By Priya Raman, Contributing Writer, Policy & RegulationPublished July 9, 2026
California gives most personal injury plaintiffs two years to sue, under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, but the real number depends entirely on what kind of claim you have: four years for a written contract under section 337(a), two for an oral one under section 339(1), three for property damage or fraud under section 338, and a tighter three-year-or-one-year combination for medical malpractice under section 340.5. A claim against a government body runs on a different track altogether, a six-month claim presentation deadline under Government Code section 911.2 that has nothing to do with the ordinary statute of limitations. The lookup tool above covers all eight of these, cites the code section, and calculates the date. This page explains where each period comes from. It is general legal information, not legal advice for your specific matter.
Personal injury: two years, and it covers more than car accidents
Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 sets a two-year period for "assault, battery, or injury to, or for the death of, an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another." That single sentence covers slip-and-fall cases, car and motorcycle collisions, dog bites, most product liability claims, and any other negligence-based claim for physical injury. The clock generally starts on the date of the injury. Wrongful death claims brought by surviving family members also run two years, but the clock for a wrongful death claim starts on the date of death, which is not always the same day as the underlying injury.
Contracts: four years if it is written, two if it is not
Section 337(a) gives four years to sue over "any contract, obligation or liability founded upon an instrument in writing." Section 339(1) cuts that to two years for a contract, obligation, or liability that is not founded on a writing, which covers oral agreements and a lot of informal business dealings that never made it onto paper. Both periods run from the date of the breach, meaning the day the other side failed to do what the contract required, not the date everyone signed. A contract signed in 2020 that was not breached until 2026 has a limitations period that starts running in 2026, not 2020.
Property damage and fraud share a three-year period, for different reasons
Section 338(c) gives three years for "taking, detaining, or injuring goods or chattels," the code's language for damage to personal property, vehicles, and similar items. Section 338(d) also gives three years for fraud or mistake, but with a twist built into the statute itself: the cause of action "is not deemed to have accrued until the discovery, by the aggrieved party, of the facts constituting the fraud or mistake." In plain terms, the three-year fraud clock does not start on the day the fraud happened. It starts on the day you found out, or reasonably should have found out. That is why the lookup tool asks for a discovery date on the fraud option, not an event date.
Medical malpractice runs on two clocks at once
Section 340.5, part of California's Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), sets the deadline for malpractice against a health care provider at "three years after the date of injury or one year after the plaintiff discovers, or through the use of reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury, whichever occurs first." Whichever of those two dates arrives first is the actual deadline, and it is usually the one-year discovery period, since most patients realize something went wrong well before three years pass. The statute allows tolling for fraud, intentional concealment, and a foreign object left in the body with no therapeutic purpose, which is one of the few situations where the three-year outer limit itself can be extended.
Suing the government starts with a six-month claim, not a lawsuit
Government Code section 911.2 requires a claim relating to personal injury, death, or damage to personal property to be presented to the public entity "not later than six months after the accrual of the cause of action." A claim for anything else gets one year instead. This is a claim presentation requirement, not the underlying statute of limitations, and it comes first: the entity gets a chance to investigate and settle before a lawsuit is filed at all. Miss the six-month window and the case is usually over before it starts, regardless of how much time the ordinary statute of limitations would otherwise have allowed.
Worked example
Say someone is injured in a rear-end collision on July 9, 2026. Under section 335.1, the two-year personal injury period runs to July 9, 2028, a Sunday, so section 12a's holiday-and-weekend extension pushes the actual deadline to Monday, July 10, 2028. Run that same date through the lookup tool above with "Personal injury" selected and it returns the same result. Now compare a written contract breached on the same day: the four-year period under section 337(a) runs to July 9, 2030, which lands on a Tuesday, so no extension applies and the deadline stays where the plain math puts it.
What this tool does not cover
The lookup tool checks Code of Civil Procedure section 12a for weekends, since the last day of a period that falls on a Saturday or Sunday rolls forward under that section. It does not check the state or county court holiday calendar in section 135, since that list changes by county and by year. If your calculated date lands within a few days of a court holiday, verify the exact deadline against your county court's own calendar. The tool also does not model tolling for minors, tolling for a defendant's absence from the state, or the fraudulent concealment doctrine, any of which can pause a clock that has already started running. And several claim types, workers' compensation and most employment discrimination claims among them, run on entirely separate deadlines this page does not attempt to cover. Confirm your actual deadline with a California attorney before you rely on any date here.
Need the day-by-day count instead of the calendar year?
Once you know which period applies, run the exact trigger date through this site's day-counting tool to see the deadline broken down by calendar days or court days.