of the bite to avoid that fight. A child's time starts at age 18. If a city, county, school district, or the state is responsible, a written notice of claim is due within one year and the lawsuit within two years.
The owner can try. A child under seven cannot be found negligent in Utah, but the Utah Supreme Court allowed a jury to weigh a mother's supervision against a strictly liable dog owner, and that jury placed most of the fault on her. The same court then ordered a new trial so the jury could hear about the dog's earlier bite. Bring the dog's history forward early, and talk to a lawyer before giving any statement about supervision.
Sometimes, but not simply for renting to a dog owner. In a November 2025 decision the Utah Supreme Court found no landlord duty where a single family rental had no common areas and the landlord said he did not know about the dogs. The court described other states' rule for bites in common areas controlled by a landlord who knew the dog was vicious, and left that situation open in Utah. Apartment and HOA common area bites deserve a close look.
In May 2025 the Legislature added an exception: no owner liability to a criminal trespasser bitten on the owner's private property while the dog was reasonably secured in a fence or enclosure. The same law changed the statute's wording from person to individual. In June 2026 the state rewrote its rabies rule, which requires a 10 day quarantine for owned dogs that bite and states that all Utah dogs must be vaccinated against rabies.
Only after you know the injury and the insurance limits. Utah's dog attack arbitration option can resolve a claim faster, but it caps the award at $50,000 plus any medical premise benefits and property damage claim, limits you to insurance money, waives any claim against the owner's personal assets, and rules out punitive damages. For a scar, a fracture, or a child's facial injury it is usually the wrong trade. A lawyer can tell you which route fits.
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