Medical Debt Statute of Limitations by State (2026)

What this table is, and what it is not

It is the deadline to file suit. It is not any of the following, and conflating them is the most common mistake people make with these numbers:

• It is not a ban on being contacted. A collector can generally still call, write, and ask you to pay a debt that is past the deadline to sue.
• It is not the credit-reporting clock. How long a debt can appear on your credit report is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and by the bureaus' own policies, on a separate timeline from the one here.
• It is not automatic. In most states the limitations period is an affirmative defense. If you are sued after the deadline and you do not appear, or you appear and do not raise it, a court can still enter judgment against you.
• It does not cancel the debt. The obligation survives; what changes is the creditor's ability to enforce it in court.

Written contract vs. open account — and why medical bills are ambiguous

The two columns matter because the paperwork behind a medical bill is rarely clean. If you signed a financial-responsibility agreement at registration, a provider will typically argue that is the written contract and the longer period applies. If you signed nothing, or the form you signed does not state an amount, the shorter open-account or unwritten-contract period is more likely to control. This is a genuinely litigated question, and it is decided under your state's law, not by a rule of thumb.

Several states remove the argument entirely by using a single period for every contract action. Among our verified rows, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina and Vermont all do this.

One state in our verified set writes a rule specifically for medical debt. Virginia Code § 8.01-246(B) bars an action to collect medical debt that is not commenced within three years of the due date on the final invoice for the health care service, regardless of which contract category applies — with a carve-out for longer payment plans and for debt arising from services paid under programs administered by the Department of Medical Assistance Services.

The table

Read the row for your state, then read the statute it cites. The link in each row is the exact page we read.

Why 33 rows carry no number

We publish a figure only when we have read it in the state's own published code. For this edition we reached and read 18 state codes. For the remaining 33 jurisdictions the official code site was unreachable, returned an access error, or served a page that requires JavaScript we could not render, so those rows say so instead of carrying a number.

That is deliberate. A confident wrong number on a page like this is worse than a blank, because someone may skip a court date on the strength of it. We would rather show you an honest gap. We intend to fill these rows in later editions, and the review date at the foot of this page will change when we do.

What to do if your state is not in the table

• Search your state legislature's website for its limitation-of-actions chapter — the phrase to look for is usually “limitation of actions” or “periods of limitation.” Read the subsection on contracts.
• Check whether your state has a separate provision for medical debt specifically, the way Virginia does.
• If you have already been sued, or the deadline is close, talk to a lawyer or a legal-aid office in your state. Many offer free help on consumer-debt cases.

What restarts the clock

The deadline does not always run from the date of service, and in several states it can be reset. Three examples, from statutes we read for this edition:

• California. Code of Civil Procedure § 360 provides that an acknowledgment or promise is not sufficient to take a case out of the limitations title unless it is in a writing signed by the party charged — but a payment on account of principal or interest due on a promissory note is deemed a sufficient acknowledgment to stop the clock running, each time such a payment is made.
• Arizona. Under § 12-543(2), no item of a stated or open account is barred so long as any item on that account was incurred within the three years immediately before suit is brought.
• Delaware. Under 10 Del. C. § 8108, the § 8106 limitation does not begin to run on a mutual and running account while that account remains open and current.

We checked this question only in the states named above. Do not assume your state works the same way. The practical consequence is the same everywhere, though: before you make a small payment on an old medical bill, find out whether that payment restarts your state's clock. A goodwill payment on a bill that was already unenforceable can hand a collector a fresh limitations period.

If you think the deadline has already passed

• Do not ignore a lawsuit. An expired deadline is a defense you have to raise. Respond to the summons and plead it.
• Get the date right. Work out when the cause of action accrued under your state's rule — commonly the date of the last payment or the date the balance became due — and put that date in writing.
• Audit the bill anyway. An old bill can be both time-barred and wrong. If the amount is inflated by duplicate charges or coding errors, that is worth establishing independently of the deadline, especially if you are negotiating rather than litigating.
• Keep everything in writing. Phone acknowledgments are exactly the kind of thing that gets characterised later as an acknowledgment of the debt.

Sources

Every figure in the table above was read on July 29, 2026 from the state code page linked in its row. Federal provisions referenced elsewhere on this site — including 45 CFR § 149.110 on emergency-services surprise billing and 45 CFR § 180.50 on hospital standard-charge disclosure — were read on the same date from the eCFR at ecfr.gov.