Before Brian Elstein opened this firm he defended insurance companies. That side of the table teaches you how cheaply a case can be won on the calendar. A carrier never has to argue about who ran the light if the claim was filed too late. The file closes, and the facts stop mattering.
Most Florida personal injury claims must be filed within two years of the date the claim arose. The deadline used to be four years, and the old figure is still on law firm websites, on advice forums and in AI-generated summaries. A second problem sits behind it: plenty of pages give the two-year answer and then cite the wrong part of the statute, because the law that shortened the deadline also renumbered the section. What follows is the number, the provision it sits in, and the structure of the statute itself, so you can judge whether anything else you read on this subject is current.
The Two-Year Rule and the Subsection It Comes From
For a personal injury claim founded on negligence, Florida gives you two years from the date the cause of action accrued to file suit. The provision is Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(a), and it governs causes of action accruing on or after 24 March 2023.
That covers most injury claims, from a crash to a fall on someone else’s property, and all of it runs on the same clock unless an exception below applies.
The change came from House Bill 837, chapter 2023-15, effective 24 March 2023, which cut the limitations period for most negligence actions from four years to two. That was only part of the bill. It also replaced Florida’s comparative fault rule with a modified version at § 768.81(6), under which a person found more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing, while a person found 50 percent or less still recovers, reduced by their share. Someone found exactly half responsible recovers half.
How Section 95.11 Is Actually Built
Section 95.11 is organised by duration, and two of its buckets matter here:
- Subsection (3) is the four-year subsection, headed “WITHIN FOUR YEARS.” It contains paragraph (d), an action for injury founded on the design, manufacture, distribution or sale of personal property, which is the products paragraph. It also contains paragraph (e), an action founded on a statutory liability, and paragraph (o), any action not specifically provided for.
- Subsection (5) is the two-year subsection, headed “WITHIN TWO YEARS.” It contains paragraph (a), an action founded on negligence, plus paragraph (c), medical malpractice, paragraph (e), wrongful death, and paragraph (h), libel and slander.
Now the sentence that does the real work: there is no two-year subsection (4). Before HB 837, negligence sat at § 95.11(3)(a), inside the four-year subsection. HB 837 moved it, and for a period an intermediate numbering placed it at (4)(a). Neither is the current provision, so a page citing either was written against a version of the statute that no longer applies.
That gives you a two-part test for anything you read on this topic. Does it say two years, and does it cite § 95.11(5)(a)? A page with the right number and the wrong citation came from a source nobody has checked since 2023.
One caution about reading that map onto your own situation. Knowing which bucket a paragraph sits in is not the same as knowing which paragraph your claim falls into, and that second question turns on how the claim is pleaded. Where a claim might arguably sit in the four-year subsection, work to the two-year date anyway. Filing early costs nothing. Filing late cannot be undone.
Why the Four-Year Figure Is Still Everywhere
Four years was correct for decades, and the material written while it was correct did not stop existing on 24 March 2023. The date matters more than the change, because the deadline attaches to the claim rather than the calendar. HB 837 governs causes of action accruing on or after that date, so a claim that accrued earlier kept the older rule. Almost none of those is still live in 2026, which makes the distinction close to historical, but it is why the older figure stays in circulation.
Accrual deserves its own sentence, because it is not always the day of the incident. Fla. Stat. § 95.031 provides that the time for beginning an action runs from the time the cause of action accrues, and that a cause of action accrues when the last element constituting it occurs. In an ordinary crash the last element and the impact are the same moment, so the injury date is the accrual date. In other claims they separate, which is what the rest of this page is about.
Deadlines by Type of Claim
Which provision governs your claim is decided by the legal theory, not by how badly you were hurt.
| Type of claim | Deadline to file | Provision |
|---|---|---|
| Injury founded on negligence, including motor vehicle crashes and falls on property | Two years from accrual | § 95.11(5)(a) |
| Medical malpractice | Two years from the incident or from discovery, with an outer four-year repose | § 95.11(5)(c) |
| Wrongful death | Two years | § 95.11(5)(e), within the § 768.19 framework |
| Injury from a defective product | Four years, with an outer limit under the repose provision | § 95.11(3)(d), repose § 95.031(2)(b) |
| Nursing home claim | Two years from the incident or from discovery, with an outer four-year limit | § 400.0236 |
| Claim against a state or local government entity | Separate presuit notice requirements apply and the timing is unforgiving. No period is stated here | § 768.28 |
| Claim arising on a cruise | The ticket contract usually controls and can be far shorter than the statute. No period is stated here | Contractual, see below |
Two rows are deliberately blank where you might expect a number. Their own sections explain why, and neither blank is an oversight.
Medical Malpractice Runs on Its Own Clock
A medical negligence claim is two years, at § 95.11(5)(c), and HB 837 did not change it. What makes it different is that the clock can start later than the injury, and that there is a hard stop behind it.
