California Government Claim Deadline: Six Months to File Against a Public Entity

Six Months to File a Claim Before Suing a California Public Entity

If a city, county, school district, transit agency, county hospital, or state department caused your injury, you have six months to file a written claim with that entity.

The deadline comes from Government Code § 911.2, and it runs from the day you were hurt.

No lawsuit can be filed until the claim is presented and the entity rejects it or lets 45 days pass.

After a written rejection, you generally have six more months to file the lawsuit.

A child's injury does not pause any of these deadlines.

If a Metro bus, a city sidewalk, a school, or a county hospital is part of what happened, call (888) 713-6653 with questions about where the claim goes.

Which Defendants Trigger the Government Claims Act in California

The Government Claims Act covers nearly every public entity in the state: the State of California and its departments, counties, cities, school and community college districts, transit authorities, water and utility districts, housing authorities, and county hospital systems. It also covers their employees when the injury happened on the job, because the entity answers for its employees' conduct under Government Code § 815.2.^[1] The one large exception is the University of California, covered in the tabs below.

The public defendant is not always obvious. The bus may belong to a contractor operating a city route, the hospital may be part of a county health system, and the road may belong to Caltrans rather than the city whose name is on the street sign. Ownership decides whether the six-month rule applies at all.

• Vehicles. A Metro or municipal bus, a police or sheriff's car, a city sanitation truck, a Caltrans maintenance vehicle, a school bus.
• Property. A broken sidewalk, a missing stop sign, a pothole, a dark crosswalk, a playground, a public building's stairway.
• Medical care. A county hospital or clinic, such as Los Angeles General Medical Center or Harbor-UCLA, or a hospital run by an elected healthcare district, such as Antelope Valley Medical Center or Palomar Health, which can look private. Our list of which Southern California hospitals are public sorts the major hospitals by owner.
• Schools. Injuries during class, recess, sports, or transportation in a public school district.

A claim against the public entity can sit alongside a claim against a private party, such as the contractor who left the trench open or the driver who ran the light, and the private claim keeps its ordinary two-year deadline. Our state-by-state guide to suing the government shows how much shorter California's first step is than many states'.

A 2026 law changes how a shared verdict is collected. For lawsuits filed on or after January 1, 2027, a public entity found 15 percent or less at fault pays only its own share of the economic damages under SB 577's amendment to Civil Code § 1431.2, so naming the private parties who share the blame matters even more.

The safe assumption, until ownership is confirmed, is that a public entity is involved and the six-month clock is running.

These offices were checked in October 2026. Addresses and portals change, so the office is confirmed again on the day a claim goes out, and the claim is sent in a way that proves the date it was received.

A Los Angeles claim is usually the first step in a larger case, followed on our page about injury cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court. San Diego keeps its own offices, from the City and County to MTS and Caltrans District 11, listed in our San Diego County claims guide.

What a Government Code § 910 Claim Has to Say

The claim is a short written document, often on the entity's own form, and Government Code § 910 lists what it must contain.^[2]

• Your name and mailing address, and the address where notices should be sent
• The date, place, and circumstances of the incident
• A general description of the injury and the damage, as far as it is known
• The name of any public employee involved, if you know it
• The amount claimed, or, for a claim over $10,000, no dollar figure at all, only whether it would be a limited civil case

The last item trips people up. For an injury claim worth more than $10,000, the law forbids stating a dollar amount on the claim, so an injured person who writes in a guess has made a mistake that the entity can use later to argue about the scope of the claim.

The description of what happened matters more than its length. A lawsuit filed later generally cannot rest on a theory the claim never mentioned, so the facts in the claim set the outer edge of the case.

A 2026 amendment to Government Code § 910.2 adds one more requirement. The claim must be signed with a declaration that, on information and belief, its contents are true and correct, a rule expected to apply from January 1, 2027. The state program's own form also asks for an amount, which sits uneasily with § 910, so a state claim needs particular care.

A claim that is late or missing a required item can be returned with a notice of insufficiency, and the response window for fixing it is short.

The Agency's 45-Day Decision and the Six-Month Deadline to Sue

Once the claim is filed, the entity's board has 45 days to grant it, deny it, or do nothing. Doing nothing is treated as a rejection.^[3] The lawsuit deadline that follows depends on what the entity sends you.

The six-month lawsuit deadline after a rejection is shorter than the ordinary two years, and it starts on the date the rejection is mailed, not the date you open it. A rejection letter is the most important piece of mail in a government case.

Proving a Dangerous Condition of Public Property Under § 835

Most claims against a public entity for a fall, a pothole crash, or a poorly designed intersection rest on Government Code § 835. The injured person has to show that the property was in a dangerous condition when the injury happened, that the condition caused the injury, that it created a reasonably foreseeable risk of that kind of injury, and that either a public employee created the condition or the entity had notice of it in time to fix it.^[6]

Notice can be actual, meaning the entity knew, or constructive, meaning the condition existed long enough and was obvious enough that a reasonable inspection would have found it, under § 835.2. Prior complaints, repair requests, 311 reports, and earlier crashes at the same spot are the usual proof.

Public entities have defenses private defendants do not. Design immunity under § 830.6 can protect a road built to an approved plan, and a court can find a sidewalk defect too minor to be dangerous, the subject of our page on the trivial defect doctrine in California and New York. Public entities also cannot be ordered to pay punitive damages under § 818.

The records that prove notice belong to the entity, so a public records request often goes out alongside the claim.