Florida Statute of Limitations: Civil, Criminal, and Tolling

The Florida statute of limitations sets how long you have to file a lawsuit or how long prosecutors have to bring criminal charges, and the deadline depends entirely on the type of claim. Most personal injury lawsuits must now be filed within two years. Written contract disputes get five years. Property insurance suits get two years from the date of loss. Miss the deadline and your case is almost always gone, no matter how strong it was.

Civil Lawsuit Deadlines by Claim Type

Florida’s civil deadlines live mostly in Florida Statutes section 95.11, which was reorganized by HB 837 in 2023. The numbers below reflect the current version.

Personal Injury and Negligence: Two Years

Car crashes, slip-and-falls, and other injuries caused by someone’s carelessness must be filed within two years of the injury under section 95.11(5)(a).¹ HB 837 cut this window in half on March 24, 2023; anything before that date used the old four-year rule.

Intentional Torts: Four Years

Assault, battery, false arrest, and malicious prosecution still get four years under section 95.11(3)(n).¹ The category matters. If someone punched you at a bar, that’s an intentional tort with four years. If you slipped on a wet floor at the same bar, that’s negligence with two.

Medical Malpractice: Two Years, With a Four-Year Cap

You have two years from the malpractice or from when you discovered (or should have discovered) the injury, whichever is later. There’s a hard outer limit of four years from the incident regardless of discovery. Claims on behalf of a minor can be brought up to the child’s eighth birthday.¹

Contracts: Five Years Written, Four Years Oral

Written contract disputes get five years under section 95.11(2)(b). Oral or unwritten agreements get four years under section 95.11(3)(j).¹ Getting important agreements in writing buys you an extra year of enforcement time.

Wrongful Death: Two Years

Surviving family members have two years to sue for a death caused by negligence or an intentional act.² If the death was an intentional killing described in sections 782.04 or 782.07 (murder or manslaughter), there is no time limit on the civil action.

Property Insurance Claims: Two Years

Suing your property insurer over a denied or underpaid claim must happen within two years of the date of loss, not the date of the denial.¹ The old rule allowed five years. Long back-and-forths with an adjuster now burn through most of the window.

Real Property and Judgments

Recovering possession of real property requires filing within seven years under section 95.12.³ Enforcing a court judgment gets you twenty years, the longest civil window on the books.¹

Employment Discrimination

Federal discrimination claims require filing a charge with the EEOC before suing. Because Florida has a state enforcement agency (the Florida Commission on Human Relations), the charge deadline is 300 days from the discriminatory act.⁴ Miss it and the federal lawsuit is blocked.

Criminal Charge Deadlines

Florida Statutes section 775.15 sets how long prosecutors have to file charges. More serious crimes get longer windows, and the most serious have none at all.

Capital felonies, life felonies, and any felony resulting in a death: no time limit.⁵
Other felonies: three years from the offense.
Felonies involving fraud or breach of fiduciary duty: five years from when the crime was discovered by the victim or someone legally responsible for the victim.
First-degree misdemeanors: two years.
Second-degree misdemeanors and noncriminal violations: one year.⁵

Sexual offenses have their own extensions. Sexual battery against a victim 16 or older must generally be charged within eight years. If DNA later identifies the perpetrator in certain sexual offense cases, prosecutors get one year from that identification even if the normal deadline has passed.⁶ Certain crimes against children committed on or after July 1, 2020, may have no criminal statute of limitations at all.

The Construction Defect Trap: Statutes of Repose

A statute of repose works differently from a statute of limitations. A limitations clock starts when you’re hurt or discover the harm. A repose clock starts from a fixed event and runs no matter what.

Florida’s construction-defect repose period is seven years from when the authority having jurisdiction issued a certificate of occupancy, certificate of completion, or the date construction was abandoned. Even if the defect is hidden and you discover it later, the seven-year cap still cuts off the claim.¹ A defective roof installed seven and a half years ago cannot support a construction-defect lawsuit, even if the leak only started last month.

