Florida Statute of Limitations for Personal Injury: Don’t Lose Your Right to Sue After A Fort Myers Accident

By David B. Pittman, Esq. — Founder, Pittman Law Firm, P.L. | Last updated May 12, 2026

Two years. That is what you have. Someone gets rear-ended on Daniels Parkway, takes a few weeks to figure out their back is not getting better, and then calls our office wondering whether they still have time. Most of them are operating on information from a friend, an old web page, or a memory of how Florida law used to work. The gap between what they think and what the statute actually says has gotten bigger since 2023 — the Legislature cut the deadline from four years to two, and a surprising number of people still haven’t heard.

This is the post where I lay out, in plain English, how the Florida personal injury clock now runs, what the exceptions are, and what we tell people who walk into our Fort Myers office unsure of where they stand.

What Florida law actually says about the personal injury deadline

The governing statute is Section 95.11(4)(a), Florida Statutes. As part of House Bill 837, signed on March 24, 2023, the Legislature cut the deadline for negligence-based personal injury suits from four years down to two. In plain English: if you were hit by a careless driver on Cleveland Avenue on April 1, 2023, you have until April 1, 2025 to file the lawsuit. After that, the door closes.

The same 2023 reform also rewrote Section 768.81, Florida Statutes, which is the comparative-fault rule. The shorthand is this: a jury still divides up fault between everyone involved, but if you are found more than fifty percent at fault for your own injury, you recover nothing. Under the old rule, you could be seventy percent at fault and still collect thirty percent of your damages. That math is gone for any accident after the 2023 effective date.

Two other statutes come up in almost every Fort Myers crash case and are worth knowing alongside the deadline:

• Section 627.736, Florida Statutes — the PIP statute. Florida is a no-fault state for the first $10,000 of medical bills. Your own auto policy pays that out under Personal Injury Protection regardless of who caused the crash. PIP has its own fourteen-day rule for getting initial treatment, which is much shorter than the two-year lawsuit deadline.
• Section 627.727, Florida Statutes — the uninsured/underinsured motorist statute. If the at-fault driver has no insurance or not enough, your own UM coverage steps in. The lawsuit deadline against a UM carrier is generally five years on the contract, not two, but that is a separate clock and one most people do not know exists.

One more provision that often gets overlooked: Section 316.066, Florida Statutes, which requires a written crash report for any accident involving injury, death, or significant property damage. The report itself is not the lawsuit, but its date stamp is almost always the day the two-year clock starts running.

The five deadline situations we see most often

The deadline problem almost always shows up in one of five shapes. None of them are theoretical. We have had each of these walk through the door in the last twelve months.

1. The “I felt fine at the scene” case. Someone gets tapped on Six Mile Cypress Parkway, tells the trooper they are okay, drives home, and three weeks later cannot turn their neck. By the time they call, the carrier has already closed the file. The two-year clock has been running the whole time.
2. The minor child case. A child gets hurt at a friend’s pool or in a school bus accident. The parents wait, because the child seems fine, and because they are not sure they want to “sue anyone.” Under Florida law the clock on the minor’s own claim does not start until the child turns eighteen, but any derivative claim the parents have for medical bills runs on the standard two-year track.
3. The delayed-diagnosis medical case. A scan from 2024 turns out to have shown something the radiologist missed. The discovery rule can push the start date forward to the day a reasonable patient would have learned of the injury, but proving that date is its own piece of work.
4. The government-vehicle case. A Lee County truck, a Fort Myers city vehicle, a state DOT crew. These cases have their own pre-suit notice rules under Section 768.28, including a one-hundred-eighty-day investigation period. Miss that notice and the lawsuit deadline does not save you.
5. The UM-only case. The at-fault driver had no insurance, or only the state-minimum coverage. The client thinks the case is over because the tortfeasor is judgment-proof, when in fact the real claim is against their own UM carrier on a contract clock that runs longer.

Why the deadline is harder to manage than it looks

The two-year number sounds clean. In practice the deadline is the easy part. The hard part is everything that has to happen inside those two years for the case to be worth filing.

Medical treatment has to be documented contemporaneously. A gap of more than thirty days between the crash and the first doctor visit is the single most reliable thing an adjuster uses to discount a Florida injury claim. Witnesses on Summerlin Road or McGregor Boulevard move, change phone numbers, and stop returning calls. Surveillance video at a gas station on Pine Island Road typically overwrites every seven to thirty days. Crash debris on Colonial Boulevard gets swept by FDOT within hours.

The comparative-fault rewrite under Section 768.81 also changes the calculus on which cases are worth bringing. A case where the client may have been forty percent at fault used to be filed without much hesitation. Today, that same case has to be evaluated with the understanding that one bad witness or one bad photo can push the jury past the fifty-percent line and zero the whole thing out. That work has to happen early, before the two-year clock starts pressing.

And then there is the carrier behavior. Under the 2023 reform, insurers now have ninety days to respond to a claim instead of thirty. That sounds like a procedural detail. In practice it means a carrier can sit on a file for three months while the client’s two-year window quietly shortens. We have seen Fort Myers clients receive their first substantive response from an adjuster in month four after the accident, with a take-it-or-leave-it offer dated to land just before suit would have to be filed.

A Fort Myers rear-end case — why moving fast mattered

We represented a Fort Myers client who was involved in a rear-end collision with a neck injury. The call to our office came in the third week after the crash — late enough that the at-fault carrier had already started building a file, but early enough that we could still subpoena the dashcam footage from the at-fault vehicle and get a preservation letter to the convenience store at the corner before its camera overwrote. The treating physician’s documentation of a disc herniation at C5-C6, combined with a clean timeline from first treatment through the imaging, settled the file for $150,000. The family later told us they had waited three weeks because they thought the case would “work itself out.” Three more weeks and the camera footage would have been gone. That is the margin these cases operate on.

