Two years. That is the general answer for a car crash in Illinois, and it is the number most people find first.
The problem is that the two-year number is wrong in more situations than people expect. If the other vehicle belonged to a village, a township, a park district, or the CTA, the window can be half that. If the person hurt was a child, it can be much longer. And the deadline applies to filing a lawsuit in court, not to calling an insurance company, which is where a lot of confusion starts.
Here is how the deadlines generally work in Illinois, which exceptions come up most often, and what “filing” actually means. If you want the whole process from the crash scene forward, we lay it out in our full guide to Illinois car accident claims.
The general rule: two years from the date of the crash
Illinois’ statute of limitations for personal injury is 735 ILCS 5/13-202. It generally gives a person two years from the date the injury happened to file suit for that injury.
For a typical crash, the date of the injury is the date of the crash. Someone rear-ended on the Kennedy near Ohio Street on September 22 generally has until September 22 two years later to have a complaint on file.
A few things that do not move that date:
- The day the last physical therapy bill came in.
- The day the adjuster denied the claim or stopped returning calls.
- The day a doctor said the shoulder needed surgery after all.
- The day a traffic ticket against the other driver was resolved in court.
There are narrow situations where an injury is not reasonably discoverable right away and the clock is treated differently, but in ordinary collisions that argument rarely applies. Every deadline has exceptions, and the only way to know the date that applies to a particular situation is to have a lawyer look at the facts.
Filing a claim and filing a lawsuit are not the same thing
This trips up more people than any statute. Reporting the crash to an insurance company opens a claim. Nothing about that claim stops the court deadline from running. An adjuster can negotiate with someone for 23 months and the two-year limit still lands where it always was.
A lawsuit starts when a complaint is filed with the circuit clerk and the other side is served. We explain the difference in more detail on our claim vs. lawsuit page. Insurers are not required to warn anyone that the date is coming, and they generally don’t.
The one-year deadline most people never hear about
If the vehicle that caused the crash belonged to a local government, a different statute usually controls. The Local Governmental and Governmental Employees Tort Immunity Act, 745 ILCS 10/8-101, generally gives one year, not two, for a civil action against a local public entity or its employee.
“Local public entity” covers a lot of ground in Chicagoland:
- The City of Chicago and its departments, including Streets and Sanitation trucks and Chicago police vehicles.
- Villages and their police, fire, and public works vehicles, from Skokie to Glenview to Wheaton.
- Townships, forest preserve districts, park districts, and school districts, including school buses owned by a public district.
- Public universities, community colleges, and municipal utilities.
So a crash with a village plow truck on Lake Cook Road and a crash with a private landscaping truck at the same intersection can carry very different deadlines.
The CTA has its own rule, and it is shorter still
For injuries involving CTA buses and trains, 70 ILCS 3605/41 generally requires written notice to the CTA within six months of the injury, with specific information in it, and suit within one year. Miss the notice and the claim can be barred even though the person did everything else right.
That means a driver hit by a CTA bus on Western Avenue, and a passenger hurt when that bus stopped short, are both generally on a six-month notice clock, not a two-year one.
Pace, Metra, and state vehicles
Pace suburban buses running Milwaukee Avenue or Dempster, and Metra, are public transit operations, and claims involving them are generally treated under the Tort Immunity Act’s shorter timeline rather than the general two-year rule. The specific notice and filing requirements differ by agency, which is exactly why these claims get looked at early.
Crashes involving a State of Illinois vehicle, or a claim about a state highway itself, are different again. Those generally go through the Illinois Court of Claims, which has its own notice and filing deadlines that are not the two-year rule. Anyone in that situation should get the specific dates confirmed by a lawyer rather than assuming.
Exceptions that give more time
Children
Under 735 ILCS 5/13-211, the clock for a person who was under 18 when hurt generally does not start running until the child turns 18, so the two-year window usually ends around age 20. A ten-year-old hurt as a passenger in a crash on Skokie Boulevard generally has years left, long after the parents assume the matter closed.
One wrinkle: a parent’s own claim for the child’s medical expenses can be governed by a different, shorter deadline than the child’s claim for the injury. Medical malpractice claims involving minors follow yet another set of rules. These are worth confirming, not guessing.
