How Long Do I Have to File an Injury Claim in Louisiana?

Louisiana changed this rule in 2024, and a lot of people still have it wrong

Louisiana was for decades a one-year state — the shortest personal injury deadline in the country. That changed. Act 423 of the 2024 session repealed Civil Code articles 3492 and 3493 and enacted article 3493.1, which sets a two-year liberative prescriptive period for delictual actions.

Which one applies to you

• Injury on or after July 1, 2024 — two years from the day the injury occurred or the damage was sustained.
• Injury before July 1, 2024 — the old one-year period. The change is prospective only; it did not revive anything that had already run.

If your accident is anywhere near that line, do not guess. Call and we will pin the date down with you.

Deadlines that come due sooner

The prescriptive period is the outside limit, not the working deadline. Several things come due well before it:

• Claims against public entities — the state, a parish, a city, a school board, a public hospital — can carry their own notice requirements with much shorter windows.
• Property insurance claims commonly contain a contractual limitation period in the policy itself, frequently two years from the date of loss for a named storm and sometimes shorter for other perils. That clock runs whether or not the claim is still under review.
• Uninsured motorist claims are governed by your policy and by statute, and the interaction with the underlying tort claim is not intuitive.
• Evidence deadlines are the real ones. Surveillance video, trucking logs, and vehicle black box data disappear in weeks or months, long before any legal deadline.

What “filing” means

Prescription is interrupted by filing suit in a court of competent jurisdiction and venue — not by opening a claim, not by negotiating with an adjuster, and not by the adjuster telling you they are still evaluating. Claims have been lost by people who were actively talking to an insurer the whole time.

If you think you may already be past it

Call anyway. There are doctrines that can suspend or interrupt prescription in specific circumstances, and the date the clock started is not always the date of the accident. It costs nothing to have someone look at it, and the alternative is never finding out.