How Long After a Car Accident Can You Sue in California?

California's statute of limitations for car accident personal injury claims is two years from the date of the accident under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. This deadline is jurisdictional and absolute: a lawsuit filed one day after the two-year window permanently bars the personal injury claim, regardless of how severe the injuries or how clear the liability.

The General Two-Year Deadline

Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 provides the governing rule: personal injury actions must be filed within two years of the injury. For a car accident, the two-year clock begins running on the date of the collision — the day the injury occurred, not the day you discovered it was serious or the day you stopped treating.

Two years sounds like a comfortable window. In practice, it passes faster than most injured people expect. Medical treatment, insurance negotiations, and the ordinary demands of recovery consume the first several months. By the time it becomes clear that the insurance claim will not settle fairly, the remaining time before the filing deadline may be shorter than anticipated.

The lawsuit must be filed before the deadline — not merely prepared, not sent to the courthouse, but stamped received by the clerk. In busy California counties like Los Angeles, filing delays at the clerk's office are common. Attorneys routinely target filing dates several weeks before the actual deadline to buffer against administrative delays.

Government Entity Accidents: The Six-Month Deadline

If the at-fault vehicle in your accident was operated by a government employee acting within the scope of their government employment, a dramatically shorter deadline applies. Before you can file a lawsuit against any California government entity — a city, county, school district, transit agency, or state agency — you must first present a Government Tort Claim to the responsible entity under Government Code section 945.4.

This government tort claim must be filed within six months of the accident date. Six months, not two years. Common government defendant scenarios in California car accident cases include:

• Accidents involving Los Angeles Metro buses or light rail vehicles
• Accidents involving city or county-owned vehicles (public works trucks, fire department vehicles, school buses)
• Accidents involving California Highway Patrol patrol cars
• Accidents involving U.S. Postal Service vehicles (federal entity requiring separate Federal Tort Claims Act analysis)
• Accidents caused by defective road conditions maintained by Caltrans, a city, or a county

After receiving the government tort claim, the public entity has 45 days to accept, deny, or ignore it. If the claim is denied, the claimant then has six months from the date of that rejection to file a lawsuit. If the entity ignores the claim without responding, the claimant has two years from the date of rejection (or the six-month waiting period) to file suit.

Missing the six-month government tort claim deadline permanently bars the lawsuit against that government entity, even if the two-year personal injury deadline has not expired and even if the claim is otherwise completely meritorious. California courts apply this deadline strictly, with very limited equitable exceptions.

Minors and Tolling Exceptions

California law tolls — pauses — the statute of limitations during a plaintiff's minority. Under Code of Civil Procedure section 352, a minor injured in a car accident does not begin accumulating limitations time until reaching the age of majority at 18. This means a child injured in a car accident at age 10 generally has until their 20th birthday to file a personal injury lawsuit (two years after turning 18).

This tolling rule creates an important practical distinction: parents can file on behalf of the minor child at any time during the child's minority using the standard two-year deadline from the accident date. Alternatively, the minor's own two-year window begins running when they turn 18. In practice, waiting until the minor reaches majority is rarely advisable — evidence deteriorates, witnesses become unavailable, and memory fades. Acting within the standard two-year window preserves the strongest possible case.

Critical exception for government claims: The minor tolling provision does not extend the six-month government tort claim deadline. A parent must file the government tort claim on the child's behalf within six months of the accident even though the lawsuit itself may be filed years later. Missing the six-month government claim bars the child's claim against the government entity permanently.

Mental incapacity at the time of the accident also tolls the statute of limitations under CCP section 352. If the injured person was legally mentally incapacitated at the time of the accident — for example, due to severe traumatic brain injury — the clock does not run during the period of incapacity. Once capacity is restored, the standard two-year period begins.

The Discovery Rule and Latent Injuries

California's discovery rule delays the start of the limitations period until the plaintiff discovered, or through reasonable diligence should have discovered, both the injury and its cause. This rule developed primarily in cases involving latent disease, occupational exposure, and medical malpractice involving delayed-onset complications.

For typical car accident cases involving acute trauma — broken bones, spinal injuries, traumatic brain injury, lacerations — the discovery rule generally does not extend the deadline. The injury is apparent at the scene, and the cause is obvious: the collision. The two-year clock begins on the date of the accident.

The discovery rule may be relevant in rare car accident scenarios: an undiagnosed internal injury that does not become apparent until diagnostic imaging days later, a traumatic brain injury whose full cognitive effects are not recognized for weeks, or a case where the identity of the at-fault party was unknown and required investigation to discover. In these scenarios, the limitations period begins when the plaintiff had enough information to investigate the potential claim.

Property Damage Claims: A Different Deadline

The two-year deadline under CCP section 335.1 applies to personal injury claims — claims for bodily injury, pain and suffering, lost wages, and medical expenses. Property damage claims — for vehicle repair or replacement, damaged personal property, and similar losses — are governed by a different statute: Code of Civil Procedure section 338(b), which provides a three-year limitations period.

This means a driver injured in a car accident has two years to sue for bodily injury and three years to sue for property damage. These are separate claims with separate deadlines. In practice, property damage claims almost always resolve quickly through the insurance process and rarely require separate litigation. But the three-year window matters if property damage negotiations remain unresolved as the two-year personal injury deadline approaches.

What Happens If You Miss the Deadline

A lawsuit filed after the applicable statute of limitations has run will almost always be dismissed. When the opposing attorney receives the complaint, identifying the filing date and calculating whether the limitations period has expired is one of the first analytical steps. A motion to dismiss based on an expired limitations period is among the most successful motions in California civil practice because the court has no discretion: if the statute has run, the claim is barred.

There is no procedure to revive a time-barred personal injury claim. No matter how severe the injuries, how clear the liability, or how sympathetic the circumstances, a court cannot hear a case that the legislature has said must be filed within a specific period. This is why statute of limitations monitoring is a fundamental professional obligation of every personal injury attorney and why injured people are consistently advised not to delay consulting with a lawyer.

Equitable tolling — a doctrine that pauses the statute in certain circumstances where the plaintiff was prevented from filing through no fault of their own — exists in California but is narrow and difficult to establish. It is not a safety net that routinely saves missed deadlines. The safer approach is treating the limitations deadline as fixed and building in significant lead time before the actual date.