New York Statute of Limitations: Every Deadline That Can End Your Case

Courts in New York dismiss strong cases every year for one reason: the plaintiff filed too late. It doesn't matter how badly you were hurt or how clear the other side's fault is — once the statute of limitations runs, the case is over before it starts. The defendant raises the deadline, the judge applies it, done.

The good news is that the deadlines themselves are knowable. Here they are, organized the way you'd actually use them.

Measured from the date of the incident unless noted otherwise:

• Personal injury (negligence): 3 years
• Property damage: 3 years
• Medical, dental, or podiatric malpractice: 2 years and 6 months
• Wrongful death: 2 years from the date of death
• Intentional torts (assault, battery, false imprisonment): 1 year
• Breach of contract: 6 years
• Claims against a city, county, town, or other municipality: written notice of claim within 90 days, lawsuit within 1 year and 90 days

If you take nothing else from this article: when a government entity might be at fault, your real deadline is measured in weeks, not years.

Most negligence cases — car crashes, falls, unsafe property — carry a three-year deadline that starts on the date of the accident, not the date you realized how badly you were hurt. A back injury that seems minor in month one and needs surgery in year two doesn't restart anything. The clock has been running the whole time.

Three years sounds generous. It isn't, really. A lawyer needs time to investigate, gather records, identify every defendant, and prepare a complaint — and witnesses, camera footage, and physical evidence degrade long before the deadline arrives. Treat year three as the emergency zone, not the plan.

Malpractice claims against doctors and hospitals must be filed within two years and six months. But three rules can move that date, and they matter:

1. Continuous treatment. If the same provider keeps treating you for the same condition, the clock doesn't start until that course of treatment ends. Five years of ongoing care for the condition the doctor mishandled can mean the deadline starts at the last appointment — but routine checkups for unrelated issues don't count.
2. Foreign objects. If a surgical instrument or sponge was left inside you, you get one year from the date you discovered it (or reasonably should have), even if the surgery was long ago.
3. Lavern's Law for missed cancer. For failure to diagnose cancer or a malignant tumor, the 2.5-year clock runs from when you discovered the missed diagnosis rather than when it happened, subject to an outer limit of seven years from the malpractice itself.

If your claim is against a public hospital — in New York City, that includes the Health + Hospitals system — the municipal rules below apply on top of everything else, and they shrink your timeline dramatically.

A wrongful death claim must be brought within two years of the death, not the underlying accident. If someone is injured in a crash and dies of those injuries eight months later, the wrongful death clock starts at death. The estate's separate claim for the person's pre-death pain and suffering, though, generally follows the underlying injury deadline. Families juggling both should not try to sequence this themselves — the two claims run on different clocks.

Suing New York City, a county, a town, a school district, the Transit Authority, or most other public entities requires a formal notice of claim served within 90 days of the incident. This is not the lawsuit — it's a sworn document describing when, where, and how you were hurt — and serving it on time is a precondition to suing at all. The lawsuit itself must then be filed within one year and 90 days.

Where this bites people: a fall on a city sidewalk, a crash with a sanitation truck or city bus, an injury at a public school, malpractice at a public hospital. The injury feels like an ordinary negligence case with a three-year deadline, but the defendant's identity cuts your effective deadline to three months.

Courts can grant permission to serve a late notice of claim, but it's discretionary, it requires a motion, and judges deny these requests regularly. Never plan on it.

A few situations legitimately stop or extend the clock:

• Children. The statute is generally tolled until a minor turns 18, and then the normal period runs. Exception: in medical malpractice, the infancy toll cannot extend the deadline more than 10 years from the malpractice. And tolling does not excuse the 90-day municipal notice in most situations — get advice immediately if a child was hurt by a public entity.
• Mental disability. A toll can apply where the injured person was insane (in the statute's language) at the time the claim arose.
• Defendant out of state. Time a defendant spends outside New York may not count against the deadline in some circumstances.
• Child sexual abuse. Under the Child Victims Act, survivors of childhood sexual abuse can bring civil claims until age 55.

Tolling rules are genuinely technical, and guessing wrong is fatal to the case. If you think a toll applies to you, that's a question for a lawyer, not a hunch to rely on.

1. Write down the exact date of the incident — and for a death case, the date of death.
2. Ask one question first: could any defendant be a government entity? If yes or maybe, you are on the 90-day track. Move now.
3. Identify your claim type from the list above and mark the deadline on a calendar you actually look at.
4. Talk to an attorney months before the deadline, not days. Late-arriving cases get turned away by good firms precisely because there's no time left to build them properly.

A deadline you know about is just a date. A deadline you discover after it passes is the whole case. If you're unsure where your claim stands, DearLegal can match you with a New York attorney who will tell you straight — visit dearlegal.com.