The statute of limitations for intentional torts and negligence is the deadline for filing a civil lawsuit over harm someone caused you, and in most states it falls somewhere between one and six years. Negligence claims usually get a longer window than intentional ones, two years being the most common deadline for personal injury. Miss the deadline by a day and a court will almost certainly throw the case out, no matter how strong the facts are. Several rules can shift when the clock starts, pause it, or cut it off early, and the differences are often what decide whether a claim survives.
Deadlines for Negligence Claims
Negligence covers harm caused by a failure to use reasonable care: car accidents, slip-and-falls, botched medical procedures. Roughly half the states use a two-year deadline for personal injury negligence claims, measured from the date of injury. The full national range runs from one year on the short end to six years on the long end, with most states landing between two and three.
Medical malpractice is often treated separately. A state may give you three years to sue over a car accident but only two years, or less, for a surgical error. Some states also set tighter rules for claims against public hospitals and government-run facilities than for claims against private providers.
Wrongful death claims shift the trigger. When negligence causes a death, the clock typically starts on the date of death rather than the date of the negligent act. That distinction matters when an injured person lingers for months or years before dying. Two years from the date of death is the most common deadline, with the usual state-by-state variation.
Deadlines for Intentional Torts
Intentional torts involve deliberate acts: assault, battery, false imprisonment, defamation. Because the victim usually knows right away that something happened, many states set shorter windows for these claims than for negligence. One or two years is common for assault and battery, though some states allow three years or more for certain intentional acts.
The reasoning is straightforward. When someone punches you or locks you in a room, you don’t need time to figure out you were harmed. Courts enforce these shorter windows strictly, and a defendant who raises an expired deadline in a motion to dismiss will almost always win regardless of how clear the underlying conduct is.
Defamation and the Single Publication Rule
Defamation has a quirk worth knowing. Under the single publication rule, adopted in most states, the clock starts when a defamatory statement is first published. It does not restart every time someone new reads an old blog post or pulls up an archived article. The rule has limits: if the content is substantially revised and republished, or sent to a meaningfully different audience, a new filing window may open.
When the Clock Starts
The default rule is that your deadline runs from the moment the injury happens. Lawyers call this accrual, and in most cases it lines up with the event itself. A car accident on March 1 starts a two-year clock on March 1.
The discovery rule is the major exception. It delays the start of the clock until you actually discover, or reasonably should have discovered, that you were harmed. This matters most for injuries that don’t surface right away. If a toxic exposure causes an illness that takes five years to appear, the clock starts at diagnosis, not at exposure. The same logic applies to hidden property damage, like a contractor concealing faulty structural work behind finished walls.
Courts apply an objective standard. They ask what a reasonable person in your situation would have noticed and when. If you ignored obvious warning signs for years before seeing a doctor, a court may decide the clock started when those signs first appeared. The rule protects people who genuinely couldn’t have known, not people who chose not to look.
Constructive notice is a related concept. Even if you didn’t actually know about the harm, the law may treat you as if you did when the information was available through reasonable investigation or public records. This comes up often in property damage cases, where permits and inspection reports would have revealed the problem.
The Statute of Repose: An Absolute Cutoff
A statute of repose works differently from a statute of limitations, and the difference can be devastating. A statute of limitations starts when the injury happens or is discovered. A statute of repose starts when a fixed event occurs, such as the completion of a building or the sale of a product. Once that fixed period expires, your right to sue is gone no matter when the harm actually appeared.
The discovery rule does not apply to a statute of repose. If a building material fails and injures you 15 years after construction in a state with a 10-year construction repose period, the claim is dead on arrival. Narrow exceptions exist for cases where the defendant actively concealed a defect through fraud, but otherwise these cutoffs are enforced strictly.
