What Is the Statute of Limitations in Virginia? Civil and Criminal Deadlines

The statute of limitations in Virginia is the deadline for filing a lawsuit or bringing criminal charges, and it varies by the type of case. Most personal injury lawsuits must be filed within two years. Written contract disputes get five years. Oral contracts get three. Defamation claims have just one year. On the criminal side, misdemeanors generally carry a one-year prosecution deadline, while felonies have no deadline at all. Miss the applicable date and the case is almost always dead, no matter how strong the underlying facts.

Deadlines for Civil Lawsuits

Personal Injury

If you’re hurt in a car accident, a slip-and-fall, or any other situation caused by someone else’s negligence or intentional conduct, you have two years from the date of injury to file suit.¹ The clock starts the day the injury happens, not the day you hire a lawyer or finish treatment.

Medical malpractice uses the same two-year baseline but adds a narrow discovery rule. If a surgeon leaves a foreign object inside you, or if fraud or concealment prevented you from discovering the injury, you get an additional year from the date you discovered (or reasonably should have discovered) the harm. No malpractice claim, however, can be filed more than ten years after the malpractice occurred.¹ That ten-year ceiling is one of the hardest walls in Virginia civil law.

Wrongful Death

When someone dies because of another person’s negligence or wrongful act, the decedent’s personal representative has two years from the date of death to file suit.² This is measured from the death itself, not the underlying injury. If someone is injured in 2024 but doesn’t die from those injuries until 2026, the wrongful death clock starts in 2026.

Property Damage

Damage to your home, car, or other property gives you five years to file, whether the damage came from negligence or an intentional act.¹

Contract Disputes

The deadline depends on whether the agreement was written and signed. A signed written contract gives you five years from the breach to sue. An oral agreement or an unsigned writing drops that to three years.³ Get agreements in writing and signed. It doubles the time you have to enforce them.

Contracts for the sale of goods follow a separate rule under Virginia’s version of the Uniform Commercial Code: four years from the date of breach, not from when you discover it.⁴ For most warranty claims the breach happens at delivery. The parties can shorten the four-year period to as little as one year in the original contract, but they cannot extend it.

Defamation

Libel, slander, and other defamation claims carry one of the shortest civil deadlines in Virginia: one year from the date the defamatory statement was made. For anonymous online defamation, the one-year clock is paused until you discover (or reasonably should have discovered) who published the statement.⁵

Claims Against the Government

Suing a government entity comes with shorter deadlines that trip up even diligent claimants. For claims against a Virginia county, city, or town, you must file a written notice within six months of the injury, stating the nature of the claim and the time and place of the injury.⁶ Miss that six-month notice and the claim is barred permanently, even if the normal statute of limitations would still give you time. The only escape is proof that the locality’s attorney, chief executive, mayor, or insurer already had actual knowledge of the claim within the same six months.

Federal claims follow the Federal Tort Claims Act. You must file an administrative claim with the responsible agency within two years of the injury. If the agency denies it, you then have six months to sue in federal court.⁷ If the agency sits on your claim for more than six months without responding, you can treat the silence as a denial and go to court.

Workplace Discrimination

Federal employment discrimination claims run on a separate administrative timeline. Before filing a lawsuit, you must file a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In Virginia, because the state has its own anti-discrimination enforcement agency, you have 300 calendar days from the discriminatory act to file that EEOC charge.⁸ For ongoing harassment, the clock runs from the last incident.

Deadlines for Criminal Prosecution

Virginia draws a sharp line between felonies and misdemeanors. Felonies have no statute of limitations at all. Murder, rape, arson, kidnapping, burglary, and every other felony can be prosecuted at any time, no matter how many years have passed.⁹

Most misdemeanors must be charged within one year of the offense. A handful of misdemeanors get a longer window: petit larceny, identity theft, violations of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, and attempts to evade state taxes all carry a five-year statute of limitations.⁹ Virginia also extends prosecution timelines significantly for sexual offenses involving children under Virginia Code 19.2-8.1; because those provisions are complex and have been amended multiple times, anyone affected should review the current statute carefully.

