California Negligence Statute of Limitations and Exceptions

The California negligence statute of limitations is two years for most personal injury claims, three years for property damage, and as short as six months when you are suing a state or local government agency. Medical malpractice compresses the window to one year from discovery with a three-year outer cap, and legal malpractice runs one year from discovery with a four-year cap. Missing the deadline that applies to your claim almost always ends the case for good, so the category your situation falls into controls everything.

Two Years for Personal Injury and Wrongful Death

If someone’s carelessness causes you physical harm, you have two years to file a lawsuit under California Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.¹ The clock starts on the date of the injury for most situations: the day of the car crash, the day you fell on a broken sidewalk, the day the dog bit you. Once two years pass, a defendant can ask the court to throw out your case, and the court will almost certainly agree.

Wrongful death claims use the same two years, but the clock starts on the date the person died rather than the date of the negligent act that eventually caused the death.¹ That distinction matters when a person lingers with injuries for months or years before dying. The survivors’ two-year window does not begin until death actually occurs.

One mistake people make is assuming the deadline pauses while they’re getting medical treatment or negotiating with an insurance adjuster. It does not. The statute keeps running no matter what else is happening. Some adjusters know this and will happily stretch negotiations past the two-year mark if you let them.

Three Years for Property Damage

When negligence damages your property rather than your body, you get an extra year. Code of Civil Procedure section 338 provides a three-year window for claims involving harm to real property like a house or commercial building, and also for damage to personal property such as a vehicle or equipment.²

A single accident can trigger both deadlines at once. If a driver hits your parked car while you’re sitting inside, you have two years to sue for your physical injuries but three years to sue for the damage to the car. Treating these as one unified deadline is a common and expensive mistake. The injury claim expires a full year before the property claim does.

Section 338 also carries a separate three-year window for fraud or mistake, and that clock does not start until you actually discover the fraud.² That matters when, for example, a contractor uses substandard materials and conceals it. Your deadline to sue for the resulting damage runs from the date you found out about the deception, not the date the work was completed.

Medical and Legal Malpractice

Claims against licensed professionals follow compressed, tiered deadlines that combine a discovery trigger with an absolute outer cap. The shorter inner deadline starts when you learn something went wrong. The longer outer deadline runs from the date of the professional’s actual error. Whichever arrives first controls.

Medical Malpractice

Under Code of Civil Procedure section 340.5, you must file a medical malpractice lawsuit within one year of discovering the injury or within three years of the date the negligent treatment occurred, whichever hits first.³ In practice, the three-year cap means that if you don’t learn about a surgical error until four years later, you are already too late even though only moments have passed since your discovery.

Three narrow exceptions can push past the three-year ceiling: proof the provider committed fraud, evidence of intentional concealment, or a foreign object left inside your body that has no medical purpose.³ Outside those situations, the three-year wall is firm.

Minors are treated differently here. A child’s medical malpractice claim must be filed within three years of the negligent act. For children under six, the deadline extends to the eighth birthday if that gives them more time.³ The general tolling rule that pauses deadlines for all minors until they turn 18 does not override these specific medical malpractice timelines.

Legal Malpractice

Code of Civil Procedure section 340.6 gives you one year from discovering an attorney’s error, or four years from the date the error happened, whichever comes first.⁴ The four-year outer limit is one year longer than the medical malpractice cap.

The statute lists specific tolling events that pause the four-year clock, including periods when the attorney continues to represent you on the same matter in which the alleged malpractice occurred.⁴ You are unlikely to sue your lawyer while they are still handling your case, and the law does not penalize you for waiting.

Six Months for Government Agency Claims

Suing a city, county, or state agency in California is a two-step process with a deadline so short that many people blow past it before they even think about hiring a lawyer. Before you can file a lawsuit, you must submit an administrative claim to the responsible government body. For personal injury and property damage, that claim must be filed within six months of the incident.⁵ For other types of claims, the deadline is one year.

Once the agency receives your claim, it has 45 days to respond.⁶ If it does nothing within that period, the claim is automatically treated as rejected on the 45th day. After the agency sends a written rejection notice, you have six months from the date that notice was mailed or delivered to file an actual lawsuit.⁷ If the agency never sends formal written notice of rejection, you get two years from the date your cause of action arose to file suit.

