Michigan Statutes of Limitations: Civil, Criminal, and Tolling

In Michigan, the statute of limitations gives you three years to sue for personal injury or property damage, six years for most contract disputes, and two years for medical malpractice (with a hard six-year outer cap). On the criminal side, murder and first-degree criminal sexual conduct can be charged at any time; most other felonies must be charged within ten years, and everything else within six. Miss the deadline that applies to your situation and the claim usually dies for good.

Civil Filing Deadlines at a Glance

Michigan sets a different clock for each type of civil claim. The most common ones:

Personal injury and property damage: 3 years
Wrongful death: 3 years from the date of death
Products liability: 3 years
Medical malpractice: 2 years (with a 6-month discovery extension and a 6-year outer cap)
Other professional malpractice (architects, engineers, surveyors): 2 years
Assault, battery, false imprisonment: 2 years (5 years if the defendant is a current or former spouse, co-parent, household member, or dating partner)
Malicious prosecution: 2 years from the end of the underlying case
Libel or slander: 1 year
Contract disputes (written or oral): 6 years
Fraud: 6 years
Civil claims for criminal sexual conduct: 10 years

The one-year defamation deadline catches people off guard more than any other on this list. If someone published something false about you, you have twelve months to sue, not three years.

Personal Injury and Property Damage

You have three years from the date of injury or damage to file suit in Michigan.¹ This covers car accidents, slip-and-falls, negligent damage to your home or vehicle, and most other harm to your person or property.

The clock starts on the date the harm happens, not when you hire a lawyer or decide to sue. In some cases the discovery rule shifts the start date to when you actually learned of the harm or reasonably should have. Environmental contamination is a common example: if chemicals leach onto your property over years, the three-year clock begins when you discover the contamination or when a reasonable person in your position would have noticed it.

Wrongful death follows the same three-year rule, measured from the date of death rather than the date of the act that caused it.¹

Contract Disputes

Michigan gives you six years to sue for breach of contract, and the rule applies whether the agreement was written or spoken.² The countdown starts the moment the breach occurs, not when you signed the contract or noticed the problem. A contractor who finishes shoddy work in January 2026 triggers the six-year clock in January 2026, even if the defects only become visible a year later.

Some contracts include clauses that shorten this period. Michigan courts generally enforce reasonable modifications, though a clause that effectively eliminates the right to sue can be struck down as unconscionable.

Medical Malpractice

Malpractice claims run on a tighter and more layered schedule than ordinary injury claims. The baseline is two years from the act or omission that caused the injury.¹

If you didn’t know about the malpractice when it happened, Michigan lets you file within six months after you discovered (or should have discovered) the injury and its link to the provider’s care. That extension has a firm outer wall: no malpractice suit can be filed more than six years after the malpractice itself, no matter when you learned about it. This six-year cap is a statute of repose, and unlike an ordinary limitations period it cannot be overridden by the discovery rule or by most forms of tolling.³

One narrow exception exists. If the provider committed fraud to conceal the malpractice or to keep the patient from discovering it, the six-year cap may not apply. The patient has to prove both the fraud and the delayed discovery.

The rules bend for children. If a child is under eight when the malpractice occurs, the suit can be filed up to the child’s tenth birthday or within the standard period, whichever gives more time. If the malpractice involves injury to a child’s reproductive system and the child is under thirteen, the deadline extends to the child’s fifteenth birthday.⁴

The 120-Day Trap for Government Road Claims

If your injury involves a defective highway or road maintained by a government agency, a much shorter clock runs alongside the normal three-year statute. You must serve written notice on the responsible agency within 120 days of the injury. The notice has to describe the exact location and nature of the defect, the injury, and any witnesses you know of at the time. For injured persons under 18, the notice deadline extends to 180 days, and a parent, attorney, or guardian can file it on the child’s behalf.⁵

Miss the 120-day window and the claim is dead, even if the three-year statute has years left on it. The deadline trips people up because 120 days passes quickly, especially when someone is recovering from serious injuries.

Criminal Charges

Criminal deadlines in Michigan swing from six years to no limit at all.

