Minnesota law makes nearly every driver and passenger wear a seat belt, and fines them if they don’t. Minnesota law also makes the fact that they didn’t wear one inadmissible in the lawsuit that follows the crash.
That looks like an oversight. It isn’t. It’s a deliberate rule of evidence, it survived a recent legislative revision of the surrounding section, and it takes out of Minnesota crash litigation the single best damages argument the defense has in states that allow it.
Where I hear practitioners get it wrong is the direction. The bar runs both ways. It shuts out proof of use just as firmly as proof of nonuse. So a plaintiff who was buckled in properly and still got badly hurt can’t tell the jury that either.
The rule isn’t in the statute you’d expect
It isn’t in the statute that requires seat belts, anyway. It’s in the older section next door, which is titled for something else entirely.
Minn. Stat. § 169.685 is headnoted “SEAT BELT; PASSENGER RESTRAINT SYSTEM FOR CHILDREN,” and most of it is about equipment standards and child restraints. Subdivision 4 is the evidence rule, and it’s two paragraphs long:
(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b), proof of the use or failure to use seat belts or a child passenger restraint system as described in subdivision 4a, or proof of the installation or failure of installation of seat belts or a child passenger restraint system as described in subdivision 4a is not admissible in evidence in any litigation involving personal injuries or property damage resulting from the use or operation of any motor vehicle.
(b) Paragraph (a) does not affect the right of a person to bring an action for damages arising out of an incident that involves a defectively designed, manufactured, installed, or operating seat belt or child passenger restraint system. Paragraph (a) does not prohibit the introduction of evidence pertaining to the use of a seat belt or child passenger restraint system in an action described in this paragraph.
Four pieces of that text do the heavy lifting.
“Use or failure to use.” Both. This isn’t a one-way shield for plaintiffs. A plaintiff can’t bring in belt use to show the crash forces were severe even with a restraint, and can’t use it as a character or credibility point. The subject is just closed.
“Or proof of the installation or failure of installation.” That’s a separate object. A claim that the owner of an older vehicle never installed belts stays out of the record too.
“Any litigation involving personal injuries or property damage.” Not “any civil action.” The scope language is built around what the lawsuit is about, not around a procedural category, and it reaches property damage cases as well as injury cases.
“Resulting from the use or operation of any motor vehicle.” The trigger is the vehicle, not whether the vehicle was insured. The no-fault tort threshold by its terms attaches to actions arising from the use of a vehicle “with respect to which security has been provided,” as I discuss in my piece on the § 65B.51 threshold. Subdivision 4 has no coverage condition at all.
Child seats are covered by name
The operative phrase is “seat belts or a child passenger restraint system,” and it shows up in both the use clause and the installation clause of paragraph (a).
“Child passenger restraint system” is defined in the same section. Subdivision 3a(c) defines it as a device that meets applicable federal motor vehicle safety standards and any other applicable federal regulations, “is designed to restrain, seat, or position children,” and “is appropriate to the age of the child being restrained” — and it says outright that the term “includes a booster seat,” which subdivision 3a(b) defines separately.
Subdivision 4a is the substantive child-restraint mandate: rear-facing until age two or the seat’s limits, forward-facing with an internal harness after that, a booster seat and safety belt after the harness limits are exceeded, a correctly fitting safety belt from age nine or when the booster limits are exceeded, and rear seating for children under thirteen when a rear seat is available. Violating subdivision 4a is a petty misdemeanor under subdivision 5, with a fine that may be waived or reduced if the driver produces evidence that a conforming restraint was obtained within fourteen days.
None of that gets in front of the jury either. A defendant can’t prove a violation of subdivision 4a to cut a child’s damages, because subdivision 4 bars proof of the nonuse itself. That’s a big allocation of risk. The Legislature made child restraint use mandatory and enforceable by citation, and in the same breath made it unusable as evidence in the injured child’s civil case.
What about the statute that actually requires adults to buckle up?
That’s a different section, and it has no evidence provision at all.
Minn. Stat. § 169.686, subd. 1(a) is the adult mandate: “Except as provided in section 169.685, a properly adjusted and fastened seat belt, including both the shoulder and lap belt when the vehicle is so equipped, must be worn by the driver and passengers of a passenger vehicle, commercial motor vehicle, type III vehicle, and type III Head Start vehicle.” Subdivision 1(a) also extends the requirement to autocycles equipped with seat belts and to class 2 all-terrain vehicles factory-equipped with seat belts when operated on or within the right-of-way of a public road.
Subdivision 1(b) sets the penalty and adds a detail you’ll want to know: a violation carries a fine, the driver is separately liable for each violation by the driver or by a passenger under fifteen, and “[t]he Department of Public Safety must not record a violation of this subdivision on a person’s driving record.”
