The Maryland Statute of Limitations Guide: Three Years, the Discovery Rule, Minors, and the LGTCA Notice Trap
Every right the law gives an injured person comes with an expiration date. Miss it, and it does not matter how badly you were hurt or how clearly the other side was at fault — the case is over before it starts. Maryland's deadlines look simple from a distance ("three years") and get complicated fast up close. This guide covers the rules as they stand in 2018, including the notice requirement that quietly kills more government cases than any other.
The general rule: three years
Under Md. Code, Courts & Judicial Proceedings § 5-101, a civil action must be filed within three years from the date it accrues. For a car crash or a fall, accrual is usually the date of the injury. Three years sounds generous; it is not. Treatment takes time, insurers stall, and the witnesses and camera footage you will need disappear long before the deadline does.
The discovery rule: when you couldn't have known
Maryland's high court — the Court of Appeals of Maryland — has long held that a claim accrues when the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known of the wrong (Poffenberger v. Risser, 1981). If a surgeon leaves something behind, or an exposure causes a disease that surfaces years later, the clock generally starts when you discover (or should have discovered) the injury and its probable cause — not when the wrong occurred. The discovery rule is a shield for the blamelessly ignorant, not for those who sit on their rights: once you are on inquiry notice, the clock runs.
Special rules that change the math
| Claim / claimant | Deadline (as of 2018) |
|---|---|
| Most negligence claims (crash, fall, etc.) | 3 years from accrual — CJP § 5-101 |
| Minors | Clock generally doesn't start until age 18; suit by age 21 — CJP § 5-201 |
| Medical malpractice | Earlier of 5 years from injury or 3 years from discovery — CJP § 5-109 |
| Med-mal injury to a young child | Special tolling — the § 5-109 clock does not begin for a child under 11 (under 16 for certain claims) |
| Wrongful death | 3 years from the date of death — CJP § 3-904(g) |
| Claim against local government (LGTCA) | Suit deadlines above PLUS written notice within 1 year of injury — CJP § 5-304 |
| Claim against the State (MTCA) | Written claim to the State Treasurer within 1 year |
The LGTCA notice: the one-year trap
If your claim is against a county, Baltimore City, a local school board, or a local government employee acting in the scope of employment, Maryland's Local Government Tort Claims Act adds a requirement that has nothing to do with filing suit: you must give written notice of the claim within one year after the injury, delivered to the specific official the statute designates (for example, the county solicitor or county attorney). For injuries before October 1, 2015, the window was even shorter — 180 days — and the one-year period applies to claims arising on or after that date.
The notice is not a formality. Courts can excuse a defective notice only for good cause and only where the government isn't prejudiced, and plaintiffs who assumed "three years" have lost otherwise strong cases at the courthouse door. Nor is it always obvious that a defendant is a local government actor: the driver who rear-ended you may turn out to be a county employee on duty, the property where you fell may be leased by a school board, and by the time discovery reveals it, the notice window may have closed.
When the defendant hides the ball
One more tolling doctrine deserves mention: fraudulent concealment. Under CJP § 5-203, when a defendant's fraud keeps the plaintiff from discovering the claim, the clock does not run until the fraud was or should have been discovered. It is a narrow doctrine — ordinary silence is not fraud — but in cases involving altered records or active cover-ups, it can save a claim that looks expired on the surface. The LGTCA also caps the local government's liability — $400,000 per individual claim and $800,000 per occurrence for claims arising on or after October 1, 2015. Claims against the State itself travel under a different statute (the Maryland Tort Claims Act), with its own one-year claim-submission requirement to the Treasurer and its own caps.
What this means for injured people in Maryland
The practical lesson is blunt: the day you are seriously hurt, more than one clock may start running, and the shortest one controls. Anyone injured by a police cruiser, on school property, in a county building, or by any government actor should treat the deadline as one year, not three — because for notice purposes, it is. And because the discovery rule, minority tolling, and the med-mal five-year outer limit interact in genuinely tricky ways, deadline questions are among the few in law where a quick consultation can be worth everything.
We calendar these dates the day a client walks in. You should never learn about a notice statute for the first time from a motion to dismiss.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.
Update: Since this post was written, the Court of Appeals of Maryland has been renamed — see Maryland's High Courts Get New Names — and police-misconduct claims received higher LGTCA caps under Maryland's 2021 Police Accountability Act. For a deeper dive on the LGTCA notice requirement, see Maryland's LGTCA Notice Letter.