The period runs from the incident, or from the date the injury was discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of due diligence. That is the discovery rule, and it exists because a surgical error or a missed diagnosis can do its damage quietly. Behind it sits an outer four-year statute of repose, measured from the incident rather than discovery, which closes the claim whether or not it was ever discoverable.
Two carve-outs sit in the same paragraph. Where fraud, concealment or intentional misrepresentation of fact prevented discovery, the outer limit extends to seven years from the incident. Where the injured person is a child, the action may be brought before the child’s eighth birthday even if the repose period would otherwise have closed.
Procedure consumes part of the deadline as well. Chapter 766 requires presuit notice of intent and a 90-day investigation period before suit under § 766.106, and § 766.203(2) requires a verified written expert opinion corroborating reasonable grounds for the claim, measured against the standard of reasonably prudent similar health care providers under § 766.102(1). That opinion takes time, so a medical claim brought to a lawyer at twenty-two months is a harder problem than a crash claim at the same point. Whether your own period has started is a question about the record, and the discovery rule in a medical negligence case is where it belongs.
Wrongful Death, and Who Is Allowed to File It
A Florida wrongful death action is two years, at § 95.11(5)(e), brought within the framework of the Wrongful Death Act at § 768.19.
One other question here gets answered wrongly more often than the deadline does, and it decides whether an action can be started at all. The action is brought by the personal representative of the decedent’s estate, under § 768.20, and by nobody else. That representative is appointed through probate and brings a single action for the benefit of the survivors and the estate together.
Survivors are defined separately, at § 768.18(1), and include the spouse, the children, the parents and certain dependent relatives. They are beneficiaries who recover through the action rather than filing it. So “the family has two years to file” is wrong in a way that costs time: a family reading it may spend months believing the claim is theirs to bring while probate has not been opened. Appointing a representative is itself a court process, and it has to happen inside the two years, so identifying the representative who brings that action is the first step rather than a formality at the end.
Defective Products Are the One Four-Year Claim
An action for injury founded on the design, manufacture, distribution or sale of a defective product is four years, at § 95.11(3)(d). This is the genuine exception, and the one place where four years is the current answer to an injury question.
Behind it sits a repose provision at § 95.031(2)(b), and it is more conditional than most summaries admit. For a product with an expected useful life of ten years or less, which the statute conclusively presumes of most products, no action may be brought where the harm came from exposure to or use of the product more than twelve years after delivery to its first purchaser or lessee. Several categories are treated differently, including aircraft in commercial carriage, vessels over 100 gross tons, railroad equipment and improvements to real property, and a product warranted for longer takes a period matching the warranty. The repose does not apply where the claimant was exposed inside the period but the injury appeared afterwards, and it is tolled where the manufacturer knew of the defect and concealed it.
So four years is the beginning of the analysis here, not the end. The delivery date to the first owner can matter as much as the injury date, and on an older machine or vehicle component it can decide the case. If a defective part caused your injury, what a defective product claim involves goes deeper into the theory.
Nursing Home Claims
A claim for damages under Florida’s nursing home provisions is two years, at Fla. Stat. § 400.0236, running from the time the incident occurred or from the time it was discovered or should have been discovered with the exercise of due diligence. An outer limit of four years from the incident applies regardless.
Where fraudulent concealment or intentional misrepresentation of fact prevented discovery, the period extends forward two years from discovery, subject to a maximum of six years from the incident. Concealment is not unusual here, since the records are held by the facility that would be the defendant.
Be careful with the citation. Published material on this subject often reaches for Florida’s assisted living statute instead, which covers a different kind of provider and does not govern a nursing home claim.
A Claim Against a Government Body Runs on a Different Track
If your claim is against a city, a county, a school board or a state agency, get it in front of a lawyer this week rather than this month.
These claims run under § 768.28, a partial waiver of sovereign immunity rather than an ordinary limitations provision. It imposes presuit notice requirements that do not exist in a private claim and places statutory limits on recovery.
This page publishes no deadline and no figure for those claims, and that is deliberate. The rules carry exclusions that cannot be stated safely in general terms, and the failure mode is specific: a reader takes a general period from a web page, treats it as their date, and finds out afterwards that the notice was defective or a shorter period applied. By then there is no remedy.
Call (305) 299-2835. There is no charge for that conversation.
A Cruise Ticket Can Set a Shorter Deadline Than the Statute
A cruise passenger’s claim is one of the few places where the deadline is not in a Florida statute at all. It is in the ticket.
Cruise tickets are contracts, and they routinely impose their own limitation period for bringing suit, which can be far shorter than any statutory period. The same contract frequently requires written notice within a separate and earlier window, and usually names the court where suit must be brought. Those terms can be enforceable, and missing the notice window can end a claim before the limitations period is ever reached.
No period is published here, because the governing period is whatever your ticket says and tickets are not uniform. Find the ticket contract and have an attorney read it. That matters more in Miami than almost anywhere, and a claim arising on a cruise is where the analysis starts.