Wrongful death
When someone dies from crash injuries, the claim changes shape. The Wrongful Death Act, 740 ILCS 180/2, generally sets a two-year limit measured from the date of death, not the date of the crash. When a person is critically injured in a winter pileup in December and dies in March, those are two different dates, and the estate’s deadlines are generally tied to the later one. A related claim under the Survival Act covers what the person went through before death and has its own timing. Estates also need someone appointed to bring the case, which takes time in probate court.
Damage to the car
Property damage claims generally get longer than injury claims in Illinois, often five years under 735 ILCS 5/13-205. That surprises people who assume the whole matter closes in two years. The injury deadline still runs on its own schedule.
Claims against your own insurance company
Uninsured and underinsured motorist claims are contract claims against a person’s own insurer, not injury claims against the other driver. The policy itself often sets the time limit and the steps, sometimes including a demand for arbitration. Reading the policy language is the only way to find that date, and those limits can be shorter than people expect.
What “filing on time” actually looks like
Filing means a complaint is accepted by the circuit clerk before the deadline. In Cook County, car crash cases are generally filed in the Law Division or the Municipal Department at the Richard J. Daley Center on West Washington, or at a suburban courthouse such as Skokie or Rolling Meadows. Lake County cases go to the courthouse in Waukegan, DuPage County to Wheaton.
A lawyer also needs time before that date to pull the police report, request records from every provider, identify whether a government entity is involved, and confirm who owned the vehicle. Investigating a crash that happened 22 months ago is harder than investigating one from last month: cameras overwrite, businesses close, witnesses move. The date on the calendar is the outer limit, not the plan.
When this usually does not need a lawyer
Plenty of crashes never come close to a courthouse. A low-speed tap in a Northbrook parking lot with a bent bumper, no one hurt, and a cooperative insurer is usually a property damage matter a person handles on the phone in a few weeks. The five-year property damage window means there is no rush created by the injury statute at all. Our post on whether to hire a lawyer after a minor car accident goes through the situations where paying a fee generally does not make sense.
Where the calendar matters is when someone was treated for an injury, when fault is disputed, or when any vehicle involved belonged to a government body. Those are the ones where the shorter deadlines and notice rules do real damage if nobody notices them.
What generally happens when a deadline passes
The claim is usually gone. The other side files a motion to dismiss based on the statute of limitations, and courts generally enforce these deadlines strictly. There are limited doctrines that can pause or extend a limitations period, but they are narrow and fact-specific, and no one should count on one.
That is the piece worth keeping: the number is not always two years, and the shortest clocks belong to the crashes people least expect, the ones involving a bus, a plow, or a squad car.
If you have questions about a crash in Chicago or the suburbs and want to know which deadline applies, call Kass & Moses at 847-513-9582 or send us a note through our contact form. Consultations are free, and we will tell you plainly if we think you don’t need a lawyer.
Kass & Moses, P.C., 601 Skokie Blvd., Suite 401, Northbrook, Illinois.
Frequently asked questions
Negotiation does not pause the court deadline. In Illinois, the limitations period generally keeps running no matter how active the claim file looks, and an insurer has no duty to remind anyone of the date. When a deadline is close, lawyers often file suit to protect the claim and keep negotiating afterward, since most cases still settle after filing. Anyone near a deadline should have a lawyer confirm the exact date right away.
The injury deadline against the unknown driver generally runs the same way under 735 ILCS 5/13-202, even if that driver is never identified. The practical route in a hit-and-run is often an uninsured motorist claim under the injured person’s own policy, and that is a contract claim with its own time limits set in the policy language. Those policy limits can be shorter than the court deadline, so reading the policy early matters.
Where a case can be filed and which state’s deadline applies are separate questions that depend on the facts. A crash on Illinois roads is generally governed by Illinois law, and an out-of-state driver can usually still be sued here. There are also rules that can affect the clock when a defendant is outside the state. This is one of the situations where the deadline should be confirmed by a lawyer rather than estimated.
Generally the same statute applies to everyone hurt in the crash, with the same two-year window measured from the date of injury. The exceptions are about the person, not the seat: a passenger who was a minor generally gets the extended timeline under 735 ILCS 5/13-211, and a passenger on a CTA or Pace bus faces the shorter transit notice and filing rules. Each injured person’s own circumstances set their own date.
A police report is evidence, not a deadline for a claim, though Illinois does have its own crash reporting requirements for drivers. A missing report makes a claim harder to prove but does not by itself end it. Getting the report number early, and requesting a copy once it is available, generally makes everything that follows easier.
