Statute of Limitations in PA: How Long Do You Have to Sue?

The statute of limitations in PA depends on the type of claim. Negligence claims, the only route to emotional damages, usually carry a 2-year limit. Breach of contract claims carry 4 years, and consumer protection claims under the UTPCPL carry 6. The clock starts when you knew or should have known you had a claim. Of those three numbers, two years is the one to remember.

What Is a Statute of Limitations?

A statute of limitations is the amount of time you have to bring a claim against someone, measured from the time you should have known you had a claim.

Put simply, you only get a certain amount of time to sue somebody for a certain claim after you find out you should have had one. If you find out you were injured today and wait 20 years to sue, you don’t really have a claim anymore. This isn’t a Kaminsky Law rule. It’s the law.

Why Do Time Limits to Sue Exist?

Time limits exist because old claims are very hard to prove and very hard to defend.

The longer a claim sits, the more the evidence falls apart:

• Evidence gets destroyed.
• People forget, and witnesses forget.
• Things get deleted, including camera footage.

Anton Kaminsky uses a simple illustration. If someone accused him today of beating them up in sixth grade, he wouldn’t know who the witnesses would even be, and he wouldn’t remember the incident. That’s the point behind a statute of limitations.

To some extent, these limits are also meant to protect the person being sued from a plaintiff who sits on his or her rights.

Pennsylvania Statute of Limitations: 2, 4, and 6 Years

In Pennsylvania, the time limit depends on which type of claim you bring: 2 years for negligence, 4 years for breach of contract, and 6 years under the UTPCPL.

Every state is different, and this article covers Pennsylvania only. A lot of states are similar, but whether their rules are the same is a separate question. The examples below come from cemetery negligence cases, where there are a few different types of claims a family could bring when something goes wrong with a burial.

Negligence claims: 2 years

A negligence claim, also called a tort claim, says that something someone did caused you physical or emotional harm. These are usually the claims Kaminsky Law brings in cemetery cases.

Negligence claims usually carry a 2-year statute of limitations. This is the claim where you can seek emotional damages, so seeking emotional damages means acting within 2 years of figuring out what happened.

Breach of contract: 4 years

If you had a contract with the cemetery and they got it wrong, that’s a contract-based claim, and it carries a 4-year statute of limitations.

That gives you some additional time. The problem is that you don’t get emotional damages for breach of contract. So in the cemetery context, if something went wrong with a burial, you have 4 years on the contract claim, but only 2 years on the negligence claim that can carry emotional damages.

UTPCPL consumer protection claims: 6 years

The UTPCPL, Pennsylvania’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, carries a 6-year statute of limitations.

It’s a consumer protection law that protects consumers from misrepresentations or fraud in the course of selling products, goods, or services. The damages available under it aren’t that great, though. They’re limited to out-of-pocket expenses and demonstrable monetary damages.

There are two additional features:

• Attorney’s fees. You can get your attorney’s fees back in a UTPCPL claim.
• Treble damages. You can also potentially get treble damages, meaning 3 times the damages, which work like punitive damages. To get them, you have to show the other side did something knowingly or purposefully wrong.

When Does the Clock Start Running?

The clock starts from the moment you knew or should have known you had an injury.

The “knew” part is the important one. Say you walk up to a grave in 2015 and see that somebody was buried in a grave you own. You decide you’ll say something about it later. Then in 2026 you call a lawyer. The first question will be why you didn’t call in 2015. Being busy doesn’t change the answer: the statute of limitations for an emotional injury from 2015 is most likely gone.

The “should have known” part is more nuanced, and it’s where the discovery rule comes in.

What Is the Discovery Rule in Pennsylvania?

The discovery rule is an exception for problems you couldn’t have known about. Under it, the clock starts running from when you reasonably could have discovered the problem.

Here’s how that plays out. Grandma is buried in 2015 in a double depth grave. In 2026, the family goes to bury grandpa in the same grave, 11 years later. Only then does the cemetery tell them: in 2017, they buried someone on top of grandma by accident, and now they have to move that person so grandpa can be buried in his intended grave space. (For how this kind of burial is supposed to work, see our guide to double depth burial done wrong.)

Maybe you didn’t visit the cemetery, didn’t see anything, and didn’t hear about it. If there was no way for you to know, the clock doesn’t start in 2017. It starts when you are just learning about it for the first time.

Could you have noticed? The disturbed soil question

If you were at the grave all the time and saw disturbed soil, maybe you should have reported it in 2017. Disturbed soil is one of the warning signs of funeral home and cemetery negligence, and it’s something a visitor can notice.

But it’s a bad example of something you reasonably should have known. Soil is only visibly disturbed for a few weeks or a few months at most. Toward the end of those months it’s barely disturbed, maybe a little sunken. You wouldn’t see it unless you were there within a few weeks of the burial.

A family member is also not a cemetery expert. If the other side argued that you should have noticed disturbed soil and said something, Anton’s view is that it’s not a great case.

Complaining to the Cemetery Doesn’t Pause the Clock

Going to the cemetery to complain does not extend the statute of limitations. It does the opposite: by going to talk to them, you’ve started the clock.

Kaminsky Law gets a lot of calls that follow the same pattern. Something was wrong in 2015, and the person figured out it was wrong in 2015. They went to the cemetery, and nothing was done about it, so they let it go. They went back in 2019, and again nothing was done. Now they’re finally ready to do something about it, and the time limit has already passed.

Why Waiting Shrinks What You Can Recover

The longer you wait, the fewer claims you have left and the less you can recover.

In cemetery and funeral home cases, damages are predominantly emotional. Emotional damages come through the 2-year negligence claim. After two years, the likelihood of recovering emotional damages is very low. Not a 0% chance, but very low.

That’s why suing a cemetery 5 years later is so limited: both the damages and the causes of action you could bring are very limited. Sitting on your rights has two costs:

1. You could lose your claim altogether.
2. Even if you had a good claim, you might be precluded from getting some of the higher damage categories.

The Number to Remember: Two Years

Of the three Pennsylvania time limits, two years is the key number for cemetery negligence.

As Anton puts it, don’t hear 2, 4, 6. Hear the 2. The 4-year and 6-year limits are the worst-case scenario, and they come with much more limited damages.

That’s why the recommended step, if something looks wrong, is to document it, report it, and speak with a lawyer as soon as possible. If you aren’t sure whether you have a claim, speaking to an attorney doesn’t take as long as you might think.

Statute of Limitations in PA: FAQ

Talk to Kaminsky Law

In Pennsylvania, the clock on these claims starts when you knew or should have known about the problem. Contact Kaminsky Law to talk through what happened and when you found out. It doesn’t take as long as you might think.

Related Reading

• Next of kin cremation and disinterment consent in Pennsylvania
• Ask for burial space probing to confirm your grave can be used
• What size should my burial space be?
• Small claims vs. arbitration vs. Court of Common Pleas

Anton Kaminsky Partner

Anton Kaminsky is the founder of Kaminsky Law and a Philadelphia business and employment litigator. He spent over a decade in finance and banking, including trading equities and evaluating strategies at a hedge fund, before earning his law degree at Temple and litigating for five years at Bochetto & Lentz. He represents small businesses and individuals in shareholder disputes, contract fights, and employment claims across Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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