§ 97.002.Limit on Liability of Certain Highway, Road, and Street Contractors

A contractor protection turning entirely on compliance with the contract.

A contractor who constructs or repairs a highway, road, or street for the Texas Department of Transportation is not liable for personal injury, property damage, or death arising from the performance of the construction or repair if, at the time, the contractor is in compliance with contract documents material to the condition or defect that was the proximate cause of the harm.

The reasoning is that the design is not the contractor's. The Department specifies the geometry, the materials, the signage, and the traffic control, and the contractor builds what it is told to build.

Holding a contractor liable for a design it did not choose and could not change would make it an insurer of the state's engineering judgment.

The compliance test is precisely scoped. It is not general compliance with the whole contract — it is compliance with the contract documents material to the condition or defect that was the proximate cause.

So a contractor in breach of some unrelated provision keeps the protection, and one that departed from the specification for the thing that caused the harm loses it.

The Department itself remains subject to the Tort Claims Act, with its discretionary function exclusion covering the design decisions this section attributes to it. The two provisions together mean a road design claim is difficult against either party.