[2026 Update] California Personal Injury Statute of Limitations
Two years is the standard statute of limitations for many cases. It’s also the answer that gets people in trouble, because it’s a starting point, not a rule that fits every situation. The deadlines that actually wreck cases tend to be the shorter ones nobody mentions in the same breath. Some of them run out in six months. And once a deadline passes, it doesn’t matter how badly you were hurt or how clearly someone else was at fault. The case is over.
So it’s worth understanding which clock is running in your situation, and when it started.
Key Takeaways
- Most California personal injury claims have a two-year deadline to file a lawsuit, measured from the date of injury under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.
- If your claim is against a government entity (a city, county, the State, or a public hospital), you generally have only six months to file a formal claim before you can even sue.
- Missing the deadline almost always ends the case. Courts have very little discretion once the statute of limitations has run.
- The discovery rule can delay the start of the clock for injuries you couldn’t reasonably have known about right away.
- Certain situations pause the clock, including injuries to minors, but the government’s six-month deadline usually is not paused the way the standard deadline is.
How long do you have to file a personal injury claim in California?
For most injury cases, two years from the date you were hurt. That’s the deadline set by California Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, and it covers the bulk of what people think of as personal injury: car crashes, motorcycle wrecks, bicycle and pedestrian collisions, dog bites, most slip-and-falls, assaults.
If someone dies from their injuries, the claim becomes a wrongful death case, and the two years run from the date of death rather than the date of the accident. Those aren’t always the same day. A person can be hurt in a crash and survive for weeks or months before passing, and the filing clock for the family starts when they die.
Important thing to note: “Filing” means filing an actual lawsuit, a complaint, in court. It does not mean hiring a lawyer. It does not mean sending the insurance company a demand letter. It does not mean opening a claim with the adjuster or negotiating a settlement.
You can do all of those things and still miss the deadline if a complaint is never filed with the court before the two years are up. Plenty of people spend eighteen months going back and forth with an insurer, assuming the conversation itself keeps their rights alive. It doesn’t. The clock runs in the background the entire time, indifferent to how those negotiations are going.
Most cases settle without a lawsuit ever being filed, which is fine and normal. But the deadline sits there regardless, and somebody has to be watching it.
What happens if you miss the deadline?
Missing the deadline has serious consequences.
The statute of limitations is what lawyers call an affirmative defense. When you file too late, the other side raises the deadline as a defense, and the court’s job at that point is mechanical. As the Sacramento County Public Law Library puts it, the court “has no leeway” on issues regarding the statute of limitations. If the case was filed after the deadline, it will be dismissed.
Usually, this happens in one of two ways. Early on, the defense can file a demurrer, which is a motion arguing that even if everything in your complaint is true, the lawsuit is barred on its face because the dates don’t work.
Later, they can move for summary judgment, citing the calendar and asking the judge to dismiss the case before trial. Either way, the merits never get heard. A jury never sees the photos of your totaled car or hears what your recovery has been like. The case ends on arithmetic.
This is the whole reason the deadlines matter so much. A strong case and a weak case die exactly the same way when they’re filed late.
When does the clock actually start? The discovery rule
The default is that the clock starts the day you’re injured. For a car accident, that’s the date of the crash, plain and simple. You knew you were hurt, you knew roughly how, and the two years ticked from there.
Some injuries don’t work like that. There are cases where you don’t know you’ve been harmed until much later, or you know something’s wrong but have no reasonable way of knowing what caused it. California handles this through the discovery rule, which can delay the start of the clock until you discover, or reasonably should have discovered, both the injury and that someone’s wrongdoing caused it.
The case that frames this is Fox v. Ethicon Endo-Surgery, where the California Supreme Court dealt with a woman who had complications after surgery. She knew she’d been injured. What she didn’t know, and couldn’t have known until later in the litigation, was that a surgical stapler may have been defective. The court held that her claim against the device manufacturer didn’t necessarily start running when she first suspected her surgeon, because a reasonable investigation wouldn’t yet have pointed to the product. Different defendant, different clock.
The rule cuts both ways, though, and it’s not a loophole you can lean on casually. If you want the benefit of delayed discovery, you carry the burden of showing it. You have to be specific about when and how you discovered the problem and why you couldn’t have found it sooner, even if you’d been paying attention. Vague claims that you just didn’t realize won’t survive. The discovery rule rewards people who were reasonably diligent and still couldn’t have known, not people who simply waited.
Does suing the government change the deadline?
This is where the two-year number becomes dangerous, because when a government entity is involved, it’s wrong.
If your injury was caused by a city, a county, the State of California, a public school district, a public hospital, a transit agency, or any other public entity, you do not have two years to take your first step. You have roughly six months. Under California Government Code section 911.2, you generally must present a formal written claim to the government entity within six months of the date your claim arose, before you’re allowed to file a lawsuit at all. The claim is a prerequisite. Skip it or file it late, and the courthouse door is closed, no matter how strong your case is.
Worse, people often don’t realize a government entity is even in the picture. You get rear-ended and assume it’s an ordinary car accident, then it turns out the other driver was a county employee on the clock. You trip on a broken sidewalk and assume you’d sue the adjacent business, then it turns out the city owns and controls that stretch. The six-month clock runs from the date of injury in those cases, too.
Where you file the claim depends on which government you’re dealing with, and the rules aren’t identical:
| Who are you suing? | First deadline | Where the claim goes |
|---|---|---|
| City or county | 6 months | That entity’s clerk or board (no filing fee) |
| State agency | 6 months | Dept. of General Services, Government Claims Program ($25 fee or fee-waiver request) |
| Caltrans, claim of $12,500 or less | 6 months | Directly to Caltrans |
| University of California | Generally exempt from the claim requirement | (Different rules apply) |
Once you’ve filed the claim, the government has 45 days to respond. They can accept it, reject it, or do nothing, and that last option is itself a kind of answer. If they don’t act within 45 days, the law generally treats the claim as rejected, so your case can move forward.
