Filing an Injury Claim in Colorado: Why Your Deadline Depends on How You Were Hurt

Most states give you one deadline for injury lawsuits. Colorado gives you two — and which one applies depends entirely on how you were hurt. Plenty of people learn about the shorter one only after it has already passed.

Two clocks, and which one is yours

Colorado’s general rule for personal injury lawsuits is two years from the date the claim accrues, under C.R.S. § 13-80-102. That covers most of what people think of as injury cases: slip and falls, dog bites, injuries on someone else’s property, and most other negligence claims.

But tort claims for bodily injury arising out of the use or operation of a motor vehicle get their own, longer clock: three years, under C.R.S. § 13-80-101(1)(n). Car, truck, and motorcycle crash victims generally have an extra year that almost nobody else does.

This split is where people get hurt twice. Someone hears from a friend who was in a car accident that “Colorado gives you three years,” assumes it applies to their fall at a grocery store, and quietly runs out the real deadline at the two-year mark. The reverse mistake is rarer but the confusion is constant. When the deadline passes, the claim is generally gone no matter how strong it was.

A few hedges worth stating plainly: the clock generally starts when the injury and its cause are or should have been discovered, some situations pause or shorten it, and claims like medical malpractice carry their own rules and outer limits. Treat these periods as the general rule as of 2026, and confirm your specific deadline with a licensed Colorado attorney rather than doing the math yourself.

The 182-day rule almost nobody has heard of

Here is the deadline that actually catches people. If a Colorado state or local government entity may be responsible for your injury — a city snowplow, an RTD bus, a state-maintained road, a fall at a public building or school — the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act generally requires a formal written notice of claim within 182 days after you discover the injury, under C.R.S. § 24-10-109.

That is roughly six months, not two or three years, and Colorado courts treat it harshly: proper notice is a jurisdictional prerequisite, meaning a claim filed without it is generally barred forever, and courts have applied the trigger strictly — the clock runs from the injury, not from when you later figure out which public entity was responsible. The notice also has to contain specific information and go to the right office, which is not always obvious.

The practical takeaway: if there is any chance a government entity is involved in your accident — and on Colorado roads maintained by CDOT, counties, and municipalities, there often is — the safe assumption is that your real deadline is measured in weeks, not years.

Colorado is an at-fault state (and has been since 2003)

Colorado ran a no-fault auto insurance system for decades, then repealed it in 2003 and returned to a traditional fault-based system. As of 2026, Colorado is squarely an at-fault (tort) state: the driver who caused the crash, generally through their liability insurance, is responsible for the harm. There is no PIP requirement and no “serious injury” threshold to clear before you can bring a claim.

Because old articles about Colorado no-fault law still float around online, it is worth saying clearly: if you are reading anything that mentions Colorado PIP requirements or no-fault thresholds, it is more than two decades out of date. What matters in Colorado today is proving fault, which makes the evidence you gather early — photos, witnesses, the police report — central to everything that follows.

The 50% bar: stricter than most of Colorado’s neighbors

Colorado follows modified comparative negligence under C.R.S. § 13-21-111, and it uses the stricter version of the rule. You can generally recover as long as your share of fault is less than the other side’s, with your award reduced by your percentage of blame. But at 50% fault, recovery is barred entirely.

Many states let an injured person recover at exactly 50/50. Colorado does not. A single percentage point — the difference between 49% and 50% — can be the difference between a reduced recovery and nothing at all. That makes the fault number one of the most contested things in any Colorado claim, and it is exactly where insurance adjusters push. An early phone call assigning you “half the blame” is a negotiating position, not a finding, and it deserves the same scrutiny as any other claim the other side makes.

The corollary: do not decide on your own that you were too much at fault to bother. Fault percentages are built from evidence and argument, and people are reliably worse judges of their own share of blame than the facts turn out to support.

The damage caps just changed — and older articles are wrong

In 2024, Colorado passed House Bill 24-1472, one of the more significant changes to its injury laws in years. For lawsuits filed on or after January 1, 2025, it substantially raised the caps on noneconomic damages — compensation for things like pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life — in personal injury and wrongful death cases, and it set medical malpractice caps on a schedule of increases running through the end of the decade, with periodic inflation adjustments after that.

One unusual detail: the new caps generally apply based on when the lawsuit is filed, not when the injury happened. Combined with the phased medical malpractice increases, that means the ceiling on a Colorado claim can genuinely depend on timing questions that did not matter a few years ago — and that most pre-2025 articles get wrong. If you are trying to understand what goes into valuing a claim in the first place, our guide to what an injury claim is worth walks through the components; how Colorado’s caps interact with your specific case is a question for a licensed Colorado attorney.

Putting it together

If you were hurt in Colorado, the order of operations looks like this:

• Get medical care and keep the records. Prompt treatment ties the injury to the accident and protects your health.
• Figure out early whether a government entity could be involved. The 182-day notice clock is the shortest deadline in Colorado injury law and it does not wait while you decide.
• Know which limitations clock you are on — generally three years for motor vehicle claims, two for most everything else.
• Do not self-assess fault, and be careful with early recorded statements to the other side’s insurer.
• Distrust undated articles. Between the 2003 no-fault repeal and the 2025 cap changes, Colorado is a state where old information is confidently, specifically wrong.

For the short version of Colorado’s deadlines and fault rules in one place, see our Colorado quick-reference page.

If you were injured in Colorado and want to know whether you may have a claim — and which of these deadlines actually applies to you — answer a few questions about what happened and we will connect you with a participating law firm that can evaluate it. Free, confidential, and no obligation.