For Most Injury Claims, the Answer Is Now Two Years
If you were injured in Louisiana on or after July 1, 2024, you generally have two years from the date of the injury to file suit. That is a change from the old rule, and it is a change many people have not heard about.
Louisiana used to give injury victims just one year, one of the shortest deadlines in the country. That one year period still applies to injuries that happened before July 1, 2024. For anything after that date, the period is two years.
This matters enormously if you have been sitting on a claim. People who were told, or who read somewhere, that their year had run out may still have a live case. If you assumed your claim was dead, it is worth checking the date before you accept that.
Two years is also not as long as it sounds, and several important categories of claim did not change at all. Some still run on one year, and missing those is just as final as it ever was.
What Changed on July 1, 2024
Act 423 of the 2024 legislative session repealed Louisiana Civil Code article 3492, the article that set the one year period, and replaced it with article 3493.1. The new article reads that delictual actions, which is the civil law term for claims based on someone else’s fault, are subject to a liberative prescription of two years.
The change applies going forward only. Act 423 says so expressly. The dividing line is the date of the injury, not the date you file or the date you hire a lawyer.
So the rule works like this. Injured on June 30, 2024 or earlier, you had one year. Injured on July 1, 2024 or later, you have two. A crash on the last day of June and a crash on the first day of July were governed by completely different deadlines, which is exactly the kind of trap that produces missed claims.
One caution worth stating plainly. Because article 3493.1 is still relatively new, there is not yet a developed body of Louisiana appellate decisions interpreting it. The language about when the clock starts is identical to the old article, so the existing case law should carry over. Should, not certainly. That is a reason to treat deadline questions as something to confirm rather than assume.
Why Louisiana Calls It a Prescriptive Period
Most states use the phrase statute of limitations. Louisiana says prescriptive period, a reflection of the state’s civil law tradition, which descends from French and Spanish law rather than English common law.
The practical concept is the same. It is the window during which an injured person must file suit. Let it close and the claim is generally gone, no matter how strong it was.
The vocabulary difference is not merely academic. Louisiana’s rules on when a period is suspended, interrupted, or renounced come from the Civil Code and follow their own logic. Advice written for other states, and general search results that do not distinguish between them, frequently do not apply here.
The Claims That Still Run on One Year
This is the part that gets lost in coverage of the 2024 change. The two year period applies to ordinary injury claims based on fault. Several significant categories were untouched, because they are governed by their own separate statutes rather than by the Civil Code article that changed.
Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice in Louisiana remains at one year. Louisiana Revised Statutes 9:5628 requires that a claim be filed within one year of the act, omission, or neglect, or within one year of the date of discovery.
There is also an outer limit. Even where a patient discovers the problem late, the discovery rule cannot extend a claim beyond three years from the date of the act, omission, or neglect.
That statute was not amended by Act 423. Medical malpractice stayed at one year because a specific statute governing a specific subject displaces the general Civil Code rule. Anyone telling you that medical malpractice in Louisiana is now a two year claim is mistaken, and acting on that could end a legitimate case.
Note also that this statute applies by its own terms to minors and to people under a disability, so a child’s malpractice claim does not get extra time on that basis.
Workers’ Compensation
Workers’ compensation also remains at one year. Under Louisiana Revised Statutes 23:1209, a claim must generally be filed within one year of the accident. Where benefits have been paid, the period generally runs one year from the last payment, with a longer window in certain supplemental earnings benefit situations. Where an injury does not appear right away, the period runs from when it develops, but in no event more than three years from the accident.
A comp claim is not a fault based claim. It is a statutory right created in exchange for the employer’s immunity from being sued in tort, which is why the 2024 change did not reach it.
Here is the practical point that matters most, and it catches injured workers constantly. One accident can produce two claims running on two different clocks. The workers’ compensation claim against your employer runs on one year. A separate injury claim against a negligent third party, a subcontractor, a delivery driver, an equipment manufacturer, is an ordinary fault claim and runs on two years. Treating them as one deadline is how good comp claims get dismissed. Our discussion of workplace injury claims compared to workers’ compensation covers how these run alongside each other.
Wrongful Death and Survival Actions Follow a Third Rule
Neither one year nor two years is the right answer here, and this changed again in 2025.
Act 176 of the 2025 legislative session amended the wrongful death and survival action articles. Under the current version of article 2315.2, a wrongful death action prescribes one year from the death of the deceased or two years from the day the injury was sustained, whichever period is longer. The survival action article now works the same way.
The whichever is longer language does real work. Where death is immediate, the two prongs collapse together and the effective period is two years from the accident. Where someone survives an injury for a long time before dying, the one year from death prong can be the longer of the two and becomes the operative deadline.
Medical malpractice wrongful death and survival claims are treated differently and remain at one year.
