The direct answer: For an injury that occurs on or after July 1, 2024, Louisiana gives an injured person two years from the date of injury to file most personal injury lawsuits, under La. Civil Code art. 3493.1, enacted by Act 423 of 2024. For an injury that occurred before July 1, 2024, the older one-year period in La. Civil Code art. 3492 still applies, because the new two-year period applies only prospectively. Louisiana calls this deadline "prescription," not a "statute of limitations." Several claims run on their own separate clocks regardless of which regime otherwise applies, most importantly medical malpractice, which keeps a one-year discovery period and a three-year absolute cutoff under La. R.S. 9:5628, and wrongful death and survival actions, which follow their own rule tied partly to the date of death. Because so many exceptions exist, anyone unsure which deadline governs a specific injury should confirm it directly rather than assume either the one-year or two-year number applies.
Louisiana had used a one-year prescriptive period for personal injury and property-damage claims since 1825. In 2024, the legislature changed that default for the first time in nearly two centuries, but only for injuries occurring after a specific date, which means both the old and new rules are still relevant today depending on when the injury happened.
Act 423 of 2024 created La. Civil Code art. 3493.1, which provides that delictual actions, meaning claims arising from an offense or quasi-offense such as negligence, are subject to a liberative prescription of two years, running from the day the injury or damage is sustained. This new article applies prospectively only, meaning it governs causes of action arising on or after its effective date of July 1, 2024. Article 3493.1 also includes a narrower exception: prescription does not run against minors or interdicts in an action for permanent disability brought under the Louisiana Products Liability Act. Outside that narrow exception, Louisiana's general rule is that prescription runs against minors and interdicts the same as anyone else, under the Civil Code's general prescription article, La. Civil Code art. 3468, unless a specific statute says otherwise.
If the injury occurred before July 1, 2024, the two-year period does not apply retroactively, and the case is instead governed by the prior one-year prescriptive period found in La. Civil Code art. 3492, which covers delictual actions and actions for damage to immovable (real) property, running from the day the injury or damage was sustained. This means two people injured in similar accidents, one in June 2024 and one in August 2024, can have entirely different deadlines to sue, and the date of the injury itself, not the date a claim is filed or a lawsuit is contemplated, is what determines which article controls.
Because Louisiana is a civil-law state, its terminology differs from the other forty-nine states in ways that matter for anyone searching for information online. "Prescription" is the Civil Code's term for the running of a deadline that extinguishes a right to sue, and "liberative prescription" specifically describes prescription that extinguishes a cause of action through the passage of time, which is the closest Louisiana concept to what a common-law state calls a statute of limitations. National legal websites written for a general American audience frequently use "statute of limitations" language that does not map cleanly onto Louisiana's Civil Code structure, and, especially since the 2024 change, a national source's stated deadline for Louisiana can simply be out of date.
The general two-year (or, for older injuries, one-year) rule is a default. Several categories of claims are governed by their own, separate prescriptive rules that the 2024 change did not touch.
Claims against a healthcare provider for medical malpractice are governed by La. R.S. 9:5628, not by the general delictual prescription articles. Under that statute, a claim must generally be brought within one year of the date of the alleged act, omission, or neglect, or within one year of the date it was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered, but in no event more than three years from the date of the alleged act, omission, or neglect, regardless of when it was discovered. Because R.S. 9:5628 is a special statute directed specifically at claims arising from patient care, Louisiana's general two-year rule under art. 3493.1 does not change or extend these medical-malpractice deadlines.
A wrongful death claim under La. Civil Code art. 2315.2, and a survival action under La. Civil Code art. 2315.1, are not governed by the same article as an ordinary personal injury claim, because they involve a death rather than only an injury. Following 2024 legislation, for a death occurring on or after July 1, 2024, these actions prescribe in whichever period is longer: one year from the date of death, or two years from the day the injury giving rise to the death was sustained. Because a person can be injured and die from that injury at a later date, this rule requires checking both the date of injury and the date of death, not just one or the other, to know which deadline actually controls, and these articles have continued to be refined by the legislature since 2024.
