Give it the date the claim arose, the claim type and the jurisdiction. It returns the expiry date, the days left, and a plain-English timeline you can paste into a file note.
Free, no account, no counter. The dates you type never leave this tab.
The default rule excludes the day the claim arose and begins the count the next day, which is how limitation is normally reckoned in England and Wales. Switch to Count the event day if your statute or your state’s rules say otherwise.
A limitation period is a rule about when you stop being allowed to sue, and it is applied without much sympathy. If your claim is worth a great deal but the writ arrives one day late, the merits never get examined: the defence files a limitation point, and the case ends there. Survey after survey of professional indemnity claims puts missed deadlines among the most frequent causes of claims against solicitors, and the sums involved are rarely small, because a limitation failure destroys the entire value of the underlying claim rather than part of it.
The arithmetic itself is not hard. The difficulty is that it is hard in a very specific way: you have to know which period applies, which event starts it, whether the event day counts, and whether the period is expressed in years, months or days, because those three are not interchangeable. Years keep the same calendar date, months can land on a day that does not exist, and days are counted differently again.
This calculator does that arithmetic and shows its working. It is free and does nothing with what you type. It is not legal advice: the period for your claim depends on your jurisdiction and on facts the calculator cannot see, including the date you knew or ought to have known that you had a claim.
A homeowner has a boiler installed in February 2021. The installer certifies the work, gets paid, and the boiler fails twice in the first winter. It is replaced at a cost of £4,800. The homeowner only discovers in early 2024, when the replacement engineer tells them in writing, that the original installation vented the flue incorrectly.
Two clocks are running here, and they are not the same length. The contract clock starts when the installer breached the contract, which is likely the installation date, and it runs six years. The tort clock starts when damage was suffered, which is also the installation date on the usual analysis, but it only runs six years for property damage. If the homeowner had claimed for personal injury from carbon monoxide exposure, the period would have been three years from injury, or three years from the date of knowledge if later — and knowledge is a statutory concept in England and Wales that includes knowledge you could have obtained with reasonable diligence.
Put the installation date of 15 February 2021 into the calculator with England & Wales, Contract or debt. It returns 15 February 2027 as the last day to issue. Note that the answer is the same calendar day six years on, not 14 February, because the event day is excluded and the count starts on 16 February 2021. Note also that this is the last day on which a claim form can be issued. Service comes later and has its own timetable, typically four months for a claim form issued within the jurisdiction.
Change the jurisdiction to New York and the same contract claim gets six years, so the answer barely moves. Change the claim type to personal injury and the number collapses to three years, which for a February 2021 date would already be long gone. That difference between six years and three years is the whole reason the tool asks two questions instead of one.
Four things can move a deadline, and all four sit outside the arithmetic.
There is also the longstop. England and Wales gives fifteen years from the act or omission complained of for most tort claims under the Latent Damage Act framework, and Germany hides a ten-year absolute bar behind its normal three-year period. A case can therefore be inside its primary period and still be dead, or outside it and still alive because of knowledge. The calculator shows the primary period; check the longstop separately on any matter more than a decade old.
Put the output at the top of the matter file as a diary entry with the reasoning attached: the event, the period, the counting rule, the expiry, and the date you will actually issue by. Most firms diarise a warning date a month or two before, and a hard date at the deadline. Copy the timeline from this page into a file note alongside the source, because a note that says "limitation expires" without saying which period and from what event is worth very little if the question is ever asked later.
Two further tools on this site do the paper end of the same job. The demand letter generator drafts the pre-action letter for a money claim, the date calculator handles the plain addition and subtraction of days and months when you are checking a contractual notice period rather than a statutory limitation, and the lease clause checker reads a residential lease for the deposit and renewal wording that tends to produce exactly these disputes. None of them replaces advice on your own facts, and neither does this page.
Under English civil practice it does not. The day the cause of action accrued is excluded, and time begins the following day, which is why a three-year period from 3 March 2022 expires at the end of 3 March 2025. A few statutes count the event day instead, and some US rules differ, so the counting rule is a switch rather than an assumption.
Almost. A claim form issued the next day is time-barred whatever the merits. The exception is a court’s power to extend, which in England and Wales under section 33 of the Limitation Act 1980 applies to personal injury actions but not to ordinary contract claims. Do not plan around it.
Choose Custom period and enter the years, months and days your statute gives. The calculator only needs the length of the period and the date it started. It will not guess a national rule for you, because limitation periods differ between claim types inside the same country as well as between countries.
Usually yes. Date of knowledge can differ per defendant, and a defendant joined late may be outside the period while the original one is not. Run the calculation once per defendant from the date their involvement became known, and work to the earliest of the results.
No. Correspondence and offers do not suspend a limitation period. Only a formal standstill agreement, or a signed acknowledgment of the debt in a contract claim, changes the date, and each works in a specific way that has to be drafted properly.
The arithmetic tools are free to use as often as you like. All-Access covers the tools that process files, and everything added later.