Most people know they have a few years to file an injury claim in Colorado. What almost nobody knows is that if the government caused or contributed to the crash, that window collapses to 182 days. Miss it, and the claim is dead, no matter how strong it is.
I see this most often in road hazard cases. A pothole that swallows a front wheel. A collapsed shoulder that sends a rider down. A traffic signal that's been malfunctioning for weeks. An intersection with a sightline problem the city has known about for years. When the responsible party is a city, county, or the state of Colorado instead of another driver, a completely different set of rules kicks in, and it moves a lot faster than people expect.
The Colorado Governmental Immunity Act, or CGIA, is the law that decides when you're allowed to sue a government entity at all. Cities, counties, school districts, and the state start from a position of immunity, meaning they can't be sued for most things. The CGIA carves out specific exceptions where that immunity is waived, and one of the biggest exceptions covers dangerous conditions on public roads that physically interfere with the movement of traffic. That's the exception that covers most road hazard crashes. There's a separate exception for injuries caused by a government employee operating a government vehicle in the course of their job, which covers a city truck or a police cruiser causing a crash.
If your case falls into one of these categories, you can pursue a claim. But the CGIA also builds in a strict procedural trap, and this is the part that catches people off guard.
Under C.R.S. § 24-10-109, anyone injured by a public entity or a public employee has to send written notice of the claim within 182 days after discovering the injury. Discovering the injury doesn't mean discovering every detail of your case. It means the date you knew, or reasonably should have known, that you were hurt and what caused it. For most crashes, that's the day it happened.
This notice isn't a formality and it isn't the same as filing a lawsuit. It's a separate, earlier step, and Colorado courts treat it as jurisdictional. That means if you miss it, there's no arguing your way around it later. The claim is barred, permanently, even if liability is obvious and the injury is severe.
The trap: Most people assume they have the standard three years to deal with a crash claim, because that's the rule for a normal car accident case under C.R.S. § 13-80-101. The 182-day notice requirement runs on a completely separate, much shorter clock, and it applies in addition to the three-year deadline, not instead of it.
The written notice has to include specific information: your name and address, a statement of the facts, including the date, time, place, and circumstances of the incident, the name of any public employee involved if known, the nature and extent of the injury, and the amount of damages you're claiming. It has to go to the right place, too. If the claim is against the state, notice goes to the Attorney General's office. If it's against a city, county, or another local public entity, it goes to the governing body or the attorney representing that entity. Send it to the wrong office and you can end up in the exact dispute that's currently working its way through the Colorado Supreme Court, where a claimant sent timely notice to one municipality only to find out later that a different one was actually responsible.
Potholes, road defects, and poorly maintained shoulders are one of the more common ways a government entity ends up on the other side of a claim, and they're also one of the easiest ways to lose a valid claim on a technicality. The road looks the same the day after the crash as it did the day before. Nobody hands you paperwork telling you the city is responsible or that you're on a clock. If you spend those early weeks dealing with medical treatment and insurance calls the way you would after a normal crash, the 182 days can be gone before anyone's looked at whether a public entity was involved at all.
This is exactly why I ask about road conditions and involved vehicles on every single motorcycle and car crash intake, not just the ones that look obviously government-related. It costs nothing to check, and it's the difference between a live claim and a barred one.
Even when a claim against a public entity is valid and timely, the CGIA caps what you can recover, and that cap depends on when your claim accrued. Under C.R.S. § 24-10-114(1)(b), for claims accruing on or after January 1, 2026 and before January 1, 2030, the limit is $505,000 for injury to one person in a single occurrence, and $1,421,000 total if multiple people are hurt in the same incident, with no individual recovering more than the per-person cap. These figures adjust every four years, so a crash that happened in 2025 or earlier falls under a lower bracket. Punitive damages aren't available against a government entity at all. These caps are worth knowing going in, because they affect strategy from day one, including whether other defendants, like a negligent contractor or a third party, should be pursued alongside the government claim.
The 182-day clock doesn't wait for you to figure that out. If there's any chance a city, county, or the state contributed to what happened, get it looked at now, not after the standard deadlines have already started to feel comfortable.
Talk to Me About Your CaseNo. It only applies when a public entity or a public employee acting within their job is potentially responsible, such as a dangerous road condition, a malfunctioning traffic signal, or a crash caused by a government-owned vehicle. A crash between two private drivers follows the standard three-year statute of limitations instead.
The 182 days runs from when you discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, your injury, not necessarily from the moment you learned a government entity was responsible. In practice, this means the clock is often already running before you've had a chance to fully investigate, which is exactly why an early evaluation matters.
No. The notice is a separate written step that has to happen first. You generally can't file suit until the public entity has denied the claim or 90 days have passed since the notice was filed, whichever comes first. But the notice itself is the piece with the hard 182-day deadline, and missing it bars the claim before a lawsuit is ever an option.
Yes, if the dangerous road condition physically interferes with the movement of traffic and the government entity responsible for maintaining that road had notice of the defect or should have. Not every pothole qualifies, and this is a fact-specific analysis, but it's worth having evaluated rather than assumed away.
Yes. The cap adjusts every four years and applies based on when your claim accrued, not when you file it. Claims from 2022 through 2025 fall under a $424,000 per-person cap. Claims accruing from January 1, 2026 through the end of 2029 fall under the current $505,000 per-person cap. If your crash happened a few years ago, don't assume today's number applies to your case.
Here to provide you clear answers about your case.