Even before the 2024 general change, Louisiana already provided a two-year prescriptive period, longer than the old one-year default, for a delictual action arising from an act defined as a crime of violence under Chapter 1 of Title 14 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes. That rule, now found at La. Civil Code art. 3493.3, was previously numbered art. 3493.10 before Act 423 of 2024 renumbered the prescription articles, and a separate, longer prescriptive period applies specifically to claims arising from sexual assault. Because this two-year period for crimes of violence already existed before 2024, an injury from a criminal act occurring before July 1, 2024, may still carry a two-year deadline even though an ordinary negligence claim from the same period would only have one year.
The same general prescriptive periods, one year or two years depending on when the injury occurred, apply to a personal injury claim against the State of Louisiana or a political subdivision such as a parish or municipality; Louisiana does not require a separate, shorter pre-suit notice of claim before filing a tort suit against a government entity the way some other states do. Suits against a government defendant do carry their own procedural rule, however: under La. R.S. 13:5107(D), once the suit is filed, the plaintiff must request service of citation on the government defendant within ninety days, and failing to do so can result in dismissal of that defendant from the case even if the underlying prescriptive deadline was met.
Even within whichever general rule applies, prescription is not always a fixed, unyielding number of days from the date of injury.
Louisiana courts recognize a jurisprudential doctrine called contra non valentem, meaning prescription does not run against a person who could not reasonably have brought suit. Courts have applied this doctrine in a handful of specific, narrow circumstances, including where the injured person neither knew, nor reasonably could have known through diligence, that they had a cause of action, sometimes called the discovery rule, and where the defendant concealed the wrongful conduct and thereby prevented the plaintiff from acting. This doctrine is applied narrowly and fact-specifically, and Louisiana courts have expressly held that it does not extend the three-year absolute cutoff for medical malpractice claims under R.S. 9:5628, even where the discovery rule would otherwise seem to apply.
Between the July 1, 2024 cutover date, the separate rules for medical malpractice, wrongful death, survival actions, and crimes of violence, and the possibility that a jurisprudential doctrine like contra non valentem applies to a specific set of facts, the safest approach for anyone with a potential Louisiana injury claim is to identify the exact date of the injury (and, for a death, the date of death), identify which category of claim is actually involved, and confirm the applicable deadline for that specific claim rather than relying on a single general number.
Someone injured in a vehicle collision on I-20 near Monroe, a workplace incident in West Monroe, or a fall on a property in Ruston, Bastrop, or Farmerville faces the same statewide prescriptive rules described above; Louisiana's prescription periods are set by the Civil Code and Revised Statutes, not by Ouachita Parish or any other parish, so the calendar math is identical across northeast Louisiana. What differs locally is simply the practical urgency of acting early: gathering accident reports, medical records, and witness information while memories and evidence are still fresh matters just as much as knowing the correct filing deadline, particularly because a claim that looks straightforward at first can later turn out to involve a government defendant, a healthcare provider, or a death, each of which can shift which prescriptive rule actually applies.
Because Louisiana's one-year deadline stood essentially unchanged for nearly two hundred years before Act 423 of 2024, a large amount of existing legal content online, including national websites and articles written before mid-2024, still states a flat one-year rule for Louisiana personal injury claims. That statement is no longer accurate for an injury occurring on or after July 1, 2024, even though it remains correct for an injury before that date. Anyone researching this topic should check the publication date of a source, and, more importantly, confirm the rule directly against the injury's own date rather than relying on an older article's stated number.
Louisiana's personal injury deadline changed in a fundamental way in 2024: an injury on or after July 1, 2024 generally has two years to bring suit under the new La. Civil Code art. 3493.1, while an injury before that date generally still has only one year under the older La. Civil Code art. 3492, and several categories of claims, especially medical malpractice and wrongful death, run on their own separate rules that this general change did not alter. Given how many variables affect the real deadline in a specific case, this article states the general framework only and should not be read as confirming the deadline for any particular claim; anyone with a potential injury claim in Louisiana should confirm the applicable prescriptive period for their specific situation as soon as possible, since a missed deadline generally cannot be undone. Residents of Monroe and throughout northeast Louisiana with questions about a potential injury claim are welcome to contact Hudson, Potts & Bernstein through our contact page to discuss their situation.
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