Subdivision 2 lists seven exemptions from the wearing requirement — including a person driving in reverse, a person in a vehicle where every belted position is occupied, a person with a physician’s written certificate of medical unfitness or physical disability, certain frequent-stop workers traveling under 25 miles per hour, rural mail carriers and newspaper delivery persons on duty, occupants of vehicles manufactured before January 1, 1965, and people in a pickup truck engaged in normal farming work.
Read § 169.686 start to finish and you won’t find an admissibility sentence. The evidence bar lives in one place — § 169.685, subd. 4 — and it’s written broadly enough to cover nonuse of a belt required by § 169.686. That matters in practice: a lawyer who goes looking for the rule in the seat-belt-use statute won’t find it. I’ve seen the search end right there more than once.
Where the bar stops
At one carve-out, in a single paragraph, and it’s narrower than it first reads.
Paragraph (b) preserves product liability claims. It “does not affect the right of a person to bring an action for damages arising out of an incident that involves a defectively designed, manufactured, installed, or operating seat belt or child passenger restraint system,” and it “does not prohibit the introduction of evidence pertaining to the use of a seat belt or child passenger restraint system in an action described in this paragraph.”
That makes sense. You can’t try a crashworthiness case about a belt that came unlatched with the belt kept out of evidence. But look at what the second sentence does not say. It doesn’t limit the reopened evidence by party or by purpose. It says evidence pertaining to seat belt use isn’t prohibited “in an action described in this paragraph.” Whether that opens the subject only for the claim against the manufacturer, or generally in a case that includes such a claim, the text doesn’t say. A plaintiff who adds a restraint-defect claim to an ordinary crash case should understand that the addition may take the protection of paragraph (a) off the table. Make that call on purpose. Don’t find out at a motion in limine.
Two other limits, stated exactly.
The bar is about admissibility, not liability. It doesn’t say belt nonuse is irrelevant, or that it isn’t fault. It says proof of it isn’t admissible.
It doesn’t reach helmets. Motorcycle equipment is governed by Minn. Stat. § 169.974, subd. 4(a), which requires protective headgear only for operators and riders under eighteen (and eye protection for all operators), with exceptions for permitted parades and enclosed-cab autocycles. That section has no admissibility provision like § 169.685, subd. 4. If you reason from the seat belt rule to a helmet rule, you’re reasoning past the text.
Why this rule moves case values
Because of what it carves out of the general definition of fault.
Minn. Stat. § 604.01, subd. 1a defines “fault” for Minnesota comparative fault purposes to include, among other things, “unreasonable failure to avoid an injury or to mitigate damages.” On its face, that language would let a defendant argue that a plaintiff who chose not to buckle up unreasonably failed to avoid injury, and ask the jury to cut damages for it.
Section 604.01 already fences that argument in once: “Evidence of unreasonable failure to avoid aggravating an injury or to mitigate damages may be considered only in determining the damages to which the claimant is entitled. It may not be considered in determining the cause of an accident.”
Section 169.685, subd. 4 fences it in again, completely, for this one fact. The defense doesn’t get a reduced-damages instruction on belt nonuse, because it can’t get the nonuse into evidence in the first place. In a serious-injury case where the harm came from ejection or the way an unrestrained occupant moves in the crash, that’s the difference between a full-value verdict and one cut by whatever percentage the jury picks. The rest of the reduction machinery (collateral sources, comparative fault, settlement credits) still applies in the fixed order Minnesota sets by statute. Belt nonuse just isn’t one of the inputs.
The Legislature revisited the section in 2024 and left the rule alone
The Revisor’s history line for § 169.685 ends with Laws 2024, ch. 104, art. 1, §§ 40–44. Section 41 of that article amended subdivision 4. Reading the strike-and-underscore text, the changes were housekeeping. The internal cross-reference was conformed from “subdivision 5” to “subdivision 4a” because the child-restraint requirements were being renumbered into a new subdivision 4a, and “shall not be admissible” became “is not admissible.” The substance of the bar didn’t change: what’s excluded, from what proceedings, and the single product-liability carve-out.
There’s one ambiguity the 2024 amendment didn’t fix, and I’d brief it rather than assume it away. The phrase “as described in subdivision 4a” comes after “seat belts or a child passenger restraint system” in both clauses of paragraph (a). Whether it modifies only the child restraint term or both terms isn’t settled by the syntax, and the amendment just carried the phrase forward with a new subdivision number.
How I run these cases
- Don’t plead around it. Belt nonuse is inadmissible. There’s no need to get ahead of it in a complaint, and raising it invites the argument that you opened the subject.
