Statute of limitations calculator
Works out when a limitation period expires from your own dates, applies the minority rule for that state and that claim, and flags a statute of repose that can bar the claim while the period still looks open.
The duration is the easy part
Every statute of limitations calculator can tell you that a period is two years. Almost none of them can tell you when the two years started, and that is the half that decides cases.
Three things move the date, and none of them is arithmetic. Accrual is often not the injury date, because most states let the clock start when the plaintiff discovered or reasonably should have discovered the harm. Minority stops the clock for a child, but not by the same mechanism in every state and not for every claim. A statute of repose runs alongside the limitations period from a fixed act and can close the claim first, without regard to discovery at all.
This tool asks for the three dates only you hold, the accrual date, the date of birth and the date of discovery, and then shows every step it took with the statute in the margin. The output is an audit trail rather than a number, for the same reason the court deadline calculator works that way: a missed date is malpractice, so being trusted is exactly the wrong ask.
Four answers, because two would be a lie
A calculator that only ever returns a date has to invent one when it does not know. This returns one of four things, and the wording changes with it.
Computed means the dataset covers the claim and your inputs settle it. Cannot be settled means a discovery rule could move the start, so what you get is the earliest the claim could expire rather than a deadline. Not in this dataset means the jurisdiction or the cause is not covered, and nothing is substituted for it. Barred by a statute of repose outranks all three, because a barred claim is barred however open the period looks.
The third one is worth dwelling on. Defaulting accrual to the injury date and presenting the result as a deadline would produce a confident answer that is wrong in the one direction that loses the claim. That is the same defect as an aircraft weight check reporting "within limits" for a load it had not finished counting, and it is the reason "could not be determined" is a visible state on every tool here.
The repose date is the one nobody shows you
A statute of repose is not a longer limitations period. It runs from a triggering act, the negligent act, the sale of the product, the substantial completion of the building, and the discovery rule cannot reach it. Finding out in year eight does not revive a claim that reposed in year seven.
The example modelled here is N.Y. C.P.L.R. ยง 214-a. New York gives a negligent failure to diagnose cancer two years and six months from when the plaintiff knew or should have known, and then imposes an outer limit of 7 years from the alleged negligent act or omission. A misdiagnosis discovered a decade later has a limitations period that reads as open and a claim that has been gone for years.
Roughly two thirds of states impose a separate repose for medical malpractice, and about a third do for product liability. Where this tool holds one, it computes the repose date alongside the limitations date and reports it whether or not it has run, because a repose three years away changes how you plan a case.
What moves a date and is not in here
Four doctrines can extend a limitation period and not one of them is computable from a form, so they are named on every result rather than quietly omitted: equitable tolling, fraudulent concealment by the defendant, a defendant absent from the state, and a continuing violation. Each turns on facts a calculator cannot see.
One more is easy to miss because it runs the other way. A claim against a government body usually carries its own notice deadline measured in months, not years. That deadline can bar a claim whose limitation period still has years left on it, and it is not this period.
Where every figure comes from
Every period, discovery clause, minority provision and repose in this tool was read from the official state code on 2026-09-05, and is quoted verbatim on the page beside its citation. The sources are the state legislatures themselves:
- California: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, Official California Legislative Information
- New York: nysenate.gov, the Consolidated Laws of New York
None of it is licensed. State statutes are edicts of government and cannot be copyrighted. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org (2020) the Supreme Court held that even the annotations in Georgia's official code were ineligible for copyright, because they were authored by an arm of the legislature acting in its legislative capacity. The statutory text itself was never in question.
A test can check that every figure has a citation. No test can check that the figure is right. That is why the statute is quoted on the page rather than merely cited: a lawyer can verify the number in one glance instead of trusting this site. If you find an entry that disagrees with the current code, please tell me. Getting a reference wrong is worse than not having one.
Deliberately out of scope: causes of action beyond the 3 listed, federal claims, non-US jurisdictions, and every fact-specific tolling doctrine named above. Each is handled by saying so rather than by approximating it.
Common questions
Why does the tool say a claim is barred when the limitations period has not run out?
Because a statute of limitations and a statute of repose are different things, and only one of them cares when you found out.
A statute of limitations runs from when the claim accrued, and in most states the discovery rule can push accrual to the day you knew or reasonably should have known about the injury. A statute of repose runs from a fixed act, such as the negligent act, the sale of a product or the substantial completion of a building, and it is a hard outer cutoff regardless of when the injury happens or is discovered.
So the two can disagree. New York gives a cancer misdiagnosis claim two years and six months from discovery, and then caps the whole thing: the action "shall be commenced no later than seven years from such alleged negligent act or omission", C.P.L.R. 214-a. A misdiagnosis in 2015 discovered in 2026 has a limitations period that looks wide open into 2028 and a claim that closed in 2022.
