Statute of Limitations Checker

A statute of limitations is the legal deadline for filing a civil lawsuit after an incident occurs. Once that deadline passes, a court will typically dismiss the case if the defendant raises the issue, regardless of how strong the underlying claim is. Deadlines are set separately by each state, and by separate statutes for federal claims, and the length of the period depends heavily on the type of claim being filed.

This calculator focuses on three of the most commonly searched civil case types: personal injury, breach of a written contract, and property damage. It does not cover criminal statutes of limitations. Criminal cases run on a completely separate framework set by criminal statutes and prosecutors, and for serious felonies such as murder, many states impose no time limit at all. If you are dealing with a criminal matter rather than a civil claim, this calculator will not give you an accurate answer.

Enter your incident date, select your jurisdiction, and choose one of the three supported case types. The calculator looks up the standard limitation period for that state and case type combination, adds it to your incident date, and returns two figures: the length of the limitation period itself, and the number of days remaining until the resulting deadline, counted from today's date. A negative number of days means the standard deadline has likely already passed based on the incident date alone.

• Personal injury: covers claims for physical harm from things like car accidents, slip and fall incidents, and similar negligence-based injuries.
• Breach of a written contract: covers claims that a signed, written agreement was not honored. Oral agreements run on a different statutory clock that this calculator does not compute.
• Property damage: covers claims for damage to real or personal property caused by another party's actions.

The statute of limitations discovery rule is one of the most consequential exceptions to the standard incident-date clock, and it is also the piece most calculators, including this one, cannot compute automatically because it depends on the specific facts of when harm was actually discovered. Under the discovery rule, the limitations clock starts when the injured party discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, the harm rather than when the underlying incident occurred.

This matters most in cases where the harm is not obvious right away. A defective product, a hidden defect in a building, or damage that only becomes apparent later can all delay the actual start of the clock well past the incident date this calculator asks for. If you suspect the discovery rule applies to your situation, the deadline this tool shows should be treated as the earliest possible date your clock could have started, not the confirmed one.

Tolling is the legal term for pausing or delaying the statute of limitations clock because of specific circumstances. When tolling applies, the time that passes during the paused period generally does not count against the deadline.

• The claimant was a minor at the time of the incident. Many states do not start the clock until the claimant turns 18, which can push a real filing deadline years past what a simple incident-date calculation would suggest.
• The claimant was legally incapacitated, such as being of unsound mind, at the time of the incident.
• The defendant concealed the wrongdoing (fraudulent concealment), in which case some jurisdictions restart the clock from the date the concealment was actually discovered.
• The defendant left the state or jurisdiction after the incident. A number of states pause the clock for the period the defendant is absent.

None of these tolling scenarios are built into this calculator's math. If any of them apply to your situation, your real deadline is very likely later than the date shown here, sometimes by years.

Those ranges are wide because states genuinely disagree on how long a claimant should have. California gives 2 years for personal injury, 4 years for breach of a written contract, and 3 years for property damage. Texas gives 2 years for personal injury and property damage and 4 years for breach of a written contract. New York gives 3 years for personal injury and property damage and 6 years for breach of a written contract. Florida shortened its personal injury period to 2 years under a 2023 reform that applies to incidents after March 24 of that year, after previously allowing 4 years. This kind of legislative change is exactly why a jurisdiction-specific lookup matters more than a general rule of thumb, and why the answer can shift over time even within the same state.

Missing the statute of limitations almost always bars the claim entirely. The court will dismiss it once the defendant raises the deadline as a defense, regardless of how strong the underlying facts are. There is generally no good-faith exception for simply not knowing the deadline existed, and courts apply the rule consistently even when the result feels unfair to the claimant.

This is why identifying the real deadline early, and filing well before it rather than right up against it, matters more than the strength of the underlying argument. Court schedules, service requirements, and simple miscalculation all eat into the time you think you have.