Is It Illegal to Text and Drive?

Why Texting Is Treated Differently From Other Distractions

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sorts driver distraction into three categories. Visual distraction happens when the eyes leave the road to look at something else. Manual distraction happens when a hand leaves the wheel to operate an object. Cognitive distraction happens when mental attention shifts away from driving even if the eyes and hands never move.^[1]

Most distractions — eating, adjusting the radio, talking to a passenger — trigger only one or two of those categories at once. Reading or typing a text message pulls the eyes down to a screen, pulls at least one hand off the wheel to hold and operate the device, and pulls cognitive attention into composing or comprehending language — all three simultaneously. That combination is exactly why regulators single texting out for a harsher legal standard than distraction in general.^[1]

NHTSA's own research quantifies the visual half of that equation: reading or sending a typical text message pulls a driver's eyes off the road for an average of five seconds.^[2] At 55 miles per hour, a car covers roughly 121 yards in five seconds — close to the full length of an American football field, driven with no eyes on the road at all. The danger isn't abstract; it is a fixed distance the vehicle travels blind, regardless of how attentive the driver believes they are being.

Federal Law: Commercial Drivers and the Federal Workforce

Congress generally leaves everyday traffic law to the states, but the federal government regulates its own workforce and the interstate trucking industry directly. For those two groups, texting isn't just illegal — it is banned outright by federal regulation, on top of whatever the state where they happen to be driving requires.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) — the agency that regulates commercial trucking and bus operations — enforces two separate rules against commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers. 49 CFR § 392.80 prohibits a driver from texting while driving, and separately bars a motor carrier from allowing or requiring a driver to do so.^[3] Critically, the regulation defines “driving” to include being temporarily stationary because of traffic, a traffic control device, or other momentary delays — so a trucker who starts typing a text the instant the vehicle stops at a red light is still “driving” under the rule, and still in violation. The only exception is a driver pulled fully off the roadway and halted somewhere the vehicle can safely remain stationary, or a text sent to communicate with law enforcement or emergency services.^[3]

49 CFR § 392.82 goes further and bans a commercial driver from using a hand-held mobile telephone at all while driving — not just texting, but making or receiving a voice call by holding the phone.^[4] The same “driving” definition applies: a truck idling at a red light still counts. The only compliant way for a CMV driver to use a phone is hands-free, through a device mounted within easy reach that requires no more than a single touch or swipe to operate.^[4]

These citations don't stay contained to the individual driver. Every texting or hand-held violation feeds into a motor carrier's Safety Measurement System (SMS) and Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) score — the federal safety-rating pipeline that determines how often a trucking company gets audited and how much it pays for commercial insurance.^[6] A single driver's texting ticket can measurably raise an entire fleet's cost of doing business, which is why carriers increasingly pair zero-tolerance policies with inward-facing dash cameras.

State Law: What Actually Governs an Everyday Driver

Federal rules cover commercial drivers and federal employees. Everyone else's legal exposure comes from the state where they're driving, and states have built three distinct types of restriction rather than one uniform rule.

A texting ban is the foundational, most common law: it prohibits typing, sending, or reading text-based communication — texts, emails, instant messages — while driving. In a state with only a texting ban and no broader handheld restriction, typing an email is illegal but holding the phone to make a voice call may still be legal.^[9] A handheld phone banexists because officers have a hard time proving, from outside a moving car, whether a driver looking at a phone is typing a text or simply dialing a number. States that adopt this broader ban require the device to be fully hands-free — mounted or voice-controlled — regardless of what's actually on the screen.^[9] A third category, the novice-driver ban, prohibits any cellphone use — handheld or hands-free — for newly licensed teen drivers under a state's Graduated Driver Licensing system.^[9]

As of 2026, 49 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands ban texting for all drivers; 33 states and D.C. go further with a full handheld ban; and 36 states and D.C. ban all cellphone use for novice drivers.^[1] The table below shows how those three bans combine differently state by state, along with each state's enforcement type — a distinction that determines whether any of these laws actually change driver behavior.

This same table is why being on your phone at a red light doesn't buy a driver any legal protection: every one of these bans defines “driving” or “operating a vehicle” to include being stopped in traffic or at a signal, mirroring the federal “driving” definition covering commercial drivers above.

Primary vs. Secondary Enforcement: The Difference That Actually Saves Lives

Under primary enforcement, an officer can pull a driver over and cite them for texting alone, with no other violation required. Under secondary enforcement, the officer must first observe an unrelated violation — speeding, a lane departure, running a stop sign — before adding a texting citation once the stop is already underway.^[1]

That distinction isn't procedural trivia — it produces measurably different outcomes. A study of emergency department data across 16 states found that states with primary enforcement of their texting ban saw an average 4% reduction in motor vehicle crash-related emergency department visits — over 1,600 prevented visits per year in an average state — and a 3% reduction in overall crash fatalities, roughly 19 saved lives per year per state.^[10] States with only secondary enforcement saw almost no statistically significant reduction in traffic fatalities at all.^[10] The mechanism is straightforward: a driver who knows an officer cannot stop them for texting alone has little reason to stop texting, so the deterrent effect that primary enforcement creates simply never materializes under a secondary law.