No Time Limit

Prosecutors can bring charges at any time for murder (including conspiracy and solicitation), first-degree criminal sexual conduct, terrorism offenses, and certain explosives crimes punishable by life imprisonment.⁶ Cold-case charges can arrive decades after the crime.

Ten Years

Several serious felonies carry a ten-year deadline. These include kidnapping, extortion, attempted murder, manslaughter, assault with intent to murder, and first-degree home invasion.

Second-, third-, and fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, along with child sexually abusive material offenses, must be charged within ten years of the offense or by the victim’s twenty-first birthday, whichever comes later. If DNA later identifies a previously unknown suspect, charges can be filed at any time while the suspect remains unidentified; once identified, the ten-year/twenty-first-birthday rule kicks in from that point.⁶

Six Years

Every other criminal offense in Michigan, whether felony or misdemeanor, falls under a six-year deadline running from the date of the crime.⁶ Theft, drug offenses, fraud, disorderly conduct, and most other charges sit in this default bucket. Identity theft is also six years, but if the perpetrator hasn’t been identified the clock doesn’t start until they are.

When the Clock Pauses

Certain situations stop or delay the running of a limitations period. These tolling rules prevent someone from waiting out the clock through delay, absence, or concealment.

The Discovery Rule

For many civil claims, the limitations period starts when you discovered (or reasonably should have discovered) the injury and its cause, rather than when the harm actually happened. This matters most where the injury isn’t immediately visible: toxic exposure, buried construction defects, a surgical instrument left inside a patient. The rule doesn’t apply to every claim type, and medical malpractice runs into the separate six-year repose no matter what.

Minors and Incapacitated Persons

If the person with the claim is under 18 or mentally incapacitated when the claim arises, Michigan gives them one extra year after the disability ends to file, even if the normal deadline has passed.⁴ The disability has to exist when the claim first accrues; becoming incapacitated later doesn’t help. Disabilities also can’t be stacked, and courts measure the one-year grace period from the end of the last qualifying disability present at accrual.

Defendant Outside Michigan

In criminal cases, any time the accused doesn’t “usually and publicly” reside in Michigan is excluded from the limitations period. Someone who commits a crime here and moves out of state cannot run down the clock from across the border. Whether the person lives openly elsewhere doesn’t matter, and neither does their intent to return.⁷

Fraudulent Concealment

If a defendant actively conceals either the existence of a claim or their own identity, the limitations period doesn’t run until the plaintiff discovers the concealment or reasonably should have. Passive silence usually isn’t enough; the concealment typically needs some deliberate act that kept the injured person from learning about the claim.

What Happens if You Miss It

File a civil lawsuit after the statute of limitations has expired and the defendant will almost certainly move to dismiss. Courts grant these motions routinely, and the dismissal is permanent. You cannot refile the same claim against the same defendant later. The legal right to sue effectively ceases to exist.

Criminal cases work the same way. Charges brought after the limitations period has run are subject to dismissal, and prosecutors cannot restart the clock by refiling for the same conduct.

If a lawyer was handling your case and let the deadline slip, that failure can itself support a legal malpractice claim. You would need to show that a competent attorney would have filed on time and that you likely would have recovered something meaningful in the underlying case. A missed statute of limitations tends to be one of the more clear-cut malpractice situations because the deadline is usually unambiguous and the loss is total.

1
Michigan Legislature. Michigan Compiled Laws 600.5805 – Injuries to Persons or Property
2
Michigan Legislature. Michigan Compiled Laws 600.5807 – Damages for Breach of Contract
3
Michigan Legislature. Michigan Compiled Laws 600.5838a – Claim Based on Medical Malpractice
4
Michigan Legislature. MCL Section 600.5851 – Tolling for Minors and Disability
5
Michigan Legislature. MCL Section 691.1404 – Highway Defect Claims Notice
6
Michigan Legislature. MCL Section 767.24 – Indictment Crimes and Limitations
7
Michigan Courts. Statutes of Limitations – Michigan Courts Benchbook