Illinois Statute of Limitations: Civil, Criminal, and Tolling

The Illinois statute of limitations sets the deadline for filing a lawsuit or bringing criminal charges, and it varies widely by case type: one year for defamation, two years for most personal injury claims, five years for oral contracts, ten years for written contracts, and no time limit at all for murder and sex offenses. Miss the deadline on a civil claim and the court will dismiss it. Miss it on a chargeable crime and prosecution is barred for good.

The rules sit in several chapters of the Illinois Compiled Statutes. What follows is a plain map of the deadlines that come up most often, plus the situations that pause the clock.

Civil Lawsuit Deadlines

Personal Injury and Wrongful Death

You have two years from the date of injury to file a personal injury lawsuit in Illinois. That covers bodily harm, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and similar torts.¹ If the injury resulted from first degree murder or a Class X felony and the perpetrator was convicted, the two-year deadline does not apply.

Wrongful death also runs two years, but the clock starts at the date of death. Illinois extends that to five years when the death resulted from violent intentional conduct. If criminal charges for murder, manslaughter, reckless homicide, or drug-induced homicide were filed, the family may also file within one year after the criminal case reaches its final disposition, whichever gives more time.²

Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice runs on a discovery timeline. You have two years from the date you knew or should have known about the injury, but no more than four years from the act or omission that caused it. That four-year cap is a statute of repose and applies to claims against physicians, dentists, registered nurses, and hospitals.³

This is where many malpractice claims fall apart. A patient who does not realize something went wrong until five years later is out of luck under the repose period, even if the two-year discovery clock never started. If the provider fraudulently concealed the cause of action, the deadline may extend to five years from discovery.

Contracts

Written contracts, including bonds, promissory notes, bills of exchange, and written leases, carry a ten-year deadline. Any payment or new written promise to pay within or after those ten years resets the clock for another ten.⁴

Oral contracts fall under a five-year catch-all provision, which also covers implied contracts and any civil claim not specifically addressed elsewhere.⁵ Credit card debt and other open-ended accounts typically land in this five-year category, since most credit agreements are treated as unwritten obligations for limitation purposes.

Property Damage, Construction Defects, and Product Liability

Damage to real or personal property gives you five years to file suit, whether it is a fallen tree, vandalism, or a car accident that only damaged your vehicle.⁵

Construction defect claims against architects, engineers, and contractors run four years from the date you knew or reasonably should have known about the defect, with a hard ten-year statute of repose measured from the act or omission. If you discover the defect before the ten-year repose expires, you get at least four years to bring the claim even if that pushes past the ten-year mark.⁶

Product liability claims follow the general period for the type of harm: two years for personal injury, five years for property damage. The trap is the repose period. No product liability claim can be brought more than twelve years from the product’s first sale, lease, or delivery, or more than ten years from its first delivery to the initial consumer, whichever comes first. A longer express warranty period, if the manufacturer gave one, controls instead.⁷

Defamation and Fraud

Defamation carries one of the shortest civil deadlines in Illinois: one year. The window covers libel, slander, and publication of matter violating the right of privacy, and it starts the day the statement was first made.⁸

Common law fraud falls under the five-year catch-all. Consumer fraud under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act runs three years. In fraud generally, the clock often does not start until the plaintiff discovers or reasonably should have discovered the fraudulent conduct.

Employment and Wage Claims

Filing a charge of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation with the Illinois Department of Human Rights now requires action within two years of the incident for employment, financial credit, and public accommodations cases. Before January 1, 2025, that window was 300 days. Housing discrimination charges still carry a one-year deadline.⁹

Wage claims are more urgent. Under the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act, an employee must file a complaint with the Illinois Department of Labor within one year after the wages or final compensation were due. That covers unpaid wages, salaries, earned commissions, earned bonuses, and the cash value of earned vacation and holiday time.¹⁰

Debt Collection and Judgment Enforcement

A lawsuit to collect on a written debt must be filed within ten years.⁴ Oral debts and open-ended accounts like credit cards run five years.⁵

Once a creditor wins a judgment, enforcement must happen within seven years. After that, the judgment goes dormant unless the creditor revives it through a statutory court proceeding. Child support judgments and certain injury-related judgments can be enforced indefinitely.¹¹

