Texas Personal Injury Statute of Limitations

By Priya Raman, Contributing Writer, Policy & Regulation
Published July 10, 2026

Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 16.003 gives a person two years from the day a personal injury claim accrues to file suit, and that same two-year period covers property damage and wrongful death claims too. The accrual date is usually the date of the injury itself, though Texas courts recognize a narrow discovery rule for the rare case where the harm was not something a reasonable person could have noticed right away. Minors get the clock paused until they turn 18. Claims against a governmental unit run on an entirely separate, much shorter notice deadline that has nothing to do with the two-year period. Each of those pieces is covered below, with the code section behind it.

Texas deadlines at a glance

Every row above is checked against the statute or the city's own published notice requirement; last verified July 10, 2026.

Things worth knowing before you count forward two years

• The two-year period runs from accrual, which for most injuries is the date of the incident itself, not the date symptoms got worse or medical bills started arriving.
• A claim against a private defendant and a claim against a Texas governmental unit are not on the same clock. The notice deadline for the government claim can expire while the two-year statute of limitations is still running.
• Filing one day past two years is generally fatal to the claim, with only the narrow exceptions covered on this page keeping it alive.

What actually starts the two-year clock

Section 16.003(a) sets the two-year period for personal injury, trespass to property, conversion, and a handful of related claims. Section 16.003(b) applies the same two years to a wrongful death claim, measured from the date of death rather than the date of the underlying injury. In the ordinary car accident, slip-and-fall, or dog bite case, accrual happens on the date of the incident, and the two-year period runs from that day forward under the statute's plain text.

The discovery rule exists, but Texas courts keep it narrow

Texas does recognize a discovery rule, but it is not a broad safety net. The Texas Supreme Court's decision in Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 918 S.W.2d 453 (Tex. 1996), set the modern two-part test: the rule only delays accrual when the nature of the injury is inherently undiscoverable and the injury itself is objectively verifiable. Both parts have to be true. A car accident with an obvious injury does not qualify, since nothing about it is inherently undiscoverable. Certain latent conditions, some categories of professional malpractice, and cases involving concealed harm are where the rule tends to actually apply. Do not assume it covers your case; assume it does not unless a fact pattern squarely fits both prongs.

Minors: the statute waits for them

Section 16.001 treats a person under 18 as being under a "legal disability," and the time spent under that disability is not counted against the limitations period. In practice, this means a child injured at age 10 generally has until roughly age 20 to sue in their own name (two years after turning 18), even though an adult injured the same day would have had only two years from the date of injury. A parent or guardian can still bring the claim earlier on the child's behalf; the tolling provision exists to protect the child's own right to sue, not to force anyone to wait.

Suing the government runs on its own, shorter clock

The Texas Tort Claims Act requires a governmental unit to "receive notice of a claim against it under this chapter not later than six months after the day that the incident giving rise to the claim occurred," under Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 101.101(a). That same section ratifies shorter notice periods set by a city's own charter or ordinance, and plenty of Texas cities use that authority. The City of Houston's charter, for instance, requires the injured person to give the mayor and city council written notice within 90 days of the injury, according to the city's own Legal Department, well short of the six-month default. Missing a shorter charter deadline can bar a claim even though the two-year statute of limitations under section 16.003 has not come close to running out. Section 101.101(c) provides one exception: none of this applies if the governmental unit already has actual notice that an injury or death occurred.

Worked example

A driver is rear-ended in Dallas on July 10, 2026. Under section 16.003, the two-year deadline to sue the other driver runs to July 10, 2028. If the same crash also involved a pothole maintained by the city, the notice-of-claim clock is separate and much shorter: Dallas's own charter and the six-month statutory default both require action long before that 2028 date, so the claim against the city has to move first even though the claim against the other driver has two full years to work with. Treating both defendants on the same calendar is the single most common mistake in a case that involves both a private driver and a government-maintained road.

Where this page stops and a lawyer's advice starts

This page covers the general rule and the four exceptions that come up most often. It does not cover claims against the federal government, which run on the separate Federal Tort Claims Act timeline, or the shorter limitations periods that apply to some specific statutory claims, defamation among them. Whether the discovery rule or the minors tolling provision actually applies to a specific set of facts is a legal judgment call, not a mechanical calculation, and getting it wrong can end a case before it starts. Talk to a Texas-licensed attorney while there is still time on the clock to do something about it.

Related reading

• check the national side-by-side table
• a broader look at how discovery rules work
• add or subtract calendar or court days from one date