When the Clock Pauses

Several situations toll (pause) the deadline.

The Discovery Rule

Some claims don’t start the clock at the harmful act; they start it when you knew, or reasonably should have known, about the injury and its cause. Medical malpractice is the classic example. If a surgeon leaves an instrument inside you and symptoms don’t appear for a year, the two-year clock starts at discovery.¹ Ignoring warning signs a reasonable person would have investigated can shift the start date back to when those signs appeared.

The Defendant Leaves or Hides

Under Florida Statutes 95.051, the clock pauses when the person you need to sue leaves Florida, hides within the state to avoid service, or uses a false name that prevents you from identifying them.⁷

Minors and Incapacitated People

When the injured person is a minor or has been adjudicated incapacitated, the clock is tolled during any period when no parent, guardian, or guardian ad litem exists, or the existing guardian has a conflict of interest or is incapacitated.⁷ Medical malpractice claims for minors follow their own rules, with the four-year cap and the age-eight exception.

Active-Duty Military Service

Under the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, time on active military duty doesn’t count toward any state or federal statute of limitations, whether the servicemember is suing or being sued. IRS tax assessment deadlines are carved out.⁸

Suing a Government Entity Requires Notice First

Under section 768.28, before you can sue a Florida government entity you must give written notice of the claim to the Department of Financial Services and to the specific agency involved. The agency then has six months to investigate and either settle or deny. Filing a lawsuit without completing this step gets the case dismissed because the notice is a condition precedent to suing.⁹

The underlying statute of limitations still runs during the notice period, so the six months eat into the filing window. For wrongful death against a government entity, the written notice must be presented within two years of the claim accruing.⁹ File notice as early as you can.

Federal Deadlines That Run Alongside

Several federal deadlines apply in Florida cases, and when both a state and federal clock run on the same claim, the shorter one controls.

The IRS generally has three years from the return’s due date (or filing date, if later) to assess additional tax. That stretches to six years if you underreported income by more than 25 percent, and there’s no limit if you never filed or filed a fraudulent return.¹⁰

Most non-capital federal crimes must be charged within five years under 18 U.S.C. section 3282, though specific offenses can carry longer or shorter periods.¹¹

Federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 borrow the state’s personal injury deadline, so in Florida you have two years.

What Happens If You File Too Late

The statute of limitations is an affirmative defense under Florida’s Rules of Civil Procedure. The defendant has to raise it or waive it, and defendants raise it almost every time because it’s an easy win.¹² Dismissal on limitations grounds usually operates as a judgment on the merits, meaning the case cannot be refiled.

Courts rarely make exceptions. A claim with clear liability and overwhelming evidence still gets dismissed if it’s a day late. The only real path around an expired deadline is proving a tolling provision applied, and judges take a skeptical view of that argument when the plaintiff simply waited. Track your deadlines from the date of the injury or loss, not from the date someone denies your claim, and don’t let an adjuster’s timeline set the courthouse’s.

1
Official Internet Site of the Florida Legislature. Florida Statutes 95.11 – Limitations Other Than for the Recovery of Real Property
2
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes Chapter 95 Section 11
3
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes 95.12 – Real Property Actions
4
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits For Filing A Charge
5
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes 775.15 – Time Limitations; General Time Limitations; Exceptions
6
Official Internet Site of the Florida Legislature. Florida Statutes 775.15 – Time Limitations; General Time Limitations; Exceptions
7
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes 95.051 – When Limitations Tolled
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 U.S. Code 3936 – Statute of Limitations
9
Official Internet Site of the Florida Legislature. Florida Statutes 768.28
10
Internal Revenue Service – IRS.gov. Time IRS Can Assess Tax
11
United States Department of Justice Archives. Criminal Resource Manual 650 – Length of Limitations Period
12
The Florida Bar. Florida Rules of Civil Procedure