Miss the six-month administrative deadline and a rescue valve exists. You can apply to the agency for permission to file a late claim, but that application must be submitted within one year of the incident. If the agency denies the late-claim application, you can petition a court to override that denial within six months of the refusal.⁸ The court can grant relief if you show the delay resulted from mistake, inadvertence, or excusable neglect, or if the injured person was a minor or physically or mentally incapacitated during the filing window.

A critical trap: the general tolling rules that pause deadlines for minors and incapacitated people in private lawsuits do not apply to government tort claims.⁹ A six-year-old injured by a city bus does not get to wait until age 18 to file the administrative claim. The six-month clock runs the same as it would for an adult, and only the late-claim petition process offers any flexibility.

Federal Government Claims

When negligence involves a federal employee acting within the scope of their job, the Federal Tort Claims Act controls instead of California’s state deadlines. You must file a written administrative claim with the responsible federal agency within two years of the date the claim arises.¹⁰ Missing that two-year window permanently bars the claim.

The federal agency then has six months to investigate and respond. If it denies your claim or fails to act within six months, you have six months from the date of the denial letter to file a lawsuit in federal court.¹¹ No lawsuit can proceed at all unless you first completed the administrative claim step. This comes up in California more often than people expect, including accidents involving federal vehicles, injuries at Veterans Affairs hospitals, and incidents on military bases.

The Ten-Year Cutoff for Construction Defects

Property damage from shoddy construction follows its own rules, and the ceiling can close before you ever discover the problem. California Code of Civil Procedure section 337.15 imposes a hard ten-year cutoff for claims against anyone who designed, built, or supervised construction of an improvement to real property.¹² This is a statute of repose, meaning it starts when the construction is substantially completed, regardless of whether any defect has surfaced.

The ten-year clock begins on whichever happens first: the final inspection by a public agency, the recording of a notice of completion, the first use or occupancy of the improvement, or one year after work stops. If a hidden plumbing defect causes water damage in year nine, you still have to file before year ten expires. If you discover it in year eleven, the repose period has already closed the door. The statute carves out limited exceptions for willful misconduct and fraudulent concealment, and the bar cannot be used by a property owner against claims arising from their own property’s defective condition.¹²

When the Clock Pauses

Several legal doctrines can freeze or delay California’s filing deadlines. These tolling rules do not erase the deadline; they pause it and let the remaining time resume once the tolling condition ends.

The Discovery Rule

The most broadly applicable tolling doctrine delays the start of the limitations period until you know, or reasonably should know, that you have been harmed and that someone’s negligence caused it. California applies this rule across many negligence categories, and it is baked directly into the medical and legal malpractice statutes.³ The standard is not whether you had absolute proof. It is whether a reasonable person in your position would have suspected something was wrong and investigated further. Once that threshold is met, the clock starts whether or not you actually follow through.

Minors

If a person entitled to bring a negligence claim is under 18 when the injury occurs, the time spent as a minor does not count toward the filing deadline.⁹ A 15-year-old injured in a bicycle collision would have until age 20 to file a personal injury lawsuit, since the two-year clock does not begin running until the 18th birthday. Two limits apply. The rule does not help with claims against government entities, and medical malpractice has its own minor-specific deadlines under section 340.5 that override the general rule.

Mental Incapacity

The same tolling provision that protects minors also covers people who lack legal capacity to make decisions at the time the injury occurs.⁹ The incapacity must exist at the moment the cause of action first arises. If you were mentally competent when the negligence happened and later became incapacitated, this tolling provision will not help. Once the incapacity ends, the standard deadline resumes from where it was paused.

Active Military Service

Under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, the entire period of a servicemember’s active duty is excluded from any statute of limitations calculation.¹³ This applies to California negligence claims. The servicemember does not need to prove that military duties actually prevented them from filing. The tolling is automatic and runs from the date they enter active service until the date they are released, whether they were deployed overseas or stationed domestically.

1
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 335.1 – Time of Commencing Actions
2
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 338 – Time of Commencing Actions
3
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 340.5 – Professional Negligence
4
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 340.6 – Actions Against Attorneys
5
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 911.2 – Presentation and Consideration of Claims
6
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 912.4
7
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 945.6
8
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 946.6
9
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 352
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2401 – Time for Commencing Action Against United States
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2675 – Disposition by Federal Agency as Prerequisite
12
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 337.15
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC 3936 – Statute of Limitations