What the Nominal Defendant actually is
NSW law says every car on the road has to carry a CTP green slip — the policy that pays out when someone gets hurt in a crash. Most drivers do the right thing. Some don't. Some cars are unregistered, some have a lapsed policy, and some drivers leave the scene before you can get their details.
For exactly that situation, NSW has the Nominal Defendant scheme. It's a fallback insurer — funded by a small levy on every NSW green slip — that steps into the at-fault driver's shoes when there's no real CTP insurer to pay. Your claim runs the same way it would against any other insurer. You just don't need the other driver's policy to make it work.
When the Nominal Defendant applies
Three situations cover it:
- Uninsured at-fault driver. They were identified but had no current CTP green slip.
- Unregistered at-fault vehicle. No registration, no CTP. The vehicle gets picked up by the same scheme.
- Unidentified at-fault driver. Hit and run, sideswipe and gone, no plate captured. The scheme covers this too, with some extra steps. See our hit and run claim page for the detail there.
What you can claim
The same things you'd claim against an ordinary CTP insurer:
- Weekly income payments while you can't work, based on what you were earning before the crash.
- Medical treatment — GP, physio, imaging, specialists, surgery, medication. Paid directly to providers.
- Rehab and return-to-work support.
- Psychological support for anxiety, PTSD, or adjustment after the crash.
- Lump sum damages if your injury is classed as non-threshold (more serious soft-tissue, fractures, head injury, psychological injury that meets the legal test).
What the Nominal Defendant doesn'tcover is property damage — that's a NSW quirk. For car damage when the other driver had no insurance, comprehensive insurance is usually the cleanest path. We can walk you through the options on the phone.
The 28-day window still matters
Even though the scheme is the safety net, the 28-day rule still runs. Get the claim in within 28 days of the crash and your statutory benefits get backdated to day one. Submit later and you usually only get benefits from the day you put it in. See the 28-day rule explained for the detail.
If you couldn't identify the driver
For unidentified driver cases (hit-and-runs, sideswipes where the other car drove off), the scheme expects you to have done what you reasonably could to find out who it was — reported it to police, asked for witnesses, checked nearby CCTV or dashcam footage. You don't have to play detective; just show you didn't shrug it off. We help with that.
What we do for you
One phone call sorts it. We take the details, work out which version of the scheme applies (uninsured vs unregistered vs unidentified), get the claim in inside the 28-day window, chase the Nominal Defendant for approvals, and keep your income and treatment flowing. You shouldn't be on the phone to a government scheme while you're trying to recover from a crash.
Uninsured-driver crashes turn up everywhere — busy arterials through Bankstown and Fairfield, the highways out past Penrith, and everywhere in between. Wherever yours happened, the Nominal Defendant pathway is the same and we run it across the whole state.
Take the short check at /check, or call (02) 7238 7379 and a real person picks up.