These provisions took effect August 1, 2025. The act does not contain an express statement about how it applies to deaths that occurred before that date, so the safest way to read it is that it governs deaths occurring on or after August 1, 2025. If you are dealing with a death that falls near that line, that is a question to put to a lawyer rather than resolve from an article. Our overview of who can file a wrongful death claim in Louisiana addresses who holds the right to bring these actions.
When the Clock Starts, and the Narrow Exceptions
For ordinary injury claims, article 3493.1 says prescription begins to run on the day the injury or damage is sustained. Not the day you discovered it, and not the day you understood how serious it was. The day it happened.
That is worth emphasizing because the article contains no discovery rule. The legislature knew how to write one when it wanted to, and did so elsewhere. The article covering damage to immovable property expressly runs from when the owner acquired or should have acquired knowledge of the damage. The medical malpractice statute expressly includes discovery. The ordinary injury article does not.
Contra Non Valentem
Where a delayed start is recognized for an ordinary injury claim, it comes through a judge made doctrine called contra non valentem, a Latin phrase meaning that prescription does not run against a person who is unable to act.
Louisiana courts apply it in four situations: where some legal cause prevented the courts from acting on the claim, where some condition connected with the proceedings prevented the plaintiff from suing, where the defendant did something to effectively prevent the plaintiff from bringing the claim, and where the cause of action was not known or reasonably knowable to the plaintiff.
Two things to understand about it. First, it is an exception applied narrowly, and the injured person carries the burden of establishing it. Second, simply not knowing about the deadline is not a basis for it. It is not a safety net, and building a plan around it is not a plan.
One point of genuine practical use sits inside the third category. A defendant who actively conceals their identity or whereabouts may fall within it. A defendant who merely moves out of Louisiana does not, which brings us to a common misunderstanding.
Prescription Runs Against Minors and Absent Defendants in Louisiana
Louisiana law here is the opposite of what many people assume, and the assumption is a costly one.
Civil Code article 3468 provides that prescription runs against absent persons and incompetents, including minors and interdicts, unless an exception is established by legislation.
Read that carefully, because it means two things at once.
It means prescription generally does run against an injured child. Louisiana is not a state where the clock waits until a child turns eighteen. If a ten year old is injured, the claim is generally subject to the same two year period as anyone else’s, and a parent or guardian needs to act on the child’s behalf within it. There are narrow statutory exceptions, including claims for abuse of a minor and certain product liability claims involving permanent disability, and there is a separate rule that suspends prescription between a child and their own parent or caretaker. None of that creates a general rule that childhood pauses the clock.
It also means a defendant leaving Louisiana does not stop the clock. The old rule that prescription did not run against absentees was abolished in the state’s 1982 revision. Louisiana’s long arm statute reaches nonresident defendants, so being out of state does not prevent suit from being filed.
If a child in your family was injured and someone told you there was no rush because they are still a minor, please have that checked promptly.
Government, Product, and Property Claims
Three categories generate persistent confusion, so it is worth being precise.
Claims against government entities in Louisiana are subject to the same prescriptive period as claims against private parties. There is no general requirement that you send a written notice of claim to the state, a parish, a municipality, or a school board before filing suit. Louisiana genuinely differs from many neighboring states on this, and advice written for those states does not transfer.
What does exist is a service requirement after filing. When you sue a governmental entity you must request service of citation within ninety days of filing, and the statute provides that a filing dismissed for that failure does not interrupt prescription as to that entity. So while there is no notice you must send beforehand, there is a step immediately after filing that can quietly destroy an otherwise timely claim. Governmental claims also carry statutory caps on general damages and restrictions on jury trials that do not apply to private defendants.
Product liability claims are now subject to the two year period. The Louisiana Products Liability Act does not contain a prescriptive period of its own; it defines the conduct as fault, which makes these ordinary delictual actions. Importantly, Louisiana has no statute of repose for product liability. There is no outer deadline measured from the date a product was first sold. A claim involving an older product may still be viable, and the age of a product goes to questions of defect and causation rather than operating as an automatic time bar. Our guide to product liability in Louisiana covers what these claims require.
Property damage claims are also two years. Damage to immovable property has its own article, which runs the two years from the day the owner acquired or should have acquired knowledge of the damage, one of the few places Louisiana writes a discovery rule directly into the statute. Damage to movable property is an ordinary delictual action on the standard two year period. If your claim arises from a fall or an injury on someone else’s property, premises liability in Louisiana sets out how those cases work.
What Happens If You Miss the Deadline
The consequence is severe and usually final. If you file after the period has run, the defendant will raise prescription, and if the court agrees the claim has prescribed, the case is dismissed. The strength of the underlying case does not save it.
Louisiana courts enforce these periods strictly and judges have limited discretion to permit late filings. The exceptions described above are the available avenues, and each requires specific factual support rather than a general appeal to fairness.
