To calculate how to calculate your statute of limitations, work through four steps in order: fix the date your claim accrued, look up the filing period for that exact type of claim, add any time the clock was legally paused, and count forward on the calendar to a specific deadline. Miss that date by a day and a court will almost certainly dismiss the case, no matter how strong it is.
Step 1: Pin Down the Date the Clock Started
Your “accrual date” is the day the countdown begins. For most claims it’s the day the harm happened. Rear-ended on March 5? The clock started March 5, because the injury was immediate and obvious. A claim accrues once every element needed to sue is in place: you’ve been harmed, and you know or should know who caused it.
Harm isn’t always obvious, though. The discovery rule pushes the accrual date forward when an injury is hidden or its cause is unknown. A surgical sponge left inside a patient, a latent construction defect, toxic exposure, financial fraud — in each of these, the clock doesn’t start until you discover the problem or reasonably should have discovered it through ordinary diligence. Courts ask what a reasonable person paying normal attention would have caught. If the answer is “sooner than you actually noticed,” the clock may already have been running.
Ongoing Wrongs
Some harms are patterns rather than single events. In employment harassment cases, the filing deadline runs from the last incident, not the first. Under EEOC rules, you file within 180 or 300 days of the most recent incident, and investigators can examine the full history of conduct including acts that fell outside the window on their own.1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits for Filing a Charge Repeated trespasses, ongoing contamination, and a continuous breach of contract can work the same way, with each new violation potentially resetting accrual.
Step 2: Find the Deadline for Your Specific Claim
Once you know when the clock started, find how long it runs. Periods vary enormously by claim type, and misidentifying yours can be fatal. Filing a medical malpractice claim under the general personal injury deadline could mean following the wrong timeline entirely.
Rough civil ranges across the states:
- Personal injury: 2 to 4 years in most states, with a handful allowing longer.
- Medical malpractice: typically 2 to 3 years from discovery, though some states allow as little as 1 year.
- Defamation: often 1 to 2 years, making it one of the shortest civil deadlines.
- Written contracts: generally 4 to 6 years, with some states allowing up to 15.
- Oral contracts: shorter than written, often 3 to 4 years.
- Property damage: typically 3 to 6 years.
These are approximations. Every state codifies its own deadlines, by claim type, in its civil procedure statutes. You need the specific number from your state’s code, not a general range. When in doubt, work from the shortest plausible deadline so you don’t accidentally blow past the right one.
Criminal Deadlines
Criminal statutes work differently. The default federal deadline for non-capital crimes is five years after the offense. Capital offenses have no time limit at all.2United States Department of Justice. Criminal Resource Manual 650 – Length of Limitations Period At the state level, misdemeanors typically carry one- to three-year windows, and the most serious felonies — murder being the obvious example — can be prosecuted any time.
IRS Assessment
Tax deadlines run on their own schedule. The IRS generally has three years from the date your return was due (including extensions) or three years from when you actually filed if you were late, whichever is later, to assess additional taxes. That window stretches to six years if you underreported gross income by more than 25%. If you filed a fraudulent return or never filed, there is no time limit at all.3Internal Revenue Service. Time IRS Can Assess Tax
Step 3: Add Any Time the Clock Was Paused
Certain circumstances temporarily freeze the countdown. This is called “tolling.” When the reason ends, the clock resumes where it left off rather than resetting. Think pausing a timer, not restarting it.
Minority and Mental Incapacity
If the injured person is a minor, most states pause the clock until they turn 18 and then give them the full statutory period from that point. Someone who lacks the mental capacity to understand and manage their legal rights receives similar protection while the incapacity lasts. Courts look at whether the person could understand the nature and consequences of legal action, not simply whether they had a diagnosis.
Defendant’s Absence or Evasion
If a defendant leaves the state or actively hides to avoid service, most states toll the statute for the duration of the absence. A defendant shouldn’t be able to run out the clock by making themselves unreachable.