Product liability claims commonly face repose periods of six to fifteen years after the product was sold. In aviation, the General Aviation Revitalization Act sets a federal 18-year repose period measured from the date an aircraft or component is delivered to its first purchaser.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 49 USC 40101 – Policy
Tolling Provisions That Pause the Clock
Tolling freezes the countdown under circumstances where the law recognizes a plaintiff can’t reasonably be expected to file. Once the condition ends, the clock resumes where it left off. Eight months remaining before a tolling event means eight months remaining after.
Minors and Legal Incapacity
When a child is injured, the deadline is typically paused until the child turns 18, at which point the normal limitation period starts. In a state with a two-year rule, a child injured at age 10 would have until age 20 to file. Legal incapacity works similarly: if a person is mentally unable to manage their own affairs, the clock stays frozen until they regain capacity or a legal representative is appointed.
Defendant’s Absence From the Jurisdiction
If the person who harmed you leaves the state to avoid being served, most states subtract that absence from the elapsed time. A defendant shouldn’t be able to run out the clock by disappearing. Courts expect evidence the defendant was genuinely beyond the court’s reach, not just away for a few weeks.
Active Military Service
Under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, any period of active military service is excluded from the calculation of filing deadlines.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC 3936 – Statute of Limitations It applies whether the servicemember is the plaintiff or the defendant, and whether the claim arose before or during service. Federal tax deadlines are the one carve-out.
Fraudulent Concealment
When a defendant deliberately hides wrongdoing to keep you from discovering your claim, courts may toll the deadline under the doctrine of fraudulent concealment. This is not the same as the discovery rule, which addresses injuries that are inherently hard to detect. Fraudulent concealment requires active deception. A plaintiff relying on it must still show they exercised reasonable diligence despite that deception.
Claims Against the Federal Government
Suing the federal government for negligence follows a separate set of rules, and skipping any step means losing the claim permanently. The Federal Tort Claims Act allows lawsuits against the United States for injuries caused by federal employees acting within the scope of their duties, but it imposes procedural requirements that don’t apply to private suits.
The first requirement trips up more people than anything else: you must file an administrative claim with the responsible federal agency before you can go to court.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2675 – Disposition by Federal Agency as Prerequisite; Evidence That administrative claim has to be submitted in writing within two years after the claim accrues.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2401 – Time for Commencing Action Against United States It must include a specific dollar amount. Leaving that number out makes the claim invalid.
After filing, the agency has six months to respond. If the agency denies the claim, you then have only six months from the date of the denial letter to file suit in federal court.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2401 – Time for Commencing Action Against United States If the agency never responds within six months, you can treat the silence as a denial and proceed.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2675 – Disposition by Federal Agency as Prerequisite; Evidence
The FTCA also has significant gaps. The government retains immunity from most intentional tort claims by federal employees and from claims arising out of military combat, actions in foreign countries, and discretionary government functions.5Congressional Research Service. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA): A Legal Overview Many state and local governments impose their own administrative notice requirements, sometimes as short as 90 or 180 days. If your claim involves any level of government, checking for a pre-suit notice requirement should be the first thing you do.
Ongoing Harm and the Continuing Tort Doctrine
Some harms aren’t one-time events. A neighbor’s contaminated runoff, a factory emitting pollutants onto nearby land, or ongoing trespass can involve repeated or continuous harm. Under the continuing tort doctrine, each new occurrence restarts the clock for a fresh claim. You can’t recover for damage that happened outside the filing window, but you can sue for harm that occurred within it.
Don’t Wait Until the Deadline
Knowing the deadline matters less than acting well before it. Evidence degrades, witnesses move or forget details, and last-minute filings produce weaker cases. Most attorneys want at least several months before the deadline to investigate, pull medical records, and prepare the complaint.
The single biggest mistake people make is assuming they have more time than they do. Government claims have shorter deadlines than private ones. Medical malpractice deadlines are often shorter than general negligence deadlines. The discovery rule might help you if the injury was hidden, but a statute of repose can still cut you off. When in doubt, treat the shortest plausible deadline as the real one and work backward from there.