Criminal Prosecution Deadlines

Offenses With No Time Limit

Illinois allows prosecution at any time for its most serious offenses, and the list is broader than most people expect. Murder in the first or second degree, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, and concealment of a homicidal death all carry no time limit. The same goes for treason, arson (including residential and aggravated arson), forgery, and child pornography offenses.¹²

Illinois also removed the statute of limitations for all offenses involving sexual conduct or sexual penetration. That covers criminal sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual assault, and related charges regardless of the victim’s age.¹² For crimes against children, predatory criminal sexual assault of a child, felony criminal sexual abuse, and female genital mutilation can all be prosecuted at any time when the victim was under 18.¹³

Aggravated DUI causing death and leaving the scene of a crash involving death or personal injuries also fall in the no-limit category.

Time Limits for Other Crimes

For crimes that do carry a deadline, Illinois uses a tiered system based on severity.

Seven years: identity theft, aggravated identity theft, financial exploitation of an elderly or disabled person, theft exceeding $100,000, and theft by deception targeting someone 60 or older. The seven years runs from the last act committed in furtherance of the crime, not the first.¹²
Three years: all other felonies not listed in the no-limit or seven-year categories, unless the specific statute defining the offense says otherwise.¹²
Eighteen months: misdemeanors.¹²

When the Clock Pauses

Criminal Cases

The most common pause on criminal prosecution is when the defendant leaves Illinois. Any period when the defendant is not usually and publicly residing in the state does not count toward the limitation period. The clock also pauses when a public officer is charged with theft of public funds while in office, when another prosecution for the same conduct is already pending, when a material witness (including the arresting officer or victim) is on active military duty, and while sexual assault evidence is being analyzed by the Illinois State Police.¹⁴

Civil Cases: Defendant Outside Illinois

If the person you need to sue is outside Illinois when your cause of action accrues, the limitation period does not start until they come into or return to the state. If they leave after the clock has started, their time away does not count.¹⁵ This tolling does not apply if the defendant can still be served under Illinois’s long-arm statute or other service-of-process laws.

Minors and People Under Legal Disability

When the person entitled to sue is under 18 or under a legal disability when the cause of action accrues, they get two years after turning 18 or after the disability is removed to file, even if the normal limitation period has already expired. If the disability begins after the cause of action accrues but before the deadline runs out, the clock freezes until the disability is removed. For claims under the five-year and ten-year limitation statutes, that freeze cannot exceed ten years from the date of the disability adjudication.¹⁶

The Discovery Rule

Some Illinois limitation periods do not start until the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known about the injury. That is built directly into the medical malpractice and construction defect statutes.³ For other claim types, Illinois courts have applied the discovery rule as a judicial doctrine, particularly in cases involving latent harm like toxic exposure or concealed fraud. The rule does not eliminate deadlines; it shifts when the clock starts.

What Happens When the Deadline Passes

Once a civil statute of limitations expires, the defendant can raise it as an affirmative defense and the court will dismiss the case. Illinois courts enforce these deadlines strictly. It does not matter how clear the evidence is or how badly the plaintiff was harmed. The right to sue is gone.

On the criminal side, an expired limitation permanently bars prosecution. The defendant cannot be charged, indicted, or tried for the offense. That only applies to offenses that have a limitation period in the first place. For the long list of crimes carrying no time limit in Illinois, the possibility of prosecution never disappears.

1
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 Personal Injury – Penalty
2
Justia Law. 740 ILCS 180 Wrongful Death Act
3
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-212 Physician or Hospital
4
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-206 Ten Year Limitation
5
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-205 Five Year Limitation
6
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-214 Construction Design Management and Supervision
7
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-213 Product Liability
8
FindLaw. Illinois Code 735 Civil Procedure 5/13-201
9
Illinois Department of Human Rights. IDHR Extends Statute of Limitations Period
10
Illinois Department of Labor. Wage Payment and Collection Act FAQ
11
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/12-108 Limitation on Enforcement
12
Illinois General Assembly. 720 ILCS 5/3-5 General Limitations
13
Illinois General Assembly. 720 ILCS 5/3-6 Extended Limitations
14
Illinois General Assembly. 720 ILCS 5/3-7 Periods Excluded From Limitation
15
Justia Law. Illinois Code Chapter 735 Act 735 ILCS 5 Article XIII – Section 13-208
16
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/13-211 Minors and Persons Under Legal Disability