Bankruptcy
When a defendant files bankruptcy, an automatic stay under federal law halts nearly all pending and potential lawsuits, effectively freezing the statute until the case closes, is dismissed, or the court lifts the stay.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 11 U.S.C. 362 – Automatic Stay If you learn a potential defendant has filed, don’t assume your deadline is still running on its normal schedule.
Active-Duty Military Service
The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act excludes any period of active military service from the calculation. If someone is on active duty when their claim accrues, the entire period of service doesn’t count against the filing deadline. This applies in both state and federal courts, but it specifically does not extend IRS tax deadlines.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 U.S. Code 3936 – Statute of Limitations
Fraudulent Concealment
If a defendant deliberately hides the existence of your claim, courts may toll the statute until you discover the fraud or reasonably should have. The classic example is a doctor who knows about a surgical error but covers it up. You generally need to show active concealment of material facts and that you could not have uncovered the truth through ordinary diligence. Silence alone is usually not enough; there must be an affirmative act of deception or a breached duty to disclose.
Step 4: Count Forward to a Calendar Date
Now do the arithmetic. In federal courts, and most state courts follow a nearly identical rule, the count works like this: start with the day after the triggering event. The event day itself does not count. Count forward through every calendar day, including weekends and holidays, until you reach the end of the statutory period. If the final day lands on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday when the clerk’s office is closed, the deadline extends to the next business day.6Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 6 – Computing and Extending Time
A concrete example. Say you have a two-year deadline and the injury occurred June 15, 2024. Day one is June 16, 2024. The deadline expires June 15, 2026. If that Monday were instead a Sunday, the deadline would slide to Monday, June 16. That extension is a safety net, not a strategy. Courts sometimes define “legal holiday” differently than you’d expect.
For electronic filing in federal court, the deadline is midnight in the court’s time zone.7Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure Rule 26 – Computing and Extending Time Physical filings must be stamped by the clerk before the office closes. Either way, confirm receipt. An attempted filing that doesn’t go through is not a filing.
Deadlines That Don’t Follow the Normal Rules
A few situations override the calculation you just did. Check for these before you settle on a date.
Government defendants. Suing a government agency comes with a much shorter fuse than any private lawsuit, and this is where the largest number of otherwise-valid claims die. Before filing suit against a federal agency, you must submit a formal administrative claim to that agency. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, you have two years from the date of injury to submit it. The agency has six months to respond. If it denies your claim, you have only six months from that denial to file suit in federal court.8U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Federal Tort Claims Act State and local governments impose their own notice requirements, often as short as 30 to 180 days after the incident. If a city bus, public hospital, or state highway is involved, check the government notice deadline before anything else.
Statutes of repose. A statute of repose looks like a statute of limitations but works differently. It runs from when the defendant completed the act — typically when a product was sold or a building was substantially completed — not from when you were injured or discovered the harm. Once that outer window closes, your right to sue is gone even if you haven’t been injured yet. Most states set construction repose periods between 6 and 10 years after substantial completion, though some go as high as 20 years. Tolling doctrines like minority, incapacity, and the discovery rule generally cannot extend a repose deadline. If your claim involves a product defect or construction defect, look up the repose period, because it is the hard ceiling.
Multi-state situations. A court usually applies its own state’s statute of limitations, but most states have “borrowing statutes” that flip this rule: if your claim arose elsewhere and that state’s deadline has already expired, the forum court will typically apply the shorter, expired deadline and bar your suit. You usually cannot escape a missed deadline by filing in a more generous state. Identify both deadlines and work from whichever expires first.
Don’t File on the Last Day
In most jurisdictions, filing the complaint stops the clock; you don’t need to have served the defendant by the deadline. But filing doesn’t let you sit indefinitely. Federal courts require service within 90 days after filing, and most state courts impose their own service windows. Miss the service deadline and the court can dismiss the case even though you filed on time. File early enough to absorb complications with locating or serving the defendant. Waiting until the last day of the statutory period means any hiccup can unravel everything you just preserved.