Criminal Statute of Limitations by State
How long does the state have to file charges? It depends heavily on the crime, not just the state — murder is almost always prosecutable at any time, while a misdemeanor might only give the state a year or two. Select a state to see the actual breakdown.
Not legal advice. These are general deadlines for when the state must file charges, drawn from each state's current statute. Real cases turn on facts a chart can't capture — when the clock is tolled, how a specific charge is classified, whether an exception applies — and getting this wrong in either direction carries real consequences. If you're asking because you or someone you know may be under investigation or charged, talk to a criminal defense attorney now, not after checking a chart.
Covers state-level crimes only, not federal charges, which follow a separate, mostly-uniform federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 3282 and its exceptions).
- Alabama 3 of 4 categories covered
- Alaska 3 of 4 categories covered
- Arizona 3 of 4 categories covered
- Arkansas 4 of 4 categories covered
- California 4 of 4 categories covered
- Colorado 4 of 4 categories covered
- Connecticut 4 of 4 categories covered
- Delaware 4 of 4 categories covered
- District of Columbia 2 of 4 categories covered
- Florida 4 of 4 categories covered
- Georgia 3 of 4 categories covered
- Hawaii 4 of 4 categories covered
- Idaho 1 of 4 categories covered
- Illinois 4 of 4 categories covered
- Indiana 4 of 4 categories covered
- Iowa 1 of 4 categories covered
- Kansas 4 of 4 categories covered
- Kentucky 3 of 4 categories covered
- Louisiana 2 of 4 categories covered
- Maine 3 of 4 categories covered
- Maryland 3 of 4 categories covered
- Massachusetts 4 of 4 categories covered
- Michigan 2 of 4 categories covered
- Minnesota 2 of 4 categories covered
- Mississippi 2 of 4 categories covered
- Missouri 4 of 4 categories covered
- Montana 4 of 4 categories covered
- Nebraska 3 of 4 categories covered
- Nevada 2 of 4 categories covered
- New Hampshire 4 of 4 categories covered
- New Jersey 4 of 4 categories covered
- New Mexico 3 of 4 categories covered
- New York 4 of 4 categories covered
- North Carolina 2 of 4 categories covered
- North Dakota 4 of 4 categories covered
- Ohio 4 of 4 categories covered
- Oklahoma 1 of 4 categories covered
- Pennsylvania 2 of 4 categories covered
- Rhode Island 3 of 4 categories covered
- South Carolina 2 of 4 categories covered
- South Dakota 3 of 4 categories covered
- Tennessee 2 of 4 categories covered
- Texas 3 of 4 categories covered
- Utah 3 of 4 categories covered
- Vermont 4 of 4 categories covered
- Virginia 2 of 4 categories covered
- Washington 4 of 4 categories covered
- West Virginia 1 of 4 categories covered
- Wisconsin 3 of 4 categories covered
- Wyoming 2 of 4 categories covered
About this data: Each period and citation above was extracted by hand from the actual statute text in our
statutes database
(sourced from official government publishers via the
Open US Law dataset, Vaquill AI, CC BY 4.0)
and cross-checked against that text, rather than copied from another site's chart — where we found a state's citation didn't match what's commonly cited elsewhere (a recent law change, for example), we used the current statute. Where a state's source text isn't in our database yet, we say so instead of linking to something we haven't verified.