What to do if you have been hurt and the clock is running

This is the action list I give people when they call, in roughly the order I would do them in. None of it is generic. Each item is here because I have watched a Fort Myers case turn on it.

• Get a written crash report. If law enforcement was not called, go to the nearest sheriff substation and file a driver’s exchange-of-information report under Section 316.066. The date stamp on that document is often what we use to anchor the two-year clock.
• See a doctor inside fourteen days. Even if you think you are fine. The PIP statute requires it for the no-fault coverage to attach, and a contemporaneous medical record is what makes the rest of the case provable.
• Photograph your own injuries the same week. Bruising, road rash, and seatbelt marks fade in days. Adjusters six months later will tell a jury you must not have been hurt that badly because the photos do not show it.
• Write down the names of any witnesses on a piece of paper that does not live only on your phone. Phones get replaced. A witness from the intersection of Daniels Parkway and Six Mile Cypress is worth ten medical records when liability is contested, and you cannot subpoena someone you cannot name.
• Do not give a recorded statement to the other side’s carrier before you talk to a lawyer. You are allowed to decline. I have watched a single offhand sentence at a recorded statement turn a clear-liability case into a comparative-fault fight.
• Pull your own auto policy and look for the UM endorsement. If it is not there, call your own agent and ask whether you rejected it in writing. Many people did not realize they had, and that one document changes the math on a case where the at-fault driver was uninsured.
• Mark the two-year date on a calendar you actually look at. Not your phone notes. A calendar. The deadline is the one thing in this process that does not negotiate.

Key Takeaways

• For Florida accidents on or after March 24, 2023, the deadline to file a personal injury lawsuit is two years from the date of the accident, not the four years many people still believe.
• The 2023 reform also tightened comparative fault — a plaintiff found more than fifty percent at fault recovers nothing under Section 768.81.
• Minors, government-entity claims, the discovery rule, and uninsured-motorist contract claims each run on their own separate clocks that the two-year rule does not automatically cover.
• Carriers now have ninety days to respond to a claim, which compresses the practical timeline an injured Fort Myers client has to build a case before the lawsuit window starts pressing.
• The strongest cases are the ones where medical treatment, photographs, witness names, and the police report were locked down inside the first thirty days, not the last thirty days before the deadline.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. How long do I have to file a personal injury lawsuit in Florida after a Fort Myers accident?
For accidents on or after March 24, 2023, you have two years from the date of the accident to file a negligence-based personal injury lawsuit. The old four-year window no longer applies. Section 95.11(4)(a), Florida Statutes, was rewritten as part of House Bill 837. Different rules apply to claims against government entities, claims involving minors, and a small set of cases where the injury was hidden.

Q2. Does the two-year deadline apply if my accident happened before March 24, 2023?
No. Accidents that occurred before March 24, 2023, are still governed by the prior four-year deadline. The new two-year clock only attaches to incidents on or after that date. If you are unsure which rule applies to your case, that is the first thing we sort out when you call our Fort Myers number.

Q3. What happens if I miss the statute of limitations on my Florida injury claim?
If you file even one day after the deadline, the defendant will move to dismiss, and the court will almost always grant that motion. The right to sue is gone, regardless of how strong the underlying facts were. That is why we tell people not to wait on the phone call. A short consultation costs you nothing and can keep the clock from running out on a real claim.

Q4. Are there exceptions that pause the two-year clock in Florida?
Yes, a handful. The discovery rule can move the start date in cases where the injury was not reasonably knowable right away, which comes up most often in medical malpractice and some toxic-exposure matters. For minors, the deadline does not begin to run until the child turns eighteen, with an outer cap of seven years. Fraud or intentional concealment by the at-fault party can also toll the clock. Claims against a city, county, or state agency have their own separate notice rules under Section 768.28.

Q5. Should I talk to the insurance adjuster before I call a lawyer?
Not before you understand what the deadline is and what the claim is actually worth. Adjusters call quickly because they know the two-year window puts pressure on injured people to settle for less. A short call to our office before you sign anything costs you nothing.

Talk to Our Fort Myers Office Before the Clock Runs Out

If you or someone in your family has been hurt in a Fort Myers accident and you are not sure how much time you have left, that is the call to make today. We will tell you, straight, whether there is a case worth pursuing and how long you have to act. Call Pittman Law Firm, P.L. at 239-992-8259 for a free consultation. There is no fee unless we recover for you.

About the Author

David B. Pittman, Esq., the founder of Pittman Law Firm, P.L., has spent more than three decades representing injured Floridians in Fort Myers and across Lee County. The firm’s Fort Myers presence handles a steady stream of serious-injury work along the Daniels Parkway, Six Mile Cypress, McGregor Boulevard, Cleveland Avenue, and Summerlin Road corridors, and along I-75 between Estero and Bell Tower. David’s practice is built around representing injured clients across Lee and Collier Counties, with a particular focus on commercial-vehicle, complex-liability, and serious-injury cases.

David’s training began at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, where he completed his undergraduate work, and continued at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where he earned his JD. Over the thirty-plus years since, he has earned an AV-Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell and membership in the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum. He is admitted to practice before the courts of Florida and has tried cases through verdict in Lee and Collier Counties.

David has held a Florida real estate broker license for twenty-five years, a credential that shapes how the firm reads the property side of premises cases. The firm handles personal injury cases across Lee and Collier Counties, serving Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Naples, Cape Coral, Estero, and Lehigh Acres, with offices at Windsor Place in Bonita Springs (main) and Fort Myers (satellite). Call 239-992-8259 for a free consultation.

The information on this page is for general information purposes only and is not legal advice for any individual case. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship with Pittman Law Firm, P.L. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome in any future matter. Attorney advertising.