How Long Do You Have to File a Personal Injury Claim in Texas?

In Texas you generally have two years from the date you were hurt to file a personal injury lawsuit. Section 16.003 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code sets that deadline, and missing it ends the claim no matter how badly you were injured or how clearly the other driver was at fault. The trap is that two years is not always the real deadline. If a city, county or state vehicle was involved, you may have as little as 90 days to put the government on notice — and that clock is already running.

The two-year rule, and what it counts from

Section 16.003(a) of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code says a person must bring suit for personal injury not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues. That is the Texas personal injury statute of limitations, and it covers almost everything I handle: car wrecks, truck wrecks, falls on someone else’s property, dog bites, workplace injuries against a third party.

For a car accident, the day the cause of action accrues is almost always the day of the crash. Not the day you first saw a doctor. Not the day the MRI came back. Not the day the insurance company denied the claim. The day it happened.

There is a narrow, court-made exception called the discovery rule, which can delay accrual where an injury is genuinely undiscoverable at the time. It rarely applies to a collision, because you know you were hit. It matters far more in medical cases, and even there it is narrower than people hope. Do not plan around it.

Two years sounds generous. In practice it is the amount of time it takes to finish treatment, gather records, figure out who the defendants really are, and give the insurance company a fair chance to settle before anyone files anything. A case that walks in the door at twenty-two months is a case with no room left in it.

Every deadline in one place

If a government vehicle was involved

This is the one that ends cases, and it is the reason I would rather hear from someone in the first week than the first year.

Under Section 101.101 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, a governmental unit is entitled to notice of a claim not later than six months after the day that the incident giving rise to the claim occurred. The notice has to reasonably describe the injury, the time and place, and the incident itself.

Then the statute does something most people never see coming. Subsection (b) ratifies and approves a city’s own charter and ordinance provisions requiring notice within a shorter period. In other words, a city is allowed to give you less time than the state does — and Houston has.

Article IX, Section 11 of the Houston city charter requires written, verified notice within 90 days of the injury, delivered to the mayor and city council. The city’s own legal department publishes what that notice has to contain: when, where and how it happened, how serious the injury appears, the damages, the amount you would accept in settlement, your address now and for the six months before, and the witnesses you are relying on.

Ninety days. A Metro bus, a city truck, a police cruiser, a pothole claim — same clock. Someone who spends three months in physical therapy before thinking about a lawyer can walk in with eighteen months left on the two-year statute and a claim that is already gone.

There is an exception in subsection (c), for situations where the governmental unit already has actual notice of a death, an injury or property damage. It is real, but it is argued hard and lost often. It is not a plan.

If anything about your wreck involved a public vehicle, a public employee on the job, or a public road defect, treat the deadline as 90 days until somebody confirms otherwise.

Medical malpractice runs on a different clock

Section 74.251 governs health care liability claims, and it does not work like the ordinary two-year rule.

The two years runs from the occurrence of the breach or tort, or from the date the treatment or hospitalization that the claim is about was completed. That is useful where there was one continuous course of treatment and harder where there was a single visit years ago.

Before suit can be filed at all, Section 74.051 requires written notice by certified mail, return receipt requested, to every physician and provider you intend to sue, at least 60 days beforehand, with a signed medical authorization alongside it. Giving that notice tolls the limitations period for 75 days, which helps — but only if you give it in time to matter.

And there is a hard stop. Section 74.251(b) is a statute of repose, and it says plainly that no health care liability claim can be brought more than 10 years after the act or omission. Texas courts have recognized narrow exceptions to it, but they are rare enough that nobody should count on one. As a working assumption, ten years is the outer wall.

If you think something went wrong with your medical care, the sequence takes months before anything gets filed, because a qualified expert has to review the records first. What a Texas medical malpractice claim involves walks through that, and Can I Sue My Doctor in Texas? covers who can be sued and for what.

When someone dies

Section 16.003(b) says a wrongful death claim must be brought within two years, and that the cause of action accrues on the death of the injured person.

Read that again, because the distinction matters. If someone is critically hurt in a crash in March and dies the following January, the wrongful death clock starts in January, not in March. Families often assume they have already run out of time when they have not.

Survival claims — the claims the person who died would have had for their own pain and medical bills — work differently and can run from the injury. In a case where someone died weeks or months after the wreck, both are usually in play, and they do not share a start date.

Children, and adults who cannot manage their own affairs

Section 16.001 calls these legal disabilities. A person is under one if they are younger than 18, or of unsound mind. When a person is under a legal disability at the moment the claim accrues, the time of the disability is not counted against the limitations period. For a child hurt at age nine, that generally means the two years does not begin until the eighteenth birthday.

Three limits on that, all in the same section. You cannot stack one disability on another to buy more time. A disability that develops after the clock has already started does not pause it. And the protection has to exist when the claim accrues, not later.

Medical malpractice is the exception that catches families. Section 74.251 says that except for minors under 12, who have until their fourteenth birthday, the section applies to everyone regardless of minority or other legal disability. A child injured at 13 by medical negligence does not get to wait until adulthood.

What “filing” actually means

Filing means a lawsuit, filed with a court, before the deadline. Nothing else counts.

It does not mean reporting the crash to your insurance company. It does not mean opening a claim with the other driver’s insurer and getting a claim number. It does not mean exchanging letters with an adjuster, sending medical records, or being told the file is under review. I have had people tell me their claim had been active for nearly two years — and what they meant was that an adjuster had been returning their calls.

Adjusters are not required to warn you that your deadline is approaching, and they will not. A claim that is still being discussed on the day the statute runs is a claim that is worth nothing the following morning.

There is a separate set of deadlines hiding in your own insurance policy. Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, and personal injury protection, both carry notice and cooperation requirements written into the contract, and some are far shorter than two years. What 30/60/25 actually covers explains how those coverages fit together.

What happens if the deadline passes

The other side files a motion, the court dismisses the case, and the merits are never reached. Limitations is an affirmative defense, which means the defendant has to raise it — and insurance defense lawyers raise it every single time. It does not matter that liability was obvious or that the injuries were severe.

Realistically, it also ends the settlement conversation. An insurer that knows you can no longer sue has no reason to pay you anything, and will not.

A handful of claim types carry longer periods, and a few circumstances can suspend the clock. Those are worth asking about rather than assuming. But as a working rule: once it is gone, it is gone.

Why waiting hurts long before the deadline does

The statute is the last thing that kills a case. Several other things get there first.

Vehicles get repaired or sold for salvage, and the damage that showed how hard the impact was goes with them. Commercial trucks overwrite their onboard data. Surveillance footage at an intersection or a store is typically overwritten within days or weeks unless somebody sends a letter demanding it be kept. Witnesses move, change numbers, and stop remembering which light was green. And a gap in treatment — six months where you did not see anybody because you were hoping it would settle down — is the single most common argument an adjuster makes that your injury was not serious or was caused by something else.

None of that is about the two years. It is about the first two weeks.

If you are reading this because you are trying to figure out whether you still have time, the honest answer is that it depends on who the claim is against, and that the government deadlines are short enough to be worth checking today. How long a settlement takes is a different question from how long you have to file, and the two get confused constantly.

Questions people actually ask

This article describes Texas law as published by the Legislature and is current to the statutes as they stand today. It is general information, not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not make me your lawyer. Deadlines turn on facts that are specific to each case — if yours is close, get it looked at rather than relying on an article.