Colorado Civil Statute of Limitations: Deadlines, Tolling, and Judgments

The Colorado civil statute of limitations sets the deadline for filing a civil lawsuit, and the window depends entirely on the type of claim: one year for defamation, two years for most personal injury and general tort claims, three years for contracts and motor vehicle collisions, six years for liquidated debts, and up to 18 years for adverse possession of real property. Miss the deadline and the court will almost always dismiss the case, no matter how strong the underlying facts are.

Colorado also uses discovery-based accrual rules for many claims, so knowing when the clock starts is as important as knowing how long it runs. And a handful of claims — especially those against government entities — carry separate notice deadlines that arrive well before the statute of limitations itself.

Deadlines at a Glance

Defamation and libel: 1 year
Personal injury (negligence, slip-and-fall, dog bite): 2 years
Wrongful death: 2 years from the date of death
Trespass and nuisance: 2 years
Medical malpractice: 2 years, with a 3-year repose cap
Legal and other professional malpractice: 2 years
Construction defects: 2 years from discovery, 6-year repose
Motor vehicle accidents: 3 years
Breach of contract (written or oral): 3 years
Fraud and misrepresentation: 3 years from discovery
Sale of goods under the UCC: 3 years
Liquidated debts and promissory notes: 6 years
Quiet title based on tax deed: 7 years
Adverse possession and prescriptive easements: 18 years
Claims against government entities: 182-day written notice, then the underlying statute

Personal Injury and Motor Vehicle Accidents

Most personal injury lawsuits in Colorado must be filed within two years of when the injury occurred. This deadline covers negligence claims like slip-and-fall accidents, dog bites, and similar harm caused by someone else’s carelessness.¹

Motor vehicle accidents are the exception. If your injuries or property damage stem from a car, truck, or motorcycle collision, you get three years.² The clock for a motor vehicle claim starts when you know, or reasonably should know, both that an injury exists and what caused it.³

Wrongful Death

Wrongful death claims fall under a two-year deadline.⁴ The clock runs from the date of death, not the date of the underlying accident or negligent act.³ When someone survives an injury for weeks or months before dying, the family’s two-year window doesn’t begin until the actual date of death.

Contracts, Debts, and Goods

Breach-of-contract lawsuits carry a three-year deadline under C.R.S. 13-80-101(1)(a), applying to written and oral contracts alike.² The clock starts when the breach is discovered or reasonably should have been discovered, not when the contract was signed.³

Liquidated debts are different. If someone owes you a fixed amount — a promissory note, a loan balance, or an unpaid invoice for a set dollar figure — Colorado gives you six years, running from when the debt becomes due.⁵ The same six-year period covers actions to enforce any instrument that secures or evidences a debt.

Contracts for the sale of goods sit under Colorado’s version of the Uniform Commercial Code. The standard UCC gives parties four years, but Colorado shortened this to three to match its general contract deadline, and parties cannot change the period by agreement.⁶

Property Disputes

Trespass falls under the two-year general tort deadline in C.R.S. 13-80-102(1)(a).¹ Encroachment problems — a neighbor’s fence crossing the property line, or a structure overhanging your land — typically fit into the same two-year window under trespass or nuisance theories.

Adverse possession is the long end of the spectrum. It takes 18 years of continuous, open use before an occupant can claim legal ownership, and the original owner’s right to challenge expires at that point.⁷ The same 18-year window applies to prescriptive easement disputes, so a path or access route used across your land for that long becomes something you can no longer block.

Tax deeds work on a shorter schedule. When a buyer at a tax sale maintains actual possession, pays all taxes, and holds the property under a claim of title in good faith for seven consecutive years, Colorado treats them as the legal owner.⁸ A prior owner who wants to challenge the title has to act before that seven-year period runs.

Medical Malpractice

Claims against hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals must be filed within two years after the claim accrues. Colorado also imposes a hard outer limit: no medical malpractice action can be brought more than three years after the actual act or omission, regardless of when you discovered it.⁹ The three-year cap is a statute of repose, meaning it extinguishes the right entirely, not just the remedy.

