Nearly everyone injured in California is told they have two years to bring a claim. That is true, and for most cases it is the only deadline that matters. But if a city, a county, a transit agency, a school district or the state had a hand in what happened to you, a second and much shorter deadline applies first, and it can expire while you are still in physical therapy.
The deadline is six months. Not to file a lawsuit, but to present a written claim to the agency itself. Miss it and the two year statute of limitations becomes irrelevant, because the courthouse door closes before you ever reach it. This is what the requirement actually involves in Los Angeles County, and where people lose otherwise strong cases.
The deadline most people are told about does not apply here
California’s general rule is that an action for injury to or the death of a person must be brought within two years. That comes from Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1[1], and it is the figure you will see on essentially every website discussing injury claims in this state.
Claims against public entities sit under a separate framework, the Government Claims Act, found at Government Code sections 810 and following[2]. Under section 911.2[3], a claim relating to a cause of action for death, injury to a person, or injury to personal property must be presented no later than six months after the cause of action accrues. Other kinds of claims, including most contract and real property claims, get one year.
Two points about that sentence do most of the damage in practice. First, “presented” means delivered to the agency, on its process, within the six months. Preparing a claim does not count. Discussing it with a lawyer does not count. Reporting the incident to the agency’s risk department, or to a police officer at the scene, is not presenting a claim. Second, section 945.4[4] bars a lawsuit entirely unless a claim was properly presented and then rejected or deemed rejected. The claim is not a formality that runs alongside the case. It is the gate.
How often a public entity is actually involved
People assume this rule is for unusual cases. In Los Angeles County it comes up constantly, and often in situations that look like ordinary private disputes at first glance.
A collision with a Metro bus involves the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. So does a fall on a Metro platform or an escalator. A crash caused by a police vehicle, a fire engine, a street sweeper, a city maintenance truck or a school bus involves whichever entity employs the driver. A trip and fall on a broken sidewalk or a raised tree root usually involves the city that owns the sidewalk. A crash caused by a pothole, a missing stop sign, a signal stuck on the wrong phase, an unlit intersection, a badly designed merge or vegetation grown over a sight line involves the entity responsible for that stretch of road, which might be a city, the county, or Caltrans depending on where the line falls.
Injuries at a public school, a community college, a county hospital, a public pool or a county park all fall inside the Act. So do injuries caused by a DASH shuttle, a Burbank Bus vehicle, a Metrolink train, or a Foothill Transit coach, each of which is a different entity with its own claims process.
The practical problem is that road authority in Los Angeles County is genuinely hard to determine from the outside. A single corridor can change hands more than once. Streets in Burbank may be city maintained, while an intersection a few hundred feet away sits under county or state control, and a freeway ramp belongs to Caltrans while the surface street it feeds does not. Nothing at the scene tells you which. That determination has to be made deliberately, and it has to be made quickly, because the clock is already running.
What the six months requires, and who you file with
A claim is a written document presented to the correct public entity. Most agencies publish their own form, and using it is usually the cleanest route. Los Angeles County Metro, for instance, routes claims through its Legal Services office[5]. The City of Los Angeles takes claims through the City Clerk[6] rather than the City Attorney, which catches people out, because the City Attorney is the office they have heard of. The City accepts a claim online, by mail or in person, but not by email or fax.
The single most expensive mistake in this area is filing against the wrong entity, or against only one of several. Each public entity is a separate defendant with its own claims process, and the six month period runs against each of them independently and simultaneously. Presenting a claim to the City of Los Angeles does nothing to preserve a claim against the County, against Metro, against a school district, or against Caltrans. There is no forwarding. An agency that receives a claim which is not its responsibility is under no obligation to tell you whose responsibility it is, and by the time it comes back the window may have closed.
Where responsibility is genuinely unclear, the conservative approach is to present a claim to every entity that plausibly had control, and to sort out which one is actually liable later. Over-filing costs a small amount of administrative effort. Under-filing ends the case.
What the claim must say, and the trap in the damages field
Government Code section 910[7] sets out what a claim has to contain: the claimant’s name and address, an address for notices, the date, place and circumstances of the incident, a general description of the injury or loss so far as it is known, the names of the public employees involved if known, and the amount claimed.
That last element contains a genuine trap. Under section 910, if the total claimed is less than ten thousand dollars, the claim must state a specific dollar figure, including the estimated amount of any future loss so far as it is known. If the amount claimed exceeds ten thousand dollars, the claim must not state a specific figure, and instead must indicate whether the case would be a limited civil case. Getting this backwards is common, and the consequence is not academic. Under section 910.8, an agency that considers a claim insufficient can return it as defective, and the six month deadline continues to run in the meantime.
