The date on the crash report is the one that matters, and a careful reader checks it against the calendar before anything else. Texas gives most people who are hurt by someone else's negligence two years to file suit, which sounds generous until you count backward from the day the file actually reaches someone who can do something with it. Medical treatment takes months. Adjusters go quiet, change hands, request records twice. None of that moves the deadline, and a claim that misses it is worth nothing regardless of how badly the other driver drove.
1. Two years, running from the day it happened
The limitations period, meaning the outside deadline for starting a lawsuit, is two years from the date of the injury for most personal injury claims in Texas, and the same two years applies to the property damage side. It runs from the incident, not from the day the pain got worse, not from the day the MRI came back, and not from the day an adjuster finally denied the claim. There are narrow exceptions where an injury could not reasonably have been discovered, but they are narrow, and a reader planning around one is planning around the least reliable part of the rule.
2. A city vehicle changes the arithmetic entirely
If the other driver was in a municipal truck, a transit bus, a county pickup, or a state agency vehicle, the two-year deadline still exists, but a much shorter notice requirement arrives long before it. The Texas Tort Claims Act sets a six-month window for formal written notice to the governmental unit, and home-rule cities are permitted to set shorter periods in their charters, some of which are measured in weeks rather than months. So the careful reader checks the vehicle first: seal on the door, plate prefix, employer named on the report. Then the reader looks up that specific city's charter provision rather than assuming six months.
3. What the notice has to say, and who has to receive it
Notice is not a phone call to a claims line. The statute asks for a description of the damage or injury, the time and place of the incident, and the incident itself, delivered to the entity in the manner its charter or ordinance requires, often the city secretary or a designated risk office. Actual notice, where the entity already knew of its own fault, can substitute in some cases, but it is argued rather than assumed. Sending the letter certified, keeping the green card, and calendaring the date sent is fifteen minutes of work that protects the entire claim.
4. Minors, incapacity, and death
A child's claim is tolled, meaning the clock is paused, until the child turns eighteen, so the two years generally runs to the twentieth birthday. That is a real cushion, and it is also why a parent should not sign anything resolving a child's injury claim casually. Legal incapacity can toll the period as well. Wrongful death claims, brought by a surviving spouse, children, or parents, run two years from the date of death rather than the date of the injury, and a survival claim, which belongs to the estate, follows its own path. Government notice deadlines are not always so forgiving.
5. Nothing an adjuster does stops the clock
This is the part that costs people their claims. An open claim number, a friendly adjuster, a pending settlement authority request, a records subpoena in progress: none of it tolls limitations. Insurers are not required to warn anyone that the deadline is approaching, and the file can be perfectly active on the day it becomes worthless. Only filing suit in a court with jurisdiction, naming the right defendant, stops the running of time, and naming the wrong entity, a common problem with governmental defendants and with commercial vehicles owned by one company and driven for another, can waste the filing entirely.
6. The checks worth making early
Pull the crash report and confirm the date and the registered owner of the other vehicle. Note whether any public entity, school district, hospital district, or toll authority appears anywhere on it. If a commercial truck was involved, the federal safety rules administered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will matter to the underlying case, though the Texas filing deadline is what governs the paperwork. Write the two-year date on a calendar, then write a date six months earlier beside it, because a lawyer taking the file at that point still has room to work.
A claim filed on time can be negotiated for as long as the parties want. A claim filed late cannot be negotiated at all, and the difference between the two is usually a date somebody wrote down early.