What is a hospital lien on your Georgia injury claim?

A Georgia hospital that treats your injuries can file a lien on your injury claim for its reasonable charges, under O.C.G.A. § 44-14-470. The lien attaches to the settlement or verdict, not to you or your property. It sits behind your lawyer’s fee, and the amount is negotiable. Handling hospital liens is part of settling any serious injury case.

What does O.C.G.A. § 44-14-470 say?

The published heading is “Lien on causes of action accruing to injured person for costs of care and treatment of injuries arising out of such causes of action.” Subsection (b) grants the lien to anyone operating a hospital, nursing home, physician practice, or chiropractic practice, or providing traumatic burn care:

shall have a lien for the reasonable charges for hospital, nursing home, physician practice, chiropractic practice, or traumatic burn care medical practice care and treatment of an injured person, which lien shall be upon any and all causes of action accruing to the person to whom the care was furnished

The same subsection says the lien is subject to any attorney’s lien, attaches only to the cause of action and not to the injured person or their other property, and is not evidence of a failure to pay a debt. Last amended in 2023 (Ga. L. 2023, p. 399, SB 168, effective July 1, 2023), which added chiropractic practices.

What does it mean for you?

After a serious crash you are taken to the nearest trauma center. Weeks later a letter arrives from the hospital saying it has filed a lien against your “cause of action.” People read that as a lien on their house or a collections action. It is neither. The hospital is telling the at-fault driver’s insurer, and your lawyer, that it expects to be paid out of whatever your injury claim produces.

The lien has limits written into the statute. It covers only “reasonable” charges, and a chargemaster rate is not automatically reasonable. It comes after your attorney’s lien, so legal fees are paid first. It cannot touch you personally. And a hospital that filed the lien has to follow strict notice and filing procedures in the surrounding sections, which not every hospital does correctly.

In practice, the lien is a negotiation. Hospitals routinely reduce lien amounts when the settlement is limited by the at-fault driver’s policy, when the charges exceed what insurance would have paid, or when the procedures were not followed. Reducing medical liens is one of the ways a lawyer increases what you take home from the same settlement, and it is work that happens after the headline number is agreed.

Related Georgia laws

• O.C.G.A. § 33-7-11: uninsured motorist coverage, often the source that pays the lien
• O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33: the two year deadline to file an injury lawsuit
• O.C.G.A. § 51-4-1: the measure of damages in a wrongful death case

Sources

• Official Code of Georgia Annotated on legis.ga.gov (official text)
• O.C.G.A. § 44-14-470 on Justia (2025 Georgia Code)
• Text verified against the published code on 2026-10-16. Statute text is public record. Nothing on this page is legal advice about your specific case.

What should you do next?

If a hospital has sent you a lien notice, do not ignore it and do not pay it from your own pocket. Send it to us. Getting that number down is part of our job.

Call Kenneth S. Nugent, P.C. at 770-820-0711, any hour, any day. The call is free, the case review is free, and there is zero fee unless we win. Nine offices across Georgia, and we come to you if you cannot come to us.

One more thing. Don’t sign anything from an insurance company before you talk to a lawyer. A signature on the wrong form can give away rights you did not know you had.