Federal crimes committed in Virginia follow federal deadlines. The general federal statute of limitations for non-capital offenses is five years.¹⁰

What Pauses or Extends the Clock

Virginia recognizes several situations where the limitations clock stops running temporarily. This concept, called tolling, prevents people from losing their rights due to circumstances they can’t control.

Minors and Incapacitated Individuals

If you’re under 18 or legally incapacitated when your cause of action arises, the statute of limitations doesn’t start until the disability is removed. A child injured in a car accident at age 10 would have until their 20th birthday to file a personal injury lawsuit, because the two-year clock doesn’t begin until they turn 18. If someone becomes incapacitated after a claim accrues, that time doesn’t count toward the deadline. When a court appoints a guardian or conservator, that representative must file within the normal period or one year after their appointment, whichever is later.¹¹

Fraud and Concealment

When someone actively hides their wrongdoing, the statute of limitations may not begin running until the victim discovers (or reasonably should have discovered) the fraud. Virginia Code 8.01-249 governs when a cause of action accrues in cases involving fraud, mistake, or concealment.¹² The classic example is a contractor who conceals defective work. Virginia courts still expect reasonable diligence, though. If red flags were obvious and you ignored them, the delayed-discovery argument will fail.

Death of a Party

If either the person entitled to bring a claim or the person being sued dies before the limitation period expires, the clock pauses. The personal representative gets either the remaining time on the original deadline or one year after qualifying, whichever is longer.¹¹

Military Service

Under the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, time spent on active military duty is excluded from any statute of limitations calculation. The law covers actions in both state and federal courts and protects the servicemember along with their heirs and representatives.¹³ If you were deployed for two years during a five-year limitation period, you would effectively have seven years from the original accrual date. One important exception: this tolling does not apply to federal tax matters.

Construction Defects: A Harder Deadline

Virginia imposes a separate and stricter cutoff for claims arising from defective construction. A statute of repose, unlike a statute of limitations, is measured from the defendant’s last act rather than from the date of injury. You cannot sue anyone who designed, planned, or built an improvement to real property more than five years after they finished the work.¹⁴

The repose applies to claims for personal injury, property damage, and wrongful death from a defective building or structure. It can bar your claim even if the defect hasn’t yet shown itself. A roof that collapses six years after construction leaves you with no claim against the builder under this provision. The repose does not protect equipment manufacturers or suppliers, and it doesn’t shield the current owner or occupant. If ongoing negligence by an owner caused the problem, the normal statute of limitations applies.¹⁴

What Happens If You Miss the Deadline

In civil cases, a missed statute of limitations is almost always fatal. The defendant raises it as an affirmative defense, and the court dismisses the case regardless of how strong the underlying evidence is. Virginia judges have no authority to grant extensions out of sympathy or fairness once the period has expired. The right to sue is gone.

Criminal cases work the same way for offenses that carry a deadline. If prosecutors don’t bring charges within the applicable period, they permanently lose the power to prosecute. Because Virginia imposes no limit on felonies, this issue arises almost exclusively with misdemeanors and the few offenses with longer, specific windows. For civil claimants, the practical takeaway is blunt: identify the deadline that applies to your case, calendar it, and file well before it arrives. Waiting until the last month to consult a lawyer is how otherwise strong cases die.

1
Justia. Code of Virginia 8.01-243 – Personal Action for Injury to Person or Property Generally
2
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-244 – Actions for Wrongful Death; Limitation
3
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-246 – Personal Actions Based on Contracts
4
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.2-725 – Statute of Limitations in Contracts for Sale
5
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-247.1 – Limitation on Action for Defamation
6
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 15.2-209 – Notice to Be Given to Counties, Cities, and Towns of Tort Claims for Damages
7
eCFR. 32 CFR 750.36 – Time Limitations
8
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits for Filing a Charge
9
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 19.2-8 – Limitation of Prosecutions
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 3282 – Offenses Not Capital
11
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-229 – Suspension or Tolling of Statute of Limitations
12
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-249 – When Cause of Action Shall Be Deemed to Accrue in Certain Personal Actions
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 U.S. Code 3936 – Statute of Limitations
14
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-250 – Limitation on Certain Actions for Damages Arising Out of Defective or Unsafe Condition of Improvements to Real Property