Hurt by the MTA or a city agency? The 90-day deadline comes first

Under New York General Municipal Law §50-e, a person bringing a personal injury claim against a public corporation must serve a notice of claim within ninety days after the claim arises. In wrongful death actions the ninety days runs instead from the appointment of a representative of the decedent's estate.

Ninety days is far shorter than the limitations period most people have in mind, and missing it can end a claim that would otherwise have been perfectly good. This article explains what the notice is, who it applies to, and why the ordinary three-year figure is the wrong number to rely on when a public entity is involved.

What is a notice of claim?

It is a formal written notice served on the public entity before a lawsuit is started. It is not the lawsuit. It is a prerequisite to one.

The purpose is to give the entity an opportunity to investigate while the facts are still fresh, which is also why the window is so short. The notice generally has to set out the nature of the claim, the time and place it arose, the manner in which it arose, and the damages claimed, in enough detail that the entity can actually look into it.

Who counts as a public entity?

More organizations than people expect. The category commonly includes:

• The City of New York and its agencies
• Transit authorities, including the MTA and its subsidiaries
• School districts and public hospitals
• Counties, towns and villages

The practical difficulty is that the entity behind an incident is not always obvious from the outside. A bus, a maintenance vehicle, a hospital or a stretch of sidewalk may be operated by a public body, a private contractor, or both. Identifying the correct entity is part of the work, and it has to happen inside the ninety days rather than after them.

Is ninety days the only deadline?

No. There are generally three separate clocks, and they run at the same time rather than one after another.

The point worth taking from this is not the specific figures, which vary by entity, but the structure: the shortest applicable deadline governs, and for public entities that is almost never the one people have heard about.

What happens if the ninety days has already passed?

It is not automatically the end, but it becomes a contested question rather than a right.

New York courts have discretion to permit a late notice of claim in some circumstances. Whether that permission is granted turns on factors including whether the public entity acquired actual knowledge of the essential facts within ninety days or a reasonable time after, whether the delay substantially prejudiced the entity's ability to defend, and the reason for the delay. Infancy and incapacity are among the circumstances courts weigh.

This is a discretionary application, not a formality, and it has to be made within the limits the statute sets. Anyone in that position should treat it as time-sensitive.

Does this apply to a slip and fall on a sidewalk?

It depends on who is responsible for the sidewalk, which is a genuinely separate question from who owns the street.

Under the New York City Administrative Code, responsibility for maintaining most sidewalks abutting a property sits with the abutting property owner rather than with the City, with an exception for certain one, two and three-family residential properties that are owner-occupied. Where the abutting owner is a private party, the claim is an ordinary private claim and §50-e does not apply to it. Where the City retains responsibility, it does.

Working out which of those is true is the first question, not a detail to sort out later, because the answer determines whether a ninety-day clock is running.

Why does this deadline catch so many people?

Because nothing about it is visible. There is no letter, no notification and no reminder. A person recovering from an injury, dealing with treatment and out of work, has no particular reason to know that a shorter and stricter deadline applies to their claim than to their neighbor's, purely because of who was involved.

The single most useful thing to know is that if a public entity may be involved in any way, the ninety-day figure is the one to work from until someone confirms otherwise.

This article is general information about New York law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines vary by entity and by the facts, and the law changes. Speak with a lawyer about your own situation.

Current as of August 2026. General Municipal Law §50-e verified against the New York State Senate's published text on 19 August 2026.