California Filing Deadlines

Why deadlines decide cases

A statute of limitations is a hard cut-off for starting a lawsuit. It is not a guideline and it is not usually negotiable. Once it passes, the other side can end the case by pointing at the calendar, no matter how clearly they were at fault or how badly you were hurt.

This is why deadlines are worth understanding early, even if you have no intention of suing anyone. Almost every claim settles without a lawsuit, but the reason an insurer takes a claim seriously is that you still could file one. Once you cannot, that leverage is gone.

The two-year rule, and what it actually runs from

The general deadline for a personal injury claim in California is two years. The wording that matters is that it runs from when the claim accrued, which for an ordinary road collision is the date of the crash.

For a wrongful death claim the two years runs from the date of death. That is not always the date of the accident, and the difference occasionally matters a great deal.

Vehicle damage has a different clock

This is the single most common misunderstanding. One collision can produce two claims with two different expiry dates: your injuries run on a two-year clock, and the damage to your car runs on a three-year clock.

In practice this rarely helps, because the property damage side is usually settled within weeks. But it means you should never assume that because one part of your claim is resolved or expired, the rest is too.

Government agencies: six months, not two years

If the party responsible is a city, a county, a school district, a transit agency, Caltrans or any other public entity, an entirely different and much shorter process applies first. Before you can sue, you must present a formal written claim to that agency, and you generally have six months from the injury to do it.

Six months is short enough that people routinely lose these claims while still in treatment and still assuming they have two years. If a public bus, a city vehicle, a poorly maintained road or a public building is any part of your story, treat this as urgent rather than something to look at later.

Missing the six months is not always the end. A late-claim application can be made within a reasonable time, up to one year from the injury, and the agency must grant it in some circumstances, including where the injured person was a child throughout the six-month period. But this is a rescue mechanism, not a plan.

After the agency responds

If the agency formally rejects your claim in writing, a new and short clock starts: you generally have six months from the date the rejection was mailed to file suit. Note that it runs from mailing, not from when you opened the envelope.

If the agency simply ignores the claim, the position is different. Silence for 45 days rejects the claim by operation of law, but because no formal rejection was ever sent, the longer two-year period applies instead. This is counterintuitive enough that it is worth getting advice rather than guessing.

Children are treated differently, with two big exceptions

Time spent under the age of 18 generally does not count against the deadline. A child injured in an ordinary car accident therefore usually has until their twentieth birthday to bring a claim.

There are two exceptions that matter enormously and are frequently misstated elsewhere. This protection does not apply to claims against government agencies, where a child still faces the six-month claim deadline. And it does not apply to medical malpractice, which has its own far harsher rule under which a child injured at birth can be out of time by the age of eight.

The reporting deadlines that are not lawsuit deadlines

Two obligations come much sooner than any of the above, and neither has anything to do with suing anyone.

If anyone was injured or killed, a report must reach police or the CHP within 24 hours. Separately, you must file form SR-1 with the DMV within ten days if there was any injury or death, or property damage over $1,000 to any one person. Every driver files their own SR-1, regardless of who was at fault, and the police will not do it for you. Failing to file can cost you your licence, entirely independently of the accident itself.

What to do with this

Work out today which of these clocks is running, and write the dates down. If a government entity might be involved, treat six months as your real deadline. If you are close to any of these dates, that is the point at which talking to an attorney stops being optional, because a deadline is one of the few things nobody can fix afterwards.