How long you have to file a car accident lawsuit in Texas

What the two years actually applies to

The deadline runs to the day you file suit in court, not the day you open an insurance claim, not the day you hire someone, and not the day you send a demand letter. Negotiating with an adjuster does nothing to the clock. People lose otherwise winnable cases this way: eighteen months of polite emails, then an offer withdrawn, and by then there is no lawsuit left to file.

Counting starts the day the crash happened. If you were hit on 14 March, the last day is 14 March two years later.

What pauses the clock

You were under eighteen. The clock does not start until the child turns eighteen, so a fifteen-year-old passenger has until their twentieth birthday.

You were of unsound mind when the injury happened, in the narrow sense the statute uses.

The injury could not reasonably have been discovered. Texas courts apply this narrowly, and almost never to a car crash, where the injury announces itself.

What shortens it, and this is the dangerous one

If the other vehicle was owned by any public body, two years is not your real deadline. A far shorter written notice requirement applies first, and missing it ends everything regardless of how much of the two years remains.

That is a separate procedure with its own rules, set out in claims against a government agency. If anything about the vehicle looked official, read that page today rather than this one.

Why two years is shorter than it sounds

A case takes months to prepare before anyone files it. Records have to be requested and chased. Treatment has to finish, or nobody can put a figure on the harm. Witnesses have to be reached while they still remember the sequence.

An attorney handed a file with three weeks left will often turn it away, not because the claim is weak but because there is no runway to build it. Somewhere around fourteen months in, an unfiled claim starts becoming hard to place with anybody.

If you think you are already late

Ask rather than assume. The pauses described above are real, they turn on facts specific to you, and only an attorney licensed in Texas can tell you which of them your situation triggers.