This is why a claim written quickly and in general terms is not automatically safer than a detailed one. A claim that is vague about the incident may fail to give the agency enough to investigate. A claim that names the wrong figure in the damages field invites a defect notice. Both problems consume time that the statute does not give back.
What happens after you file, and the second clock nobody mentions
Once a claim is presented, the agency’s board has 45 days to act on it under section 912.4[8]. It can grant the claim, deny it, or do nothing. If it does nothing within 45 days, the claim is deemed rejected by operation of law, which means you are free to file suit without waiting for a letter.
Then a second limitations period starts, and this is where careful cases still get lost. Under section 945.6[9], if the agency serves written notice of its action in the form required by section 913, suit must be filed within six months of the date that notice was personally delivered or deposited in the mail. If the agency never serves proper written notice, the period is two years from accrual of the cause of action.
The temptation is obvious. If no rejection letter arrives, why not rely on the two year fallback? The answer is that the fallback depends on a fact you cannot verify from your side of the transaction. Agencies keep proofs of service. A rejection letter that was mailed but never received still starts the six month clock, and an argument about whether it arrived is an argument you can lose on a clerk’s declaration. The safe practice is to calendar six months from the date the claim was presented and work to that date, treating the two year period as a backstop rather than a plan.
If the six months has already passed
There is a route, and it is narrow.
Section 911.4[10] allows a written application to the agency for leave to present a late claim. The application must state the reason for the delay, must have the proposed claim attached, and must be presented within a reasonable time not exceeding one year after the cause of action accrued. Once that year is gone, neither the agency nor a court generally has power to grant relief, which makes the one year mark a genuine hard stop rather than a soft one.
Section 911.6 sets out when the agency must grant the application. The grounds include failure to present the claim through mistake, inadvertence, surprise or excusable neglect where the agency was not prejudiced in its defense; the injured person having been a minor throughout the whole of the six month period; physical or mental incapacity during that period; and death of the injured person. Incapacity has its own inner deadline, requiring the application within six months of the incapacity ending or a year after accrual, whichever comes first.
If the agency denies the application, section 946.6 permits a petition to the superior court for relief from the claim presentation requirement. That petition must be filed within six months after the agency mails its notice of denial. Note the pattern: six months to present, forty five days for the agency to act, six months to sue, one year for a late application, six months to petition after denial. Three separate six month windows, each capable of ending a case on its own, and none of them the two year deadline most people have in mind.
Excusable neglect is also a narrower concept than it sounds. Not knowing about the six month rule is generally not excusable neglect. Courts scrutinize the stated reason, and the safest position is never to need this section at all.
A timely claim is not enough on its own
Clearing the deadline gets you through the gate. What you then have to prove is different from an ordinary negligence case, because public entities are not liable at common law. Under Government Code section 815[11], a public entity is liable only where a statute makes it so.
Two statutes carry most injury cases. The first is Vehicle Code section 17001, which provides that a public entity is liable for death or injury proximately caused by the negligent operation of a motor vehicle by an employee acting within the scope of employment[12]. This is the provision that governs bus collisions, police and city vehicle crashes, and school bus cases, and it works in a way that will feel familiar: the driver was negligent, the driver was working, the entity answers for it.
The second is Government Code section 835[13], which governs dangerous conditions of public property. It is considerably harder. A plaintiff must establish that the property was in a dangerous condition at the time of the injury, that the injury was proximately caused by that condition, that the condition created a reasonably foreseeable risk of that kind of injury, and either that an employee’s negligent act created the condition or that the entity had actual or constructive notice of it long enough beforehand to have addressed it. Constructive notice under section 835.2 turns on whether a reasonable inspection system should have found the problem, which is why a pothole that opened the morning of a crash is a much weaker case than one that generated complaints for a year.
Then come the immunities. Design immunity under section 830.6 shields an entity from liability for a roadway feature where the design was approved in advance by a body or employee with discretionary authority and the design was reasonably approvable. That defense defeats a great many road cases, but it is not the end of the analysis. In Tansavatdi v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes, decided by the California Supreme Court in April 2023, a cyclist was killed after a bike lane was removed from the area where he collided with a turning truck. The Court held that design immunity does not categorically preclude a failure to warn claim[14], and that public entities retain a duty to warn of known dangers the roadway presents. That distinction is doing real work in Los Angeles County road cases right now, and it is often missed.
The deadline nearly changed this year
It is worth knowing that the six month rule is contested, because it affects how confidently anyone should treat published summaries of it.