That gap is driving a nationwide legislative trend. Ohio upgraded its texting ban from secondary to primary enforcement in 2022, and Nebraska lawmakers have repeatedly debated bills to do the same after state transportation officials acknowledged secondary enforcement wasn't changing driver behavior.^[11]

The Montana Exception

Montana is the only state in the country without a statewide ban on texting while driving.^[1] The state legislature has repeatedly tried to change that — most recently with Senate Bill 359 in 2025, which would have banned holding a wireless device and typing a text — but the bill died in the legislative process, as similar bills have in prior sessions.^[12] The resistance traces to a mix of concerns over personal liberty and skepticism about enforcing the law across Montana's vast rural highway network.^[13]

That statewide gap doesn't mean texting is actually legal everywhere in Montana, though. Because state law doesn't preempt local governments from regulating the issue themselves, several of the state's largest cities and counties — including Missoula, Bozeman, Great Falls, Billings, Helena, and Butte-Silver Bow — have passed their own municipal ordinances banning texting while driving within city limits.^[13] A driver in Montana's largest cities is still breaking the law by texting behind the wheel; the legal exposure just comes from a city ordinance instead of a state statute.

Civil Liability: Negligence Per Se

Beyond a traffic ticket, texting while driving carries a separate and often larger financial consequence if it causes a crash. A driver injured by a texting driver can sue for medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering — and in most states, that lawsuit gets a significant legal shortcut because the underlying conduct was already illegal.

In an ordinary negligence case, a plaintiff has to convince a jury that the defendant failed to act as a reasonably careful person would have — a subjective, fact-intensive argument. Because texting while driving is explicitly illegal in nearly every state, plaintiffs can instead invoke negligence per se— Latin for “negligence in itself” — a doctrine holding that violating a public-safety statute is automatically treated as unreasonable conduct, without a jury needing to separately debate whether it was reasonable.^[14]

To invoke it, a plaintiff's attorney generally has to establish three things: that the defendant violated a specific safety statute (the state's texting ban), that the plaintiff belongs to the class of people the statute was written to protect (other motorists, passengers, pedestrians), and that the harm suffered — a collision caused by distraction — is exactly the kind of harm the legislature intended to prevent when it passed the ban.^[14] Once those elements are met, the “breach of duty” element of a negligence claim is effectively established by the citation itself, which is why insurance adjusters facing a texting defendant tend to move toward settlement faster rather than risk a trial.^[14]

Proving the texting happened is no longer difficult, either. Personal injury attorneys routinely subpoena cellular carrier records — outbound message timestamps, data transmission logs — and line them up against the exact minute of a 911 call or dashcam footage to show a driver was actively texting at the moment of impact.^[14]

That same illegality cuts both ways. A driver who is hit by someone else but was themselves texting at the moment of impact can have their own compensation reduced under comparative negligence, or in a handful of strict contributory-negligence states, barred from recovering anything at all if they were even 1% at fault.^[14] This is the same fault-allocation framework that governs other distraction-adjacent claims, including one-handed driving and driving while sleep-deprived, where a driver's own impaired attention can reduce or eliminate their recovery even when someone else caused the crash.

Criminal Liability: When Texting Becomes Vehicular Homicide

A texting-related crash that kills someone moves the case out of civil court and into criminal court, where the question shifts from who pays to whether the driver goes to prison. That shift usually turns on criminal negligence— a failure to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk so severe that it amounts to “a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe.”^[15] Appellate courts have repeatedly found that manipulating a phone while driving clears that threshold.

In State v. Dion, a New Hampshire driver going 30 mph struck and killed a pedestrian in a marked, brightly lit crosswalk. Accident reconstruction showed the driver had 13.5 seconds of unobstructed view of the pedestrian and never braked or swerved; subpoenaed phone records showed she had been using her device intermittently during the trip. The court upheld her negligent homicide conviction, ruling that her sustained inattention was a gross deviation from ordinary care.^[16] Pennsylvania's Commonwealth v. Kling illustrates the same general homicide-by-vehicle framework, though that specific case involved a death caused while driving under the influence rather than while texting — courts applying homicide-by-vehicle statutes have generally required the underlying illegal driving act to be a substantial, direct cause of the death, a standard that could extend to a sufficiently reckless texting-while-driving case.^[17]

California takes the escalation a step further with implied malice — a legal theory that allows a murder charge when a driver acts with conscious disregard for human life, understanding the danger their conduct poses. California courts have applied implied malice to extreme cases of reckless driving involving high speed and disregard for safety, such as People v. Ortiz, which involved a driver with a prior DUI/reckless-driving record passing on a double-yellow line at high speed rather than texting specifically.^[18] Prosecutors have argued in some cases that texting for extended periods at high speed, knowing the scientifically documented danger it creates, could meet that same conscious-disregard standard — but this remains a developing and fact-specific theory rather than an established line of texting-specific murder convictions, and sentencing outcomes vary widely by case and jurisdiction.