Then there’s a second deadline that catches even people who did the first part right. After the entity rejects your claim, how long you have to actually file the lawsuit depends on how they rejected it. Under Government Code section 945.6, if the government sends you a proper written rejection notice with the required statutory warning, you have just six months from that notice to file suit. If they don’t send a compliant notice, you get much more time, up to 2 years from when the claim arose. So a properly worded rejection letter actually sets off a short fuse, and a lot of people assume a rejection means the matter is closed, rather than realizing it just shortens their window.
Miss the original six-month claim deadline, and there’s a narrow second chance. You can apply for permission to file a late claim, but you have to do so within a reasonable time, and no later than 1 year from when the claim arose, with a clear explanation for why you were late. The entity can say no. It’s a safety net with large holes in it, not something to rely on.
How do these deadlines play out in real accidents?
The mechanics above sound abstract until you put them against actual situations. The same set of rules produces very different deadlines depending on who’s involved, and the difference is almost always whether a government entity is involved.
Car accidents. A standard crash between two private drivers is the simple case. The clock starts on the date of the collision, and you have two years. Change one fact, though, and the deadline can collapse. If the other vehicle was a city bus, a police cruiser, a public works truck, or any government vehicle, you’re now in six-month territory. The same is true if the crash was caused partly by a dangerous road condition the government failed to fix, a missing sign, a malfunctioning signal, or a pothole the city knew about. Suddenly, the question is bigger than who hit you. It’s whether a public entity helped cause it, and that changes your timeline.
Pedestrian accidents. The engine is identical. Hit by a private driver, two years from the date you were struck. But pedestrian cases often involve public property because pedestrians walk on sidewalks, in crosswalks, and across streets that the government built and maintains. When a dangerous condition of public property contributes to the injury, the government claim rules come into play, and the timeline shortens.
Falls on government property. Slip-and-fall and trip-and-fall cases on public land combine two things at once. There’s the deadline, the six-month government claim, and there’s a separate question about whether the government is even liable for the condition that hurt you. Under Government Code section 835, a public entity is responsible for a dangerous condition of its property only if you can show the condition was actually dangerous, that it caused your injury, and that the entity either created the hazard or knew about it long enough to have fixed it. So the clock is short, and the proof requirement is specific.
Sidewalks deserve their own note, because they’re a genuine gray area. You’d assume the city is always on the hook for a cracked or buckled sidewalk, and often it is. But California Streets and Highways Code section 5610 also puts a maintenance duty on the owner of the property next to the sidewalk. Whether the adjacent owner can actually be held liable to an injured pedestrian, as opposed to just being responsible for repairs, usually turns on local ordinances and on who created the defect. The upshot is that a sidewalk fall can involve the city, a private owner, or both, and sorting that out early matters because the government deadline is the shortest one on the table.
Are there exceptions that pause the clock?
A few situations stop the clock or delay its start, beyond the discovery rule already covered.
Minors. When the injured person is under 18, the standard deadline is generally paused until they turn 18, and then the normal period runs from there. A child hurt at five doesn’t lose their rights because no one filed before they started kindergarten. Here’s the catch, and it’s a serious one: this pause generally does not apply to the six-month government claim deadline. If a child is injured by a government entity, that six-month clock can still be running, and the protection that applies to ordinary claims doesn’t fully carry over. Families assume a child always has years to act, and against a government defendant, that assumption can be wrong.
Mental incapacity. If an injured person lacks the legal capacity to handle their own affairs, the deadline can be paused while that’s the case. This comes up after catastrophic injuries, a severe traumatic brain injury, or a coma, where the person genuinely cannot manage a lawsuit.
Medical malpractice runs on its own clock. Injuries caused by a doctor, nurse, or hospital’s professional negligence are subject to a different deadline under Code of Civil Procedure section 340.5: one year from when you discovered the injury, or three years from the injury itself, whichever comes first. That’s a separate topic with its own wrinkles. One point worth clearing up, because many sources get it wrong: the 2022 reforms to California’s medical malpractice law (AB 35) raised the limits on certain damages, but they did not change this filing deadline. The one-year and three-year structure is the same as it was.
And the fact that a medical provider was somehow involved doesn’t automatically drag your case into the malpractice rules. In Gutierrez v. Tostado, decided in 2025, the California Supreme Court considered a man who was rear-ended by an ambulance on the freeway. The ambulance company argued that the shorter malpractice clock applied because they were a health care provider. The court disagreed. The ambulance hitting another car was ordinary negligence, a driving mistake, not the kind of professional medical judgment the malpractice statute is about, so the regular two-year deadline applied. The lesson is that what matters is the nature of what went wrong, not the job title of who did it.
What to do now
The honest summary is that “how long do I have” doesn’t have one answer in California. It depends on who hurt you and how. Two years is the common case. Six months is the case that catches people’s attention, and it shows up more often than you’d think, especially when a city, county, or state entity had a hand in what happened. On top of that, the discovery rule can move when the clock starts, and a handful of exceptions can pause it.
If you’re not certain which deadline applies to your situation, that uncertainty is itself a reason to get an answer sooner rather than later. The cost of asking early is a phone call. The cost of guessing wrong is the entire case. If you have questions about a California injury claim and its deadline, contact DK Law for a free consultation.
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