This is why the two year change is worth acting on rather than filing away. It moved the deadline in the right direction for injured people, but it did not move every deadline, and it did nothing for injuries before July 1, 2024.
Two Years Goes Faster Than It Sounds
An extra year is meaningful. It is not room to wait.
Consider what happens after a serious injury. There may be weeks in a hospital, multiple procedures, and months of rehabilitation. You may be out of work and managing the household consequences of that. Legal deadlines are not what anyone is thinking about.
Meanwhile, a case takes time to build properly. Evidence has to be preserved before it disappears, and surveillance footage and vehicle data often disappear within weeks. Medical records have to be gathered, treatment has to progress far enough to know what the injury actually is, and experts may need to review it. Insurers frequently let negotiations run long, and there is no version of that process where the delay works in your favor. We have written about how adjusters work to reduce a Louisiana injury claim, and time pressure is one of the tools.
All of that has to fit inside the period. Someone who first calls a lawyer twenty two months after a crash is not bringing a two year case. They are bringing a two month case. Our overview of how long a personal injury case typically takes gives a realistic picture of the stages involved.
If You Are Unsure About Your Deadline, Ask
Deadline questions have exact answers, and they depend on the date of your injury, the type of claim, and who the defendant is. Those are things a lawyer can tell you quickly.
Arnona Rose represents injured people throughout the Greater New Orleans area, including New Orleans and Metairie. Consultations are free, and we work on a contingency fee basis, so you pay no attorney fee unless we recover for you.
If you were injured after July 1, 2024 and assumed your one year window had closed, that assumption may be wrong. Small firm, big difference means someone here will actually look at your dates rather than turn you away over a rule of thumb. Contact our office and we will tell you where you stand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does filing an insurance claim stop the prescriptive period from running?
No. Reporting a claim and negotiating with an adjuster does not pause or extend the period. Insurance negotiations and the legal deadline run on separate tracks entirely, and an open claim file offers no protection. Suit must be filed within the applicable period regardless of how cooperative the insurer appears. Some adjusters are well aware of the deadline and are in no hurry to resolve a claim as it approaches. If your period is running short and the claim is unresolved, that is a reason to move rather than wait.
I assumed my one-year deadline passed. Could my claim still be alive?
Possibly, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming. If your injury occurred on or after July 1, 2024, the two year period applies even if someone told you otherwise at the time or you read an older article saying one year. A claim you wrote off in month thirteen or month twenty may still be within the period. The only way to know is to check the injury date against the correct rule for your claim type. That is a short conversation, and there is no cost to having it.
Does filing a lawsuit mean my case is going to trial?
No, and this misunderstanding causes real harm near a deadline. Filing suit preserves your rights; it does not commit you to a trial. Most personal injury cases resolve through settlement, and a large share of them settle after suit has been filed rather than before. Filing often improves the negotiating posture, because it signals the claim is serious and imposes a schedule on the other side. If a deadline is approaching while negotiations continue, filing is usually the way to protect the claim without ending discussions.
What is the deadline for an uninsured motorist claim against my own insurer?
Uninsured motorist claims have their own statute, and the period is two years from the date of the accident. That is a separate deadline from your claim against the at-fault driver, and it applies to the claim you bring against your own insurance company when the other driver has no coverage or not enough. Doctrines that interrupt or suspend prescription can still apply in particular circumstances. Because these claims often surface late, once it becomes clear the at-fault driver’s policy is too small, the remaining time can be shorter than expected.
Does requesting a medical review panel extend my malpractice deadline?
It suspends the period rather than restarting it, which is an important difference. A valid request suspends prescription until a set time after notice of the panel’s opinion, at which point you have the time that was remaining when you filed, not a fresh year. There is also a filing fee that must be paid within a short window; if it is not, the request can be treated as invalid and without effect, meaning it never suspended anything. This is an area where small procedural missteps have ended otherwise strong cases.
What if several parties are responsible and their deadlines differ?
This is common and it requires care. A single incident can produce claims against a private driver, an employer, a manufacturer, and a government entity, and the applicable rules are not uniform across them. A workers’ compensation claim runs on one year while a third party claim from the same accident runs on two. A malpractice claim against a treating provider runs on its own one year period. The practical approach is to identify every potential defendant early and work to the shortest applicable deadline rather than the longest.
About the Author
Toni R. Arnona, Esq. is a partner at Arnona Rose, LLC, a personal injury and family law firm in the Greater New Orleans area. A New Orleans native, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in French and Linguistics from Newcomb College at Tulane University and her Juris Doctor from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2009. She was admitted to the Louisiana Bar that same year, after interning with Judge Robin M. Giarrusso and later clerking for Judge Lloyd J. Medley, Jr. in the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans. Toni joined Arnona Rose in 2014, where she focuses her practice on personal injury and family law. She is a member of the American Bar Association, the Louisiana Bar Association, the Jefferson Parish Bar Association, and the Federal Bar Association.