Three narrow exceptions extend the outer limit. If a provider knowingly concealed the wrongdoing, you get two years from when you discovered (or reasonably should have discovered) the concealment. The same two-year-from-discovery rule applies when a provider left a foreign object in your body, or when both the injury and its cause were genuinely unknowable at the time.⁹

Legal and Other Professional Malpractice

Malpractice claims against attorneys, accountants, architects, and other licensed professionals fall under the general two-year tort deadline.¹ The claim accrues when you know or should know about both the injury and its cause. For legal malpractice, that’s often the moment you realize an attorney’s error cost you a case or a right, such as discovering a filing deadline was missed.

Construction Defects

Colorado has a dedicated statute for claims against architects, contractors, builders, and engineers. You must file within two years of discovering, or reasonably being able to discover, the physical signs of a defect. No construction defect claim can be brought more than six years after substantial completion.¹⁰

If the defect first becomes apparent during the fifth or sixth year after completion, you still get two full years from that discovery date to file, even when that pushes past the six-year repose.¹⁰ The six-year repose also does not protect a person who owns or occupies the building at the time a defect causes injury.

Fraud and Defamation

Fraud, misrepresentation, and concealment claims carry a three-year deadline.² The clock doesn’t start when the fraud happens. It starts when you discover, or should have discovered through reasonable diligence, that you were deceived.³ That discovery-based trigger matters in financial fraud cases, where schemes can go undetected for years.

Defamation and libel claims have the state’s shortest deadline: one year from the date of injury under C.R.S. 13-80-103(1)(a). The tight window catches people off guard, especially when damaging statements circulate slowly before the subject learns about them.

Claims Against Government Entities

Suing a Colorado city, county, school district, or the state itself requires a preliminary step. Before filing a lawsuit, you must submit a written notice of claim within 182 days of discovering your injury. Missing that notice deadline permanently bars the claim. The statute calls compliance a “jurisdictional prerequisite,” meaning no court has power to hear the case without it.¹¹

The notice has to include your name and address, a description of what happened (with date, time, and place), the name of any government employee involved, a description of your injuries, and the dollar amount you’re requesting. Claims against the state go to the attorney general; claims against local governments go to the governing body or its attorney.¹¹ After filing, you have to wait until the entity denies the claim or 90 days pass, whichever comes first, before you can sue.

The underlying two-year statute of limitations for tort claims against government entities still applies on top of the 182-day notice requirement.¹ In practice, the 182-day notice arrives first, and it’s the one that matters most.

When the Clock Starts

Accrual rules determine when a limitations period begins. Getting the start date wrong is as fatal as getting the deadline wrong. Colorado’s master accrual statute, C.R.S. 13-80-108, sets these triggers:³

Personal injury and property damage accrue when you know or should know that an injury exists and what caused it.
Wrongful death accrues on the date of death.
Contract breach accrues when the breach is discovered or should have been through reasonable diligence.
Fraud accrues when the deception is discovered or reasonably should have been.
Debt actions accrue when the debt becomes due.

The “reasonable diligence” standard means you can’t stall the clock by ignoring obvious signs of a problem. Courts expect an investigation when the circumstances would make a reasonable person suspicious.

Tolling for Minors, Incapacity, and Absent Defendants

Colorado’s tolling rules for minors and incapacitated individuals are more nuanced than most people expect. If a person with a legal disability, such as being under 18 or mentally incapacitated, has a legal representative like a guardian or conservator, the statute of limitations runs normally against them. The representative gets at least two years from the date of appointment to act, even if that extends past the normal deadline.¹²

If no legal representative is ever appointed, the person gets the normal limitations period or two years after the disability ends, whichever is longer.¹² So a child injured at 16 with no guardian doesn’t necessarily get the full limitations period starting at 18. The analysis depends on whether a representative was appointed and when.

If the person you need to sue is outside Colorado and cannot be served with legal process, the time they spend out of state doesn’t count toward the limitations period. The same rule applies if they conceal themselves within the state while evading service.¹³ Both conditions have to exist: the defendant must be out of state and not reachable through service of process. If they’re out of state but still subject to long-arm jurisdiction, the clock keeps running.

How Long a Judgment Lasts

Winning before the deadline is only half the work. A Colorado district court judgment can be enforced for 20 years from the date it was entered, after which it’s treated as fully satisfied unless revived through a court proceeding. County court judgments have a shorter enforcement window of six years.¹⁴

Judgment liens on real property also expire after six years unless revived. When there’s a judgment against someone who owns property, keeping up with the revival process is the difference between eventually collecting and holding a worthless piece of paper.