Filing an Injury Claim in North Dakota: A Long Deadline With Short Fuses

On paper, North Dakota gives injured people more time to sue than almost any other state — generally six years for most personal injury claims. In practice, that headline number hides a set of much shorter fuses, and trusting it blindly is one of the easier ways to lose a valid claim here.

Start with the number everyone quotes: six years

Under section 28-01-16 of the North Dakota Century Code, an action for “any other injury to the person or rights of another” must generally be commenced within six years of when the claim accrued. As of 2026, that puts North Dakota in a tie for the longest general personal injury window in the country — three times the two-year rule many states follow. You can see how unusual that is in our state-by-state breakdown of injury filing deadlines.

So why does this post exist? Because the six-year figure only describes the general rule. Several of the claims people most commonly bring in North Dakota run on entirely different clocks, and a few run out startlingly fast.

The two-year exceptions that catch people

North Dakota law carves out a separate, much shorter list in N.D.C.C. 28-01-18. Claims on that list must generally be brought within two years, including:

• Wrongful death. When someone dies from their injuries, the claim generally accrues at the time of death and carries a two-year limit — not six.
• Medical malpractice. Two years, generally from discovery, with an outer limit of six years from the act itself unless discovery was prevented by fraudulent conduct.
• Assault and battery. Injuries someone inflicted intentionally are also on the two-year list.

The pattern is worth noticing: the more serious the situation, the shorter the deadline can be. Families grieving a death have a third of the time that someone with a sprained wrist has.

North Dakota is a no-fault state — and that changes how crash claims start

North Dakota is one of roughly a dozen no-fault auto insurance states. Under its Auto Accident Reparations Act (N.D.C.C. chapter 26.1-41), your own policy’s basic no-fault benefits — often called PIP — generally pay your initial medical expenses and a portion of lost wages after a crash, regardless of who caused it, up to a statutory maximum of $30,000.

The trade-off is a threshold. To step outside the no-fault system and sue the at-fault driver for pain and suffering, you generally need a “serious injury” as the statute defines it: death, dismemberment, serious and permanent disfigurement, disability beyond sixty days, or medical expenses over $2,500. That last figure is low by modern medical billing standards — a single emergency room visit can clear it — but insurers still lean on the threshold to argue smaller claims stay boxed inside no-fault. Whether your injury qualifies is exactly the kind of question worth putting to a licensed North Dakota attorney rather than answering yourself.

The 50 percent fault line

North Dakota applies modified comparative fault under N.D.C.C. 32-03.2-02. You can generally recover as long as your share of fault is less than the combined fault of everyone else who contributed to the injury — with your award reduced by your percentage. Hit 50 percent, and recovery is barred entirely. That makes the percentage an adjuster tries to pin on you enormously consequential, and it is worth remembering that an insurance company’s opening position on fault is a negotiating stance, not a finding.

Multiple defendants? Each one generally pays only its own share

Here is a wrinkle many out-of-state guides miss. The same statute makes liability in North Dakota several only, not joint: when more than one party contributed to your injury, each is generally liable only for its own percentage of the damages (with an exception for parties who acted in concert). If one responsible company is uninsured, dissolved, or gone, you generally cannot collect its share from the others. In a state where oilfield and trucking incidents routinely involve layers of contractors and out-of-state operators, identifying every responsible party early — while records and witnesses still exist — can matter as much as proving fault at all.

Suing the government runs on a different calendar entirely

If your injury involves the State of North Dakota — a state vehicle, a state agency, a state employee — N.D.C.C. 32-12.2-04 generally requires presenting a written notice of claim to the director of the office of management and budget within 180 days of when the injury was or should have been discovered (one year for a serious injury). That is a fraction of the six-year headline, and missing it can end a claim before it starts. Claims against cities, counties, school districts, and other political subdivisions follow their own chapter, generally with a three-year filing period and statutory caps on what a political subdivision can be required to pay.

Damage caps: mostly no, with one big exception

North Dakota does not cap compensatory damages in ordinary negligence cases. Medical malpractice is different: N.D.C.C. 32-42-02 limits noneconomic damages — pain, suffering, and similar losses — to $500,000 in health care malpractice actions. The North Dakota Supreme Court upheld that cap against a constitutional challenge in Condon v. St. Alexius Medical Center (2019), so as of 2026 it remains the law. Economic damages such as medical bills and lost earnings are not subject to that cap.

Why you should ignore the six-year clock anyway

Even when the full six years genuinely applies, using it is a bad strategy. Skid marks fade, camera footage gets overwritten, and witnesses scatter — a dynamic amplified in western North Dakota’s oil patch, where workers, drivers, and even the companies themselves often leave the state long before a slow-moving claim gets around to finding them. Insurers also read delay as doubt. The long window is best understood as protection against worst-case timing, not an invitation to wait.

For the short version of all of this — deadlines, fault rule, and no-fault status at a glance — keep our North Dakota quick-reference page bookmarked, and confirm anything deadline-critical with a licensed North Dakota attorney, since statutes and court decisions can change.

Find out where you actually stand

If you were hurt in North Dakota — on the road, on a worksite, or on someone else’s property — the fastest way to clarity is to answer a few questions about what happened. We will connect you with a participating law firm that can evaluate your situation against North Dakota’s specific rules. It is free, confidential, and there is no obligation.