California paused the statute of limitations on most civil lawsuits during the early pandemic through Emergency Rule 9. If your claim’s normal filing deadline was longer than 180 days, the clock stopped from April 6, 2020 through October 1, 2020. If the deadline was 180 days or shorter, the pause ended earlier, on August 3, 2020. The rule itself was repealed on June 30, 2022, but the extra time it granted still counts for any claim whose statute of limitations was running during that window.
The Two Tolling Windows
Emergency Rule 9 drew a single line at 180 days, and the length of the statute of limitations for your specific claim decides which window applies to you.1California Courts. Emergency Rule 9 – Tolling Statutes of Limitations for Civil Causes of Action
- Claims with deadlines longer than 180 days were tolled from April 6, 2020 through October 1, 2020, a pause of 178 days. This covers most civil claims: personal injury, wrongful death, breach of contract, fraud, and property damage.
- Claims with deadlines of 180 days or less were tolled from April 6, 2020 through August 3, 2020, a pause of 119 days. This shorter window applied to claims with tight statutory deadlines, including the 30-to-35-day window for most challenges under the California Environmental Quality Act and the 90-day deadlines under the Planning and Zoning Law and Subdivision Map Act.2California Courts. Deadlines to Sue Someone
The rule reached “civil causes of action,” meaning lawsuits between private parties and lawsuits against government entities. Criminal cases were not covered.
How to Calculate Your Tolled Deadline
The method is straightforward, and people get it wrong in a way that can kill a case. Do not simply add the tolled days onto your original expiration date. Instead, figure out how many days remained on your filing clock as of April 6, 2020, then count that same number of days forward from the end of the applicable tolling window.
A worked example makes this clear. Say you were injured on June 1, 2018. California gives you two years for a personal injury claim, so your original deadline was June 1, 2020.3California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 335.1 Two years is longer than 180 days, so the October 1, 2020 end date applies. On April 6, 2020, you had 56 days left before your original deadline. The clock froze. When it resumed on October 1, 2020, you still had those 56 days. Counting 56 days forward from October 1 puts your new deadline at November 26, 2020.
The common mistake is bolting the 178 days of tolling onto the original June 1, 2020 deadline. In this particular example that produces November 26 by coincidence, but the same shortcut gives a wrong answer in most other scenarios. The remainder method is the only reliable approach.2California Courts. Deadlines to Sue Someone
Short Deadlines and Claims Against the Government
The 180-day cutoff has real bite for lawsuits against public entities. Under Government Code section 945.6, once a government agency rejects your claim, you generally have six months to sue.4California Legislative Information. California Government Code 945.6 Six months runs roughly 180 days, and whether your particular deadline lands above or below the line can turn on which months are involved. A claim that clears the 180-day threshold gets the longer pause through October 1, 2020. One that falls at or under it only gets tolled through August 3, 2020.
CEQA challenges sit even further inside the short-window category, with a typical 30-to-35-day filing period. Anyone who waited until after August 3, 2020 on the assumption that the October 1 end date applied would have missed the filing window.
Medical Malpractice and Discovery-Based Claims
Medical malpractice runs on a different clock. Under Code of Civil Procedure section 340.5, you must file within three years of the injury or one year from when you discovered (or should have discovered) it, whichever comes first.5California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 340.5 Both the three-year and the one-year periods are longer than 180 days, so both fall inside the longer tolling window that ended October 1, 2020.
Discovery-based claims interact with the tolling window in a way worth pausing over. Your statute of limitations does not start running until you learn of the injury. If you discovered a surgical error in March 2020, your one-year clock started then and was almost immediately frozen on April 6. If you discovered the same error in July 2020, the tolling helped you very little, because it ended on October 1 regardless. The exact discovery date matters.
Legal malpractice follows a similar structure under CCP section 340.6: one year from discovery or four years from the wrongful act, whichever comes first. Both periods exceed 180 days and qualified for the longer window.
Equitable Tolling Is a Separate Doctrine
Emergency Rule 9 was automatic and applied to everyone. California courts also recognize a separate judge-made doctrine, equitable tolling, that can pause a deadline case by case when fairness requires it. This doctrine existed before the pandemic and remains available after the rule’s repeal.
To win equitable tolling, a plaintiff must show three things: the defendant received timely notice of the claim, the defendant would not be prejudiced by the delay, and the plaintiff acted reasonably and in good faith.6Supreme Court of California. Saint Francis Memorial Hospital v. State Department of Public Health That is a harder standard than Emergency Rule 9, which asked nothing of the plaintiff at all. But for anyone whose deadline expired after October 1, 2020 and who could still not access the courts because of pandemic disruption, equitable tolling is the remaining avenue.
Does COVID Tolling Still Matter Now
For most common claims, no. A two-year personal injury claim alive on April 6, 2020 would have needed to be filed by late 2022 even with full tolling. A four-year breach-of-contract claim alive that day would have expired by roughly early 2025. The pause only added about six months.
Where COVID tolling can still matter is the narrow set of claims with unusually long filing windows. California allows up to 22 years for childhood sexual abuse claims, and certain fraud and title disputes carry extended deadlines. If the statute of limitations on such a claim was running on April 6, 2020, the 178-day extension still gets added to the calculation. For a long-tail claim approaching its deadline, verifying whether the tolling period applies can be the difference between a live case and a time-barred one.
Courts do not forgive good-faith miscalculations. If you think your claim was running during the Emergency Rule 9 window, have an attorney check the math before you rely on it.