New York Employment Claim Filing Deadline Checker

Which deadline applies to which claim

These are the periods the checker uses. Each one was verified against the statute or the enforcing agency rather than a secondary summary, and each one has a trigger that matters as much as the number of days.

Discrimination, harassment, and retaliation

• EEOC charge, 300 days. The federal baseline is 180 days, extended to 300 where a state or local agency enforces a law prohibiting discrimination on the same basis. New York qualifies. A Title VII, ADA, or ADEA case cannot go to court without this charge. Once a right-to-sue letter issues you have 90 days to file suit, and that window is enforced strictly.
• NYS Division of Human Rights, three years. Executive Law 297(5), as amended effective 15 February 2024. For incidents on or before 14 February 2024 the period was one year, except sexual harassment in employment, which already carried three. The trigger is the incident date.
• State Human Rights Law in court, three years. CPLR 214(2), as a liability created by statute. Note that this is an alternative to the Division, not a next step: under Executive Law 297(9) an administrative complaint generally forecloses a later lawsuit on the same claim.
• City Human Rights Law, three years in court. N.Y.C. Admin. Code 8-502(d), which also tolls that period while a complaint sits at the City Commission or the State Division. The administrative route at the City Commission is only one year, or three years for gender-based harassment, under 8-109(e).

Wages and pay

• New York Labor Law, six years. NYLL 198(3). Among the longest wage limitations periods in the country, and usually the single biggest driver of value in a New York wage case.
• FLSA, two years, or three if willful. 29 U.S.C. 255(a). Willfulness is a contested factual finding, so the third year is not something to plan around. Wage claims accrue paycheck by paycheck, which means this is a rolling deadline rather than a single one, and filing a lawsuit is what stops the clock.
• Wage retaliation, two years. NYLL 215(2)(a). Worth noticing that the retaliation claim expires four years before the underlying pay claim does.
• Whistleblower retaliation, two years. NYLL 740(4)(a), running from the retaliatory act rather than from whatever you originally reported.

Public employers, where the answer splits five ways

There is no single public-sector rule, and this is the part of the subject that catches people. Asking only whether the employer is public produces one answer for five situations, and four of them would be wrong.

• Federal employees get 45 days, not 300. Under 29 C.F.R. 1614.105(a)(1) an aggrieved person must initiate contact with an EEO Counselor at their own agency within 45 days of the discriminatory matter, or of the effective date of a personnel action. It is a precondition to everything after it. This is the shortest deadline anywhere in the system.
• School districts, three months and then one year. Education Law 3813(1) requires a written verified claim to the governing body of the district, board of education, or BOCES within three months of accrual. Section 3813(2-b) bars any action begun more than one year after the cause of action arose, and the Court of Appeals held in Amorosi v. South Colonie that this one-year period governs discrimination claims against a school district in preference to the three years in CPLR 214(2).
• Counties, ninety days. County Law 52(1) requires a notice of claim for any claim against a county for damage, injury, or death, or for invasion of personal or property rights of every name and nature, served in compliance with General Municipal Law 50-e. That wording is considerably wider than the ordinary tort language, which is why counties are treated differently from cities.
• Cities, towns, and villages, possibly nothing. The Court of Appeals held in Margerum v. City of Buffalo that a notice of claim is not a condition precedent to a Human Rights Law action where General Municipal Law 50-e and 50-i supply the only notice-of-claim criteria. That is the position for a city, town, or village, and it is not the position for a county or a school district.
• New York State itself, the Court of Claims. Court of Claims Act 10(3) and 10(3-b) require tort claims to be filed and served on the Attorney General within ninety days of accrual unless a written notice of intention is served in that time; 10(4) sets six months for other claims. Which subdivision governs a Human Rights Law claim against a State agency is contested, so the checker shows the shortest.

One thing none of these rules does is shorten a federal deadline. Notice-of-claim statutes are creatures of New York law. If you work for a public employer you are running the state clocks and the federal clocks at the same time, and you have to satisfy both. Note as well that a complaint to the State Division of Human Rights against a State agency runs on the same three years as everyone else, because Executive Law 297(5) carves out nothing by employer type. The divergence appears when you go to court.

What starts the clock, and what does not

The clock generally starts on the date of the adverse action, not the date you understood it was unlawful and not the date an internal process ended. For a termination, courts generally start counting when you are told you are being fired, even if you keep working for several more weeks. For a failure to promote, when the decision is communicated. For a denied accommodation, when the denial is made clear.

Three things that do not stop the clock:

• An open HR investigation. Employers often ask employees to let the process play out. The process has no effect on a statutory deadline.
• An internal appeal or grievance, unless a union contract independently requires it and separately preserves the claim.
• Severance or settlement discussions. Negotiations toll nothing unless the employer signs a written tolling agreement.

There are real exceptions running the other way. Under the continuing violation doctrine a hostile work environment is treated as a single unlawful practice, so it can reach back to earlier acts as long as one contributing act falls inside the window. Under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act each discriminatory paycheck can restart the clock on a pay discrimination claim. Neither is something to rely on before a lawyer has looked at the dates, which is why this checker does not apply them for you.

Why this tool never tells you that you are safe

Because it cannot know. It counts forward from one date you typed and compares the result to today. It does not know whether the conduct continued after that date, whether you signed an arbitration agreement or a handbook acknowledgement that cut the period to six months, whether a right-to-sue letter has already started a 90-day clock, whether you are inside a collective bargaining agreement with its own grievance deadlines, or whether the date you gave it is the date the law would actually count from.

Every one of those can move a date, and most of them move it earlier. So the output is framed as an estimate throughout, deadlines that depend on unknown facts are marked rather than guessed at, and the result says plainly that the shortest applicable deadline is the one that decides whether a claim survives. If you want the version with your actual documents in front of someone, tell us what happened. Dates are the one part of an employment case that cannot be fixed later.

For the same material in prose, with the statutory citations set out in a table, see how long do I have to file. If a severance agreement is part of the picture, the severance agreement checklist covers the signing deadline and what a release actually gives up.