In the 2025 to 2026 session, Assembly Bill 614 would have removed the six month requirement for death and personal injury claims and replaced it with a uniform one year deadline for all claims against public entities. It did not pass. The bill failed in February 2026[15], and the six month rule survived intact.
A second measure is live as this is written. Assembly Bill 2529 would amend Government Code section 910.2 to require that a claim against a public entity or public employee include a declaration that, upon information and belief, its contents are true and correct. Co-sponsored by a coalition of cities, it passed the Assembly in May 2026 and cleared the Senate on a 39 to 0 vote in late August, and as of early September 2026 it sits with the Governor. The Senate Judiciary Committee analysis[16] sets out the reasoning. If it is signed, claims presented after it takes effect will need that verification, and a claim missing it becomes one more thing an agency can call defective while the six months keeps running.
Anyone reading this after autumn 2026 should check where that bill landed rather than assume.
Six months is shorter than a recovery
The reason this deadline catches people is not carelessness. It is that six months is shorter than serious injuries take. Someone hit by a bus in February may still be having surgeries in August, may not yet know whether they will return to work, and may reasonably believe there is time to think about lawyers once life has settled. Under this Act, the window has already closed by then.
At Djougourian Law Corporation we handle claims against public entities throughout Los Angeles County, and the first task in these cases is usually unglamorous: establishing which agency actually controlled the bus, the road, the intersection or the property, and getting a compliant claim in front of every entity that might be responsible before the six months runs. That work does not wait for a medical picture to resolve.
If a city, county, transit agency, school district or state agency may have played a part in your injury, the sensible step is to find out where you stand on the calendar now rather than later. There is no charge for that conversation and we work on a contingency fee, so there is no fee unless we recover compensation for you. You can reach us at 818-530-0000 or through our contact page, and if it would help to read about how we handle motor vehicle collision claims generally, that is available too.
Works Cited
- California Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, establishing the general two-year limitations period for actions for injury to or death of an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another. law.justia.com
- California Government Code sections 810 through 996.6, the Government Claims Act, establishing the liability and immunity of public entities and the procedure for presenting claims against them.
- California Government Code section 911.2, requiring that a claim relating to a cause of action for death or for injury to person or to personal property be presented not later than six months after the accrual of the cause of action, and within one year for any other cause of action.
- California Government Code section 945.4, barring suit against a public entity unless a claim has been presented in accordance with the Act and has been acted upon or is deemed to have been rejected.
- Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Legal Services, giving the office and contact details through which claims against Metro are presented. metro.net
- Office of the City Clerk, City of Los Angeles, File a Claim, setting out the online, mail and in-person filing options and confirming that emailed and faxed claims are not accepted. clerk.lacity.gov
- California Government Code section 910, specifying the required contents of a claim, including the requirement that a specific amount be stated where the claim totals less than ten thousand dollars, and that no specific amount be stated where it exceeds that figure. Section 910.8 permits a public entity to return a claim as insufficient.
- California Government Code section 912.4, giving the board 45 days to act on a presented claim, after which the claim is deemed rejected by operation of law.
- California Government Code section 945.6, requiring suit within six months of written notice given in accordance with section 913, or within two years of accrual of the cause of action where no such notice is given.
- California Government Code sections 911.4, 911.6 and 946.6, governing applications for leave to present a late claim, the grounds on which such an application must be granted, and petitions to the superior court for relief from the claim presentation requirement.
- California Government Code section 815, providing that a public entity is not liable for an injury arising out of its act or omission except as provided by statute.
- California Vehicle Code section 17001, providing that a public entity is liable for death or injury proximately caused by the negligent operation of a motor vehicle by an employee acting within the scope of employment. law.justia.com
- California Government Code section 835, establishing liability for a dangerous condition of public property; section 835.2, defining actual and constructive notice; and section 830.6, providing design immunity.
- Tansavatdi v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes, Case No. S267453, Supreme Court of California, decided April 27, 2023, holding that design immunity does not categorically preclude failure to warn claims and that public entities retain a duty to warn of known roadway dangers. scocal.stanford.edu
- California Assembly Bill 614, 2025 to 2026 Regular Session, which would have removed the six-month presentation deadline for death and personal injury claims and replaced it with a uniform one-year deadline. Failed February 2026.
- California Assembly Bill 2529, 2025 to 2026 Regular Session, amending Government Code section 910.2 to require a declaration that the contents of a claim are true and correct. Passed the Assembly May 28, 2026 and the Senate August 27, 2026. Senate Judiciary Committee analysis. sjud.senate.ca.gov
Statutory provisions, case authority and pending legislation described in this article were verified against primary sources on September 9, 2026. Assembly Bill 2529 was awaiting the Governor’s action on that date and its status should be confirmed before relying on the description above.