Personal Injury Statute of Limitations by State (2026 Reference)

Every other mistake in a personal injury claim can be recovered from. This one cannot. When the statute of limitations expires, the claim is over — no matter how clear the liability, how severe the injury, or how far along the negotiations were.

The trap that catches people is procedural rather than legal: negotiating with an insurance company does not stop the clock. An adjuster who is still exchanging offers two years and one month after your crash has no duty to remind you that your right to sue expired last month. Some will simply stop returning calls once it has.

Quick answer: Most states allow 2 or 3 years from the date of injury. A few allow only 1 year. Claims against government entities usually require notice within 6 months or less. Confirm your specific deadline with a licensed attorney in your state — early, not late.

Want your specific date instead of scanning a table? Our free statute of limitations calculator takes your injury date and state and returns the commonly cited deadline directly.

Commonly Cited Deadlines by State

The short-deadline states deserve special attention. Tennessee’s one-year period is among the shortest in the country, and Kentucky applies a one-year period to general negligence while motor vehicle claims fall under a separate statute. If your claim arises in one of these states, the practical window for investigation and negotiation is very small.

The Rules That Change Your Actual Deadline

The table is a starting point. Five doctrines routinely move the real date:

1. The discovery rule

Where an injury is not immediately apparent, many states start the clock when the injury was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered. It typically applies to latent conditions — toxic exposure, occupational disease, a retained surgical instrument, defective medical devices — rather than to ordinary accidents where the harm is obvious on impact. A cancer diagnosis that surfaces years after long-term medication use is a common real-world example — see our guide to the Zantac ranitidine cancer litigation for how that discovery-rule timing interacts with which of four different manufacturers a given claim might target.

2. Tolling for minors

Most states pause the clock while the claimant is under 18, so the period effectively begins at the age of majority. Government claims are frequently excepted, meaning a child injured on public property may still face a six-month notice requirement. This matters directly in litigation like the ongoing social media and youth mental health lawsuits, where most claimants were minors when the alleged harm began — see our guide to social media addiction lawsuit status for how that tolling question plays out at scale.

3. Tolling for incapacity

Where a claimant is mentally incapacitated — a real consideration after a traumatic brain injury — many states toll the period during the incapacity.

4. Defendant’s absence or concealment

Some states toll the period while the defendant is out of state or has concealed their identity, and fraudulent concealment of the claim itself can extend the deadline in most jurisdictions.

5. Statutes of repose

Distinct from a limitations period, a statute of repose sets an absolute outer cutoff measured from a fixed event — such as substantial completion of construction or the first sale of a product — regardless of when the injury occurred or was discovered. A repose statute can bar a claim that is well within the limitations period.

Government Claims: The Deadline Most People Miss

If your injury involves a city, county, state, transit authority, public school, public hospital or government vehicle, a general limitations period is not your operative deadline. Most states require an administrative notice of claim first, on a much shorter clock:

• Commonly six months from the incident
• Sometimes as short as 30 to 90 days for certain entities
• Usually in a prescribed written form, filed with a specific office
• Often followed by a mandatory waiting period before suit may be filed
• Frequently accompanied by damages caps and immunity defenses

Filing correctly and on time is a precondition to suing at all. A pothole claim against a city can be dead in ninety days while a claim against a private driver in the same state would have two years.

Related Deadlines That Run Separately

Claim type	Typical treatment
Wrongful death	Separate action, commonly running from date of death
Survival action	The decedent’s own damages, sometimes a different clock
Medical malpractice	Frequently shorter, plus a certificate-of-merit requirement and a statute of repose
Product liability	Limitations period plus a possible statute of repose from first sale
Uninsured motorist claims	Governed by your policy’s contractual deadline, which can be shorter than the statute
Property damage	Often a different, sometimes longer, period than injury
Workers’ compensation	Very short notice to employer (often 30 days), separate claim-filing deadline

The uninsured motorist row catches people regularly. Your own policy is a contract, and it may impose its own notice and suit deadlines independent of state law.

Michigan deserves separate mention: alongside its three-year lawsuit period it runs one-year notice and per-expense claim deadlines under its no-fault act, which expire while the lawsuit clock is still running — see our Michigan guide.

What to Do About It

1. Write your accident date down and identify the deadline within the first weeks, not the final months.
2. Assume the shortest plausible deadline applies until an attorney confirms otherwise.
3. Check immediately for any government defendant — that is the short-fuse scenario.
4. Do not let negotiations run the clock. Nothing an insurer says or does extends it.
5. Consult an attorney well before the deadline. Firms often decline cases brought to them weeks before expiry, because there is no time to investigate properly.
6. If the deadline is near and unresolved, suit must be filed to preserve the claim. Filing does not prevent settling afterward — most filed cases still settle.

For unfamiliar terms used above — tolling, the discovery rule, a statute of repose — see our glossary.

Sources & Further Reading

• State civil practice codes and limitations statutes (e.g. Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 335.1; Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003; N.Y. CPLR § 214; Fla. Stat. § 95.11; Ga. Code § 9-3-33)
• State tort claims acts — administrative notice requirements, waiting periods and damages caps
• Louisiana Civil Code art. 3493.1 (delictual actions, effective July 2024)
• Florida HB 837 (2023) — reduction of the general negligence limitations period

Florida’s 2023 changes went further than the deadline: see our Florida settlements guide. Michigan is also worth separate attention — its no-fault act runs one-year notice and per-expense deadlines that expire while the three-year lawsuit clock is still running (Michigan guide). A handful of states set an unusually short deadline for local government defendants specifically: Illinois runs a full one-year statute of limitations — not just a notice step — for suits against local public entities (Illinois guide), Georgia bars recovery at a stricter 50% fault threshold than most neighboring states (Georgia guide), and Pennsylvania ties your right to sue for pain and suffering to a tort election made on your own insurance policy (Pennsylvania guide).

• State statutes of repose for construction and product liability claims — an outer deadline running from sale or completion rather than from injury, covered in our defective workplace equipment guide
• Medical malpractice periods are usually separate and shorter, and can capture claims you would not expect. Several states route nursing home neglect claims through their malpractice regime, which replaces the general negligence deadline above with a tighter one and often adds an expert-report prerequisite — see is a nursing home claim medical malpractice or negligence? before relying on the general figure for a care-facility claim.
• An international flight is the hardest deadline on this site, and none of the flexibility above applies to it. The Montreal Convention’s two-year period is generally treated as a condition of the right to damages rather than a limitations period, so tolling and discovery doctrines do not rescue a late claim — see our guide to airline injury claims and the Montreal Convention.