Florida Cut Its Injury Deadline in Half: What to Know Before Filing a Claim

If most of what you know about Florida injury claims comes from an article written before 2023, it is probably wrong. One law rewrote the state’s two most important rules at the same time — how long you have to file, and how much your own share of fault can cost you.

The 2023 rewrite, in two sentences

In March 2023, Florida enacted House Bill 837, one of the most sweeping tort reforms any state has passed in decades. For most negligence claims it did two big things at once: it cut the general filing window from four years down to two years under Fla. Stat. 95.11, and it moved Florida from pure comparative negligence — where you could recover something even if you were mostly to blame — to a modified system that bars recovery entirely if you are found more than 50% at fault under Fla. Stat. 768.81.

Both changes generally apply to injuries and lawsuits arising after March 24, 2023. Claims from before that date may still run under the old rules, which is exactly the kind of edge case worth confirming with a licensed Florida attorney rather than guessing about. The larger point stands: a lot of the Florida legal information still circulating online describes a system that no longer exists.

Two years is shorter than it sounds

The clock on a Florida negligence claim generally starts on the date of the injury. Two years sounds like plenty of time, but that window has to hold everything: your medical treatment stabilizing enough to understand what the injury actually is, the investigation, the insurance negotiation, and — if the case does not settle — getting a lawsuit properly on file. Attorneys also need runway to work; a claim brought to a law firm three weeks before the deadline is a much harder case to accept than the same claim brought in month three.

A few claims run on their own clocks. Medical malpractice, for example, generally follows a two-year period tied to when the malpractice was or should have been discovered, with an outer limit measured from the incident itself, and it carries pre-suit requirements of its own. Wrongful death claims are also generally two years. For a compact summary of the current numbers, see our Florida quick-reference page.

The 51% line changes how fault fights work

Under the modified rule in Fla. Stat. 768.81, you can generally still recover if you were 50% at fault or less — your award is just reduced by your share of the blame. Cross the line to more than 50%, and you recover nothing. Before 2023, an injured person found mostly at fault could still collect a reduced amount; today that same finding ends the claim.

That single threshold changed the economics of every fault dispute in the state. An insurance adjuster who can push your assigned share of blame past the halfway mark does not just shrink the payout — they erase it. So expect fault arguments to be aggressive, and remember that an adjuster’s early opinion about your percentage of fault is a negotiating position, not a ruling. Fault is decided on evidence: photos, reports, witnesses, and reconstruction, not on whoever sounded most confident on the phone. One caveat: the statute itself says the 51% bar does not apply to medical negligence claims, which continue under the older comparative approach.

Car crashes start with no-fault — and a 14-day trap

Florida is a no-fault auto state. After most car accidents, your own personal injury protection (PIP) coverage pays first, regardless of who caused the crash. Two features of that system catch people constantly:

• The 14-day rule. Under Fla. Stat. 627.736, PIP medical benefits generally require you to get initial medical care within 14 days of the accident. Wait longer — often because the pain “wasn’t that bad at first” — and those benefits can be lost entirely. An ER visit, urgent care, or a qualifying provider visit inside two weeks protects you.
• The emergency medical condition distinction. How much of your PIP benefit is actually available can depend on whether a provider certifies that you had an emergency medical condition. This is a paperwork determination with real consequences, and it is worth asking your providers about directly.
• The permanency threshold. To step outside the no-fault system and pursue the at-fault driver for pain and suffering, Fla. Stat. 627.737 generally requires a permanent injury, significant and permanent scarring or disfigurement, or a similarly serious finding. Whether an injury clears that threshold is a medical and legal question — not something to concede on your own read of an X-ray.

Claims against the government run through their own gauntlet

If the responsible party is a city, county, school district, or state agency — a crash with a government vehicle, a fall at a public facility — Fla. Stat. 768.28 layers extra procedure on top of everything above. You generally must present a written notice of the claim to the agency (and the state’s Department of Financial Services) within three years, two for wrongful death, and the government gets an investigation period before a lawsuit can proceed. Recovery is also capped at statutory amounts; judgments above the caps generally require a special claims bill passed by the Florida Legislature, which is as slow and political as it sounds. The practical takeaway: government claims reward early, procedurally careful handling even more than ordinary ones.

What about damage caps?

Florida’s caps on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases were struck down by the Florida Supreme Court in North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan (2017), so as of 2026 there is generally no fixed statutory ceiling on pain-and-suffering awards in ordinary negligence or malpractice cases. Punitive damages — the rare, conduct-punishing kind — are generally capped by Fla. Stat. 768.73. What a specific claim is realistically worth turns on evidence, medical documentation, and the rules above; we walk through those drivers in what actually determines an injury claim’s value.

The practical read

Put together, post-2023 Florida is a state that rewards moving early. The filing window is half what it used to be, the fault bar makes early evidence work decisive, and the no-fault system imposes a 14-day medical deadline that expires before many people have even called their insurer back. None of this means a claim is complicated to start — it means the costs of waiting are higher here than they used to be, and higher than in many other states.

Everything above is general information, not legal advice, and the details shift with new legislation and court decisions — confirm how the current rules apply to your situation with a licensed Florida attorney. If you were hurt in Florida and want to know whether you may have a claim worth pursuing, answer a few questions about what happened and we will connect you with a participating law firm that can evaluate it. Free, confidential, and no obligation.