§ 8.01-243.Personal action for injury to person or property generally; extension in actions for malpractice against health care provider.

Section 8.01-243 is the workhorse limitations provision most personal-injury and property-damage cases in Virginia turn on. Subsection A gives ordinary personal-injury claims, whatever the theory of recovery, and fraud claims, two years from accrual to file suit. Subsection B gives property-damage claims, including a parent’s or guardian’s claim for the cost of curing a child injured by a tortfeasor, five years, though an infant’s own medical-expense claim under § 8.01-36(B) accruing on or after July 1, 2013, instead follows whatever limitation period applies to the infant’s own underlying injury claim.

Subsection C extends the two-year malpractice period against health care providers in three specific situations: a foreign object with no therapeutic or diagnostic purpose left in the body gets one year from discovery; fraud, concealment, or intentional misrepresentation that prevented discovery within the normal two years gets one year from when the injury was or reasonably should have been discovered; and a negligent failure to diagnose a malignant tumor, cancer, or certain schwannomas gets one year from when the diagnosis is communicated to the patient, subject to effective-date rules tied to the underlying act or omission. None of these extensions, though, can push the deadline past ten years from accrual, except that the disability-tolling rule in § 8.01-229(A)(2) still applies on top of that ten-year outer limit.

Subsections D, D1, and D2 carve out sexual abuse claims from the ordinary two-year period entirely, and set their own long deadlines depending on the circumstances: twenty years for abuse occurring during the victim’s infancy or incapacity as described in § 8.01-249(6); ten years, for causes of action accruing on or after July 1, 2020, for other sexual abuse; and fifteen years where the abuse occurred when the victim was eighteen or older and was committed by a “person of authority” — someone in a position of trust with influence over the victim’s life. Subsection E, unrelated to the personal-injury framework, gives the Commonwealth five years to sue a tortfeasor for property-damage expenses arising from negligent operation of a motor vehicle.