Tennessee Distracted Driving and Hands Free Law

The statute targets the physical act of holding the phone, and it reaches well beyond texting. Under T.C.A. § 55-8-199, a driver may not physically hold or support a wireless or stand-alone device with any part of the body while the vehicle is in motion.

The prohibited list is broader than most drivers think:

• Holding or supporting a phone or tablet with a hand, a shoulder, or a lap
• Writing, sending, or reading any text-based message
• Reaching for a device in a way that makes the driver leave a seated or belted position
• Watching a video
• Recording or broadcasting video

The law leaves normal, hands-free use alone. A wired or wireless earpiece, a headphone, or a smartwatch used for voice is allowed. So is a single tap to start or end a call, voice-to-text dictation, and glancing at a GPS display mounted where it belongs.

The line is simple: the phone can talk to you, but your hands stay off it. A driver holding one to an ear or thumbing a screen at speed has already crossed it.

A Hands Free violation is a Class C misdemeanor and a moving traffic violation. The fine climbs with the circumstances: a first offense runs up to $50, a repeat offense or any violation that causes a crash runs up to $100, and a violation in an active work zone or a school zone with its flashers on runs up to $200.^[2]

Lawmakers considered narrowing the holding ban to school and work zones in 2025, but House Bill 559 did not pass and was deferred to a summer study committee on March 18, 2025, so the statewide ban on holding a phone still stands.^[3]

For an injury claim, the ticket size barely matters. What counts is that the driver committed a specific, documented safety violation, and that fact does real work in a civil case.

A driver who breaks a safety statute can be found negligent per se, meaning the violation itself establishes the breach of duty. Tennessee does not apply that rule automatically.

Under the framework set out in Rains v. Bend of the River, 124 S.W.3d 580 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2003), the statute has to be designed to protect a class of people, the injured plaintiff has to belong to that class, and the violation has to be the proximate cause of the injury; the statute must also set a specific standard of conduct, and even then the court keeps discretion over whether to adopt it as the civil standard of care.^[4]

Section 55-8-199 fits that framework cleanly. It sets a specific standard, keep your hands off the device, it exists to protect everyone sharing the road, and a person struck by a driver who ignored it sits squarely in the protected class.

Here is the honest limit. No Tennessee appellate court has yet applied negligence per se to the Hands Free Law by name. The argument is built case by case, on the statute and the general framework, rather than on a decision that has already blessed it. That is a reason to build the record properly, not a reason to skip the argument. A violation documented with phone records and tied to the moment of impact carries weight whether the court adopts negligence per se outright or treats the broken statute as strong evidence of ordinary negligence.

A citation reflects an officer's judgment at the scene. It helps, but it is not the proof. The proof is the data, and the data has a short shelf life.

• Carrier phone records. A subpoena to the wireless carrier pulls call logs, text timestamps, and data-session records that show whether the phone was active in the seconds around impact
• The device and its apps. Phones and many apps keep their own activity logs, and forensic extraction can place a tap, a message, or a video at a specific time
• The vehicle's event data recorder. The onboard black box captures speed, braking, and steering in the moments before the crash, which is where distraction shows up as a driver who never slowed
• Telematics. Fleet systems and usage-based insurance programs record hard braking, speed, and screen interaction that corroborate the timeline
• The preservation letter. Carriers purge records on a schedule and phones get wiped or replaced, so a spoliation demand has to go out fast to freeze the evidence in place

Because Tennessee's negligence per se framework turns on proximate cause, the case is won by tying the phone activity to the moment of the crash, not by the ticket alone. A timeline built from carrier records, the black box, and witness accounts connects the two. That is why the early weeks of a Tennessee car accident claim decide so much: the record either gets locked down while it exists, or it is gone.

Tennessee follows modified comparative fault with a 49 percent bar, the rule from McIntyre v. Balentine. You can recover only if you are less than 50 percent at fault, your recovery drops by your own percentage, and at exactly 50 percent the claim is barred. Proving the other driver was on a phone pushes fault onto them and protects your share, which is the whole point of documenting the violation. The mechanics are covered in our breakdown of Tennessee comparative negligence.

Fault also decides who pays what. Tennessee abolished joint and several liability, so each at-fault party is responsible only for its own percentage of the damages. When a defendant blames someone who is not in the lawsuit, you get a 90-day window to bring that person in. In a distracted driving case, the phone records are what keep the largest fault share where it belongs, on the driver who was not watching the road.

Value depends on the injuries, the fault split, and the coverage available, not on the citation. A serious claim can include economic damages for medical bills, future care, and lost income, and non-economic damages for pain and the loss of a normal life.

Tennessee caps non-economic damages at $750,000, with a $1 million cap in catastrophic cases, though the cap can lift when the at-fault driver's conduct leads to a felony conviction. How those numbers fit together is spelled out in our guide to Tennessee's personal injury damage caps.

Egregious distraction can also open the door to punishment. A driver recording or broadcasting a video at highway speed, an act the statute names by itself, is the kind of reckless conduct that can support punitive damages, which Tennessee allows when reckless conduct is proven by clear and convincing evidence.

Coverage still shapes the outcome. Tennessee's minimum liability limits are 25/50/25, and many drivers carry no more than that, so mapping every available policy is part of valuing the claim. Distracted driving remains one of the behaviors behind the state's crash totals tracked in Tennessee car accident statistics.

One year. Tennessee's personal injury statute of limitations, T.C.A. § 28-3-104, is the shortest in the nation, and it runs from the date of the crash. Miss it and the claim is gone, no matter how clear the phone records are. The full set of deadlines and exceptions is laid out in our page on the Tennessee statute of limitations for personal injury.

There is one extension. When the distracted driver is criminally charged within a year, for example with vehicular assault, and the case is brought by the injured person against that prosecuted driver, the deadline stretches to two years under § 28-3-104(a)(2). All of its conditions have to be met, and a municipal ordinance violation does not trigger it, so it is a safety net, not a plan.

The evidence clock is shorter than the filing clock. Carrier records and surveillance footage are often gone within weeks, so the useful deadline is measured in days, not months.