That is the single fact this calculator exists for, and it is the one almost no other statute of limitations tool models.
Does the clock start on the date of the injury?
Often not, and this is the hard part rather than the arithmetic.
Most states apply a discovery rule, under which the period runs from when the plaintiff discovered or reasonably should have discovered the injury and its cause. Whether it is available varies by state and by cause of action, and whether it applies to you is a question about what you knew and when. No form can answer that.
So this tool does not guess. Where a discovery rule could move the start and you have not supplied a discovery date, the result is reported as the earliest the claim could expire, and never as your deadline. A confident date built on an assumed start is worse than no date, because it reads like an answer.
Where the statute itself states the discovery period and an outer limit, the calculation is genuine. California medical malpractice is the clean example: three years from the injury or one year from discovery, whichever occurs first, C.C.P. 340.5. A late discovery buys nothing, and an early one shortens the period to a single year.
Do minors always get until they turn 18?
No, and that assumption is how a child's claim gets missed.
It is the common pattern. California C.C.P. 352(a) says the time of the disability "is not part of the time limited for the commencement of the action", so the ordinary period simply starts on the eighteenth birthday. New York C.P.L.R. 208(a) instead extends the deadline to three years after the disability ends, which lands on the twenty-first birthday.
California medical malpractice does neither. Under C.C.P. 340.5 a minor gets three years from the wrongful act, and only a child under six gets the longer of three years or their eighth birthday. A child injured at ten is out of time at thirteen, with no tolling to majority at all.
New York adds a further twist in the other direction: the ten-year outer cap in C.P.L.R. 208(a) applies to malpractice but is expressly written not to apply to infancy in any other action. So the same tolling statute produces a cap in one cause and none in another.
Minority is therefore data in this tool, held per jurisdiction and per cause, rather than a rule in the code.
Why only California and New York, when other sites cover all fifty states?
Because a fifty-state table of periods already exists, is free, and is better maintained than a hand transcription here would be.
Casefleet publishes a lookup covering 51 jurisdictions and nine causes of action, 459 entries, each verified against the official state code, last verified in April 2026. Retyping a subset of that would produce a strictly worse copy of someone else's work, which is not worth shipping.
What that lookup does not do, and says so on its own page, is compute a date. It gives you the period and sends you elsewhere to count. That is the actual gap. A period is a fact anyone can publish. A date computed from your accrual date, your date of birth and the repose that runs alongside it is not.
So this went deep instead of wide: every figure here was read from the official state code and is quoted on the page beside its citation, and the rules that decide dates are modelled all the way down. Where a jurisdiction is not covered, the tool says so plainly and applies nothing. It never substitutes a neighbouring state's period, because a wrong period presented confidently is the failure mode that matters.
What happens if the deadline lands on a weekend?
The tool steps it forward to the next weekday and tells you the step is approximate.
Most states have a computation-of-time rule resembling Federal Rule 6(a)(1)(C), under which a period ending on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday runs to the next day that is not one. So a Saturday expiry generally means a Monday filing is timely.
The honest limit is holidays. This site ships no state court holiday calendar, and a state holiday or a local closure falling on that Monday would move the date again. The result therefore labels the step rather than presenting the rolled date as settled. If the answer turns on a single day, that is exactly the situation in which you should not be relying on a calculator.
What does the tool do with a 29 February accrual date?
It uses 28 February in a year that has no 29th, and it says that it did.
Two answers are defensible, 28 February and 1 March, and they are one day apart in the direction that decides whether a filing was timely. This takes the earlier one, for two reasons. First, it is the conservative direction: if the earlier date is wrong you filed early, whereas if the later date is wrong you missed a limitation period. Those two errors are not symmetric.
Second, it matches the one statute that addresses the question directly. California Government Code 6803 defines a year as a period of 365 days and provides that the added day of a leap year and the day immediately preceding "shall be reckoned together as one day". Reckoning the 28th and 29th as one day puts the anniversary on 28 February.
Not every state legislates this, and some may reckon it differently, so the result flags it rather than burying it.
Can I rely on this for an actual filing?
No. Use it to understand what moves the date, then get a lawyer in the jurisdiction to fix the date.
A missed limitation period cannot be undone, and several things that routinely change it are invisible to a calculator: equitable tolling, fraudulent concealment by the defendant, a defendant absent from the state, and a continuing violation that keeps the clock running. Each is fact specific and none is computable from a form. They are listed on every result rather than left out.
One trap deserves naming on its own: a claim against a government body usually carries a separate notice-of-claim deadline measured in months rather than years, which is not this period and is not modelled here. Missing it can bar a claim whose limitations period has years left.
This is not legal advice and no attorney-client relationship arises from using it.