Every California personal injury deadline in one table Two years for most. Six months for some.

Most California injury claims must be filed within two years of the injury under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, and that rule is wrong often enough to end cases. Damage to your car runs three years, a claim against a city, a county, or the state has to be presented in six months, and medical malpractice can expire in one year. The table below gives every deadline with the statute it comes from.

What missing a deadline costs you

A statute of limitations is the deadline the Legislature sets for filing a lawsuit. Miss it and the case is over on the calendar, not on the merits: the court dismisses it no matter how clear the fault or how serious the injury. A government claim is different. It is a written claim you present to the public agency before you are allowed to sue it at all, and it has its own, much shorter clock. Workers’ compensation, criminal cases, and claims against the federal government run on their own rules and are not covered here.

Every California injury deadline in one table

The sources, row by row: section 335.1 gives two years for assault, battery, or injury to or death of a person caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another, which is why the injury row and the death row read the same. Section 377.60 says who may bring the death claim: the surviving spouse, domestic partner, children, and issue of deceased children, and if there are none, the people who would inherit by intestate succession. Section 338(c) gives three years for taking, detaining, or injuring goods or chattels, which is the car. Section 340.5 sets the malpractice rule, section 352 the tolling for minors, meaning the pause in the clock, and section 340.8 the toxic exposure rule.

Why a government claim gets six months

Government Code section 911.2(a) is the deadline people miss. A claim for death, injury to a person, or injury to personal property must be presented “not later than six months after the accrual of the cause of action.” Accrual is the date the claim arose, which for an injury is usually the date it happened. Any other claim gets a year. That applies to the City of Los Angeles, the County, the State, a school district, a public hospital, and a transit agency. If you were hit by a Metro bus, the claim goes to Metro’s claims process, on that six month clock.

After the claim is presented, section 912.4 gives the agency’s board 45 days to act, and if it does nothing the claim is deemed rejected on the last day of that period. Then section 945.6 takes over: six months to file suit if the entity mails a written rejection, two years from accrual if it never sends one. If the six month claim deadline has already passed, section 911.4 allows a written application for leave to present a late claim, within a reasonable time not to exceed one year after accrual.

This is also the reason a bad piece of pavement is a different case from a bad driver. A claim that a road, a signal, or a sidewalk was itself unsafe runs under Government Code section 835, which requires a dangerous condition, causation, foreseeability, and either an employee’s act or the entity’s actual or constructive notice in time to fix it. The same crash against a different defendant runs six months instead of two years.

When the clock waits for minors

Under section 352(a), if the person entitled to sue was under 18 when the claim arose, the time of that disability is not counted. In practice the two years starts at the 18th birthday. Subdivision (b) is the exception: that tolling does not apply to claims that must first be presented to a public entity. A child hurt by a city vehicle is on the same six month claim clock as an adult, and the parent or guardian has to meet it.

Medical malpractice has its own version. Section 340.5 gives a minor three years from the wrongful act, except that a child under six gets until the eighth birthday, whichever period is longer.

If you learned of the harm late

The discovery rule delays the start of the clock until you knew, or a reasonable person would have suspected, that you were harmed by someone’s wrongful conduct. The Judicial Council’s 2026 civil jury instructions put it to juries as CACI No. 455, Statute of Limitations, Delayed Discovery. The case is still on time if, before the deadline, the plaintiff did not discover and did not know facts that would have caused a reasonable person to suspect harm caused by someone’s wrongful conduct.

The Legislature wrote its own versions into specific statutes. Section 340.5 runs one year from discovery in malpractice, with a three year outer limit that opens only for fraud, intentional concealment, or a foreign body left inside with no therapeutic purpose. Section 338(d) delays a fraud claim until the fraud is discovered. Section 340.8 gives a toxic exposure claim two years from the injury or two years from the point a reasonable person would have connected it to someone’s conduct, whichever is later. Delayed discovery is something you have to prove, not something you get to assume.

Insurance claims do not stop the clock

Every deadline above is a deadline to file a lawsuit or present a government claim. Reporting the crash, opening a claim number, sending medical records, or negotiating for a year does none of it. We see cases where the insurance adjuster stayed friendly and responsive for twenty three months, and the value of the case fell to zero on the two year anniversary. Nothing in the negotiation moves the date.

Your own uninsured motorist coverage has a second clock that surprises people. Under Insurance Code section 11580.2(i)(1), no cause of action accrues under that coverage unless, within two years of the date of the accident, you sue the uninsured motorist, agree with your insurer on the amount, or formally demand arbitration in writing by certified mail. That is two years from the accident, not from the denial. Our post on dealing with insurance after an accident covers what the adjuster is doing in the meantime.

When your deadline is different

• Medical malpractice notice. Code of Civil Procedure section 364 requires 90 days’ notice to the provider before filing. Serve that notice inside the last 90 days of the limitations period and the deadline extends 90 days from the service.
• Childhood sexual assault. Section 340.1(a) sets no time limit for assaults occurring on or after January 1, 2024. A plaintiff who is 40 or older when filing must file certificates of merit, the supporting declarations the statute requires.
• Two clocks from one crash. The car is three years and the body is two. Signing a property damage release in week two does not end the injury claim, and letting the injury claim sit because the car is handled is how the two years disappears.
• Toxic or chemical exposure. Section 340.8 measures from the point you knew or should have known the cause, which can be years after the exposure.
• Deadlines already passed. Tolling arguments exist, they are narrow, and they are decided on facts you cannot change later. A missed deadline is usually final, so the call is worth making the day you realize the date is close.

How long you have

Two years, unless one of the rows above is yours. Find the date of the injury, then answer one question before anything else: could a city, county, state, school district, transit agency, or public hospital be responsible for any part of what happened? If the answer is yes or maybe, work to six months, not two years. If a doctor or a hospital caused the harm, work to one year from the day you understood it.

Then write the deadline down and treat it as the real one. When we take a case, tracking that date is our job, not yours, and there is no fee unless we recover. To see how the rest of the claim runs, start with our Los Angeles car accident lawyer page, our pedestrian accident page, or the questions we answer most.