What Can Pause the Clock
A limited set of circumstances can extend or suspend a limitations period. They are narrow, fact-specific, and the burden of establishing one falls on the person relying on it.
Minority is one, and the medical malpractice provision carries its own version in the eighth-birthday rule above. Legal incapacity can have a similar effect, the discovery rule in medical negligence is the most commonly relied on of the group, and fraudulent concealment by a defendant can affect timing in several settings, including the nursing home provision above.
None of these is a plan. Courts read the exceptions narrowly, and an argument that the clock was paused is one you have to win, on evidence, after the ordinary deadline has passed.
What Happens When the Deadline Passes
The consequence is not that the case gets harder. The case ends.
Once the period has run, the defendant raises it and the claim is barred. Courts grant that motion in the ordinary case, and the strength of the facts makes no difference. Liability can be admitted, the injury can be permanent, the records can be immaculate, and none of it is reached.
There is an earlier consequence people rarely anticipate, and it is why a carrier watches the date so closely. A barred claim has no settlement value. Insurance is a business of assessing what a claim might cost at trial, and a claim that cannot go to trial cannot cost anything. So the practical effect arrives before the deadline does: as the date approaches with no suit filed, the incentive to pay anything falls away. Nobody announces this. The offers simply stop being offers.
Talk to Brian Before the Clock Runs Out
Brian Elstein spent years defending insurance claims before he began bringing them, and a missed limitations date was the cheapest available result on that side of the file. It required no investigation, no expert and no argument about fault. That is why this page leads with a date rather than a promise, and it is worth understanding how a carrier builds its side of the file while your claim is still fresh.
A first conversation needs three things: when you were hurt, what happened, and who else was involved. From that it is usually possible to say which provision governs your claim and what your actual date is, which is the one thing you cannot safely work out from a web page. If a crash caused the injury, an ordinary Miami crash claim covers that process, and if you are not sure what kind of claim you have, start with our Miami injury overview.
Cases are handled personally by Brian, from one office in South Miami, on a contingency fee. No fees unless we win. Call (305) 299-2835, days, nights or weekends, or send the firm your injury date.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a personal injury claim in Florida?
Two years from the date the claim accrued, for most injury claims founded on negligence, under Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(a). That covers crashes, falls on property and most other ordinary injury claims where a cause of action accrued on or after 24 March 2023. Several claim types run on different periods, so the safe step is to confirm which provision governs yours rather than to assume the general rule fits.
Why do so many websites still say four years?
Because it was four years until House Bill 837, chapter 2023-15, took effect on 24 March 2023 and reduced the period for most negligence actions to two. Material written before that date was correct when written and was never revised. The same bill renumbered section 95.11, which is why some pages now state two years while citing a paragraph that no longer contains the negligence rule.
Is there a two-year subsection (4) of section 95.11?
No. Section 95.11 is organised by duration, subsection (3) is the four-year subsection and subsection (5) is the two-year subsection. Negligence is at § 95.11(5)(a). Before HB 837 it sat inside the four-year subsection at (3)(a), and an intermediate numbering placed it at (4)(a). A page citing either was written against a superseded version of the statute.
Does the two-year period start on the day I was hurt?
Usually, though not always. Section 95.031 provides that the period runs from accrual, and that a cause of action accrues when the last element constituting it occurs. In an ordinary crash that is the moment of impact, so the injury date and the accrual date are the same. In medical negligence and in nursing home claims the period can instead run from when the injury was discovered or should have been discovered, which is a question about the record rather than the calendar.
My claim is about a defective product. Is that different?
Yes. An injury claim founded on the design, manufacture, distribution or sale of a product is four years, under § 95.11(3)(d), and it is the one injury claim on which four years is the current answer. A repose provision at § 95.031(2)(b) also applies, generally cutting off a claim where the harm came from use of the product more than twelve years after delivery to its first purchaser, with several categories treated differently and with exceptions for a late-appearing injury and a concealed defect. The delivery date can therefore matter as much as the injury date. One warning travels with that longer period: it belongs to the product claim and not to the injury, so a crash producing both a negligence claim against a driver and a product claim against a manufacturer runs two clocks at once. Treating the longer one as the deadline for both is how the claim against the driver expires while a part is still being investigated.
Who files a wrongful death claim, and how long do they have?
The action is brought by the personal representative of the estate under § 768.20, not by the spouse, the children or the parents, who are beneficiaries under § 768.18(1) and recover through the action. The deadline is two years under § 95.11(5)(e). Appointing a personal representative goes through probate and takes time, so it needs to start well inside the two years rather than at the end of them.
What if my claim is against a city or a state agency?
Those claims run under § 768.28 and follow a different track, with presuit notice requirements that private claims do not have and statutory limits on recovery. Whether it applies, and what the timing is, depends on the entity and the circumstances, which is why no period is quoted on this page. If a government body may be responsible for your injury, treat it as urgent and have it assessed immediately rather than working from a general figure.