- Move in limine anyway. The bar is statutory, but adjusters, investigating officers, and medical records routinely note restraint status. Get the references out of the exhibits, not just the argument.
- Scrub the records that will go to the jury. Crash reports and emergency department notes commonly record “restrained” or “unrestrained.” That’s how the fact actually reaches a jury despite subdivision 4.
- Decide about a restraint-defect claim on purpose. Paragraph (b) reopens seat belt evidence “in an action described in this paragraph,” and the text doesn’t say for whose benefit.
- Don’t stretch the rule to helmets. Section 169.974 has no counterpart, and helmet nonuse in a Minnesota motorcycle case is a different problem from belt nonuse in a car case. Where the at-fault driver’s limits won’t cover a motorcycle injury, the uninsured and underinsured coverage on the rider’s own policy usually matters more than the evidence question.
- Remember it doesn’t touch first-party benefits. Section 169.685, subd. 4 is a rule of evidence in litigation. It doesn’t decide what a no-fault carrier pays, or whether a benefit dispute goes to mandatory no-fault arbitration.
The observation
Legislatures usually pair a mandate with a consequence. Minnesota paired this one with a fine, a rule against putting the violation on a driving record, and an evidence bar that keeps the violation out of the injured person’s civil case.
The policy isn’t hard to see. If belt nonuse came in, every serious crash case would turn into a fight over occupant kinematics, and the person paying for that fight would be the one already hurt. The Legislature decided you raise seat belt use with enforcement on the road, not with damages cuts in a courtroom.
What makes the rule unusual is that it cuts both ways. A statute meant to protect injured people from a defense argument could easily have been written one way: bar proof of nonuse, allow proof of use. It wasn’t. The words are “use or failure to use,” and the whole subject drops out of the trial.
That’s a cleaner rule than the alternative. It also quietly does more for the value of Minnesota crash cases than most doctrines lawyers spend far more time fighting about. That’s why I check it first, not last.
Madgett Law, LLC handles Minnesota automobile and motorcycle injury claims, including evidence motions, no-fault benefit disputes, and underinsured motorist claims. If you’ve been hurt in a crash, whether you were wearing a seat belt isn’t the question that decides your case. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 169.685 (2025) (subd. 3a(b)–(c), definitions of “booster seat” and “child passenger restraint system,” including that the latter “includes a booster seat”; subd. 4(a), the admissibility bar on proof of the use or failure to use, and the installation or failure of installation of, seat belts or a child passenger restraint system in any litigation involving personal injuries or property damage resulting from the use or operation of any motor vehicle; subd. 4(b), the product-liability carve-out and the sentence permitting seat belt evidence “in an action described in this paragraph”; subd. 4a(a)(1)–(6) and (b)–(d), the child passenger restraint requirements; subd. 5(a), petty misdemeanor and fine, with the fourteen-day purchase provision); Minn. Stat. § 169.686 (2025) (subd. 1(a), the seat belt requirement and its extension to autocycles and certain class 2 all-terrain vehicles; subd. 1(b), the fine, per-violation driver liability, and the prohibition on recording the violation on a driving record; subd. 2, clauses (1)–(7), the seven exemptions from the wearing requirement — and note that this section contains no admissibility provision); Minn. Stat. § 169.974, subd. 4(a)–(b) (2025) (protective headgear required for motorcycle operators and riders under eighteen, eye protection for all operators, and the parade and enclosed-cab autocycle exceptions — and note that § 169.974 contains no admissibility provision); Minn. Stat. § 604.01, subd. 1a (2025) (“fault” includes “unreasonable failure to avoid an injury or to mitigate damages”; the second paragraph limiting mitigation evidence to damages and forbidding its use “in determining the cause of an accident”) (Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes, 2025 Minnesota Statutes). Revisor’s history line for § 169.685 (last listed amendment, Laws 2024, ch. 104, art. 1, §§ 40–44); Laws of Minnesota 2024, ch. 104, art. 1, § 41 (amending Minn. Stat. 2022, § 169.685, subd. 4 — the strike-and-underscore text on the Revisor’s site shows the cross-reference changed from “subdivision 5” to “subdivision 4a” and “shall not be” changed to “is not,” with no other change), and § 42 (adding subd. 4a). The scope of the paragraph (b) carve-out as to party and purpose, and whether the phrase “as described in subdivision 4a” modifies “seat belts” as well as “child passenger restraint system,” are identified above as open questions of construction and are not answered here; no Minnesota appellate decision construing § 169.685, subd. 4 is cited or relied upon in this article. This article is general legal information about Minnesota law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Every case depends on its own facts. No outcome is promised or implied.