Accident at work: how long do you actually have to claim?

Three years. That is the answer most people are given, and for most people it is the right one. But it is only half the rule, and the half that gets left out is the half that catches people out: the clock does not always start on the day of the accident.

Here is how the deadline actually works, and the four situations where the ordinary rule does not apply.

The ordinary rule

Section 11 of the Limitation Act 1980 gives you three years to issue court proceedings for a personal injury claim. For a straightforward accident at work — you fell from a badly maintained ladder on 14 May, you knew that day you were hurt and you knew that day the ladder was the reason — the three years runs from the date of the accident.

Two things about that are worth being precise on, because they are where claims are lost.

• The deadline is for starting court proceedings, not for contacting a solicitor. Issuing a claim takes preparation: medical evidence, disclosure from your employer, often an expert report. A solicitor approached three weeks before the deadline is being asked to do in three weeks what normally takes months.
• Once the three years passes, the claim is usually gone for good. It is not a soft deadline and there is no routine extension.

When the clock starts later: the date of knowledge

Not every workplace injury announces itself. Industrial deafness develops over years. Hand-arm vibration syndrome creeps up. A back injury from repeated lifting has no single moment you can point to. Asbestos-related disease can appear decades after the exposure that caused it.

For those, the law uses the date of knowledge instead: the date you first knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, three things together — that your injury was significant, that it was attributable to the act or omission you are complaining about, and who the defendant is.

In practice that is usually the day a doctor tells you your hearing loss is noise-induced, or that your symptoms are consistent with the vibrating tools you used for fifteen years. Not the day you first noticed you were struggling to follow conversations in a pub.

If you have been told recently that a long-standing health problem is linked to work you did years ago, do not assume you are out of time. That conversation may itself be the start of your three years.

Four situations where the ordinary rule does not apply

1. You were under 18

Time does not run at all while you are a child. The three years starts on your eighteenth birthday, so a claim for an accident during an apprenticeship at 16 can still be brought until you are 21.

2. The injured person lacks mental capacity

If someone lacks the capacity to conduct legal proceedings — after a serious head injury, for example — the limitation clock does not run while that remains the case. There may be no deadline at all. These claims are brought by a litigation friend on the injured person’s behalf.

3. The accident was fatal

Where someone dies from their injuries, dependants have three years from the date of death, or from the date the dependants had the relevant knowledge, whichever is later. If the person who died had already lost their own limitation period before they died, that is a different and more difficult position, and one to take advice on quickly.

4. The court exercises its discretion

Section 33 of the Limitation Act lets a court disapply the three-year limit where it would be equitable to do so. It weighs how long the delay was, why it happened, and how much the delay has damaged the defendant’s ability to defend the claim.

It is a genuine power and it is genuinely used. It is also entirely discretionary, and no solicitor can tell you in advance that a court will exercise it in your favour. Treat it as a rescue, not a plan.

Accidents outside England and Wales

If you were injured abroad — working on a site overseas, or on a business trip — the limitation period may be set by the law of that country, and foreign limitation periods are frequently shorter. One year is not unusual. If your accident happened outside England and Wales, the three-year assumption is the one most likely to cost you the claim.

Why waiting costs more than the deadline

The legal deadline is the last thing to worry about, not the first. Long before it arrives, the evidence decays:

• CCTV is usually overwritten within 30 days.
• Accident books get archived and, occasionally, lost.
• The colleague who saw it happen leaves and stops answering messages.
• The faulty machine is repaired, replaced or scrapped, and cannot be inspected.
• Memories of exactly what was said at the toolbox talk become genuinely unreliable.

A claim brought at two years and eleven months is in time. It is also, very often, a much weaker claim than the same facts would have supported at three months.

What to do if you think you might be out of time

Ask anyway. The date-of-knowledge rule, the exceptions above and the court’s discretion mean that a good number of people who assume they are too late are not. It costs nothing to find out, and we will tell you plainly if we think the answer is no.