The 90-Day Deadline Most People Miss After a New Jersey Transit Injury

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By Michael J. Epstein, Managing Partner, The Epstein Law Firm, P.A. Rochelle Park, New Jersey · July 2026

 

In Brief

If you are injured by a New Jersey public entity, including NJ Transit, you generally have ninety days to serve a formal notice of claim. That is not the same as the two-year deadline to file a lawsuit, and it comes first. Miss the ninety days and you can lose the case before it starts. There is a limited path to file late, but it is discretionary and it is not something to count on.

 

Ninety Days, and the Clock Usually Starts the Day You are Hurt

Most people know there is a two-year deadline for injury cases in New Jersey. That is true, and it is also the reason so many good claims die.

When the party that hurt you is a public entity, the two-year deadline is not the first one you have to meet. Before that, you have to put the entity on formal notice of your claim, and the statute gives you ninety days from the date the claim arises. Not ninety business days. Ninety days.

In most cases the claim arises the day you are injured, which is why it is safest to treat the injury date as day one. It is not an absolute rule. New Jersey courts have recognized that where an injury or its cause could not reasonably have been known right away, the ninety-day period can start later. That is a narrow doctrine and a poor thing to rely on, but it means someone who is past ninety days should ask the question rather than assume the answer.

Think about what the first ninety days after a serious injury actually look like. Surgery, maybe more than one. A hospital stay. Discharge to a rehabilitation facility or to a home that suddenly does not work for the person living in it. Insurance calls. Missed work. A family reorganizing itself around someone who cannot yet climb stairs. Somewhere in that stretch, a legal deadline is running that nobody has mentioned, and it will expire quietly.

That is the trap. The deadline runs during the exact stretch when a person is least able to attend to it, and nothing in the process is built to warn them. Nobody hands you a calendar on the way out of the hospital.

 

Why Public Entities Get a Shorter Clock than Everyone Else

The short answer is that the Legislature decided they should.

New Jersey, like most states, once held that the government could not be sued at all. The Tort Claims Act changed that, but it changed it on the government’s terms. The Act opened the door to claims against public entities and simultaneously built in protections that private defendants do not get. The notice requirement is one of them. The stated purpose is to let the public entity investigate while the evidence is fresh, correct the condition if something needs correcting, and budget for what it may owe.

Whether ninety days strikes the right balance is a fair debate. What is not debatable is that the rule is enforced, and that an injured person who misses it is usually out of options.

 

Who Counts as a Public Entity

This is where people get caught, because the answer is broader than it sounds.

NJ Transit is a public entity for these purposes, and New Jersey’s Supreme Court has said so while also holding that NJ Transit owes its passengers the heightened duty of care that the law places on common carriers. So both things are true at once. The agency owes riders a high standard of care, and the person suing it has a short window to speak up.

The category does not stop at NJ Transit. County and municipal governments, school boards, state agencies, and the authorities that maintain roads and public facilities can all fall within it. If you were hurt by a municipal vehicle, or on a public sidewalk, or because of a defect in a road that a public body maintains, you may be looking at the same ninety days.

The scale of the exposure here is easy to underestimate. According to post-tournament reporting, NJ Transit’s rail network alone carried more than 185,000 fans to the World Cup matches at MetLife Stadium this summer, on top of the ordinary weekday commute it runs all year. A very large number of New Jersey residents are on public transportation every day without ever considering that being hurt on it would put them on a different legal clock than being hurt in a supermarket parking lot.

 

The Six Months Nobody Warns You About

Here is the sequencing problem, and it is the part that surprises even people who know about the ninety days.

Serving the notice does not let you file suit. Once the notice has been received, the statute requires you to wait six months before you can bring the lawsuit. During that waiting period the two-year deadline keeps running. It does not pause.

So the real timeline looks like this. Ninety days to notice. Six months of waiting after that notice lands. And a hard two-year outer limit on filing suit that has been counting down from the day you were hurt through all of it. There is time in there to work with, but only if the first step happens early. A notice served on day eighty-nine leaves a much tighter path than one served on day ten, even though both are technically on time.

That is the practical case for calling someone quickly. Not urgency for its own sake. The calendar simply behaves differently in these cases.

 

If You Have Already Missed It

If you are reading this past the ninety days, the situation is very difficult but not automatically over.

New Jersey law gives a Superior Court judge discretion under limited circumstances to permit a late notice within one year of when the claim arose. Getting that permission requires a formal motion supported by sworn statements, and it requires showing what the statute calls extraordinary circumstances for the delay. The public entity also has to not be substantially prejudiced by the late filing. And the two-year limit on actually filing suit does not move regardless.

I want to be straight about this rather than encouraging. Extraordinary circumstances is a demanding standard, and courts apply it as one and limit it to rare situations. Forgetting, or not knowing the rule existed, does not usually meet it. But serious medical incapacity during the notice period, or circumstances that genuinely prevented a claim from being presented, have supported late-notice applications. If you are in that window, the application is worth evaluating quickly, because the one-year door closes too.

The statute does carve out some room for a minor or a person who is mentally incapacitated, preserving the ability to bring an action after reaching adulthood or regaining capacity. I want to be careful not to oversell that. It speaks to the deadline for filing suit, and New Jersey courts have not treated a claimant’s youth as automatically excusing a late notice of claim. If a child was hurt, the answer depends on the specifics and is worth asking about rather than assuming in either direction.

 

What the Injury Numbers Actually Show

Nationally, the picture is steady rather than dramatic, which is its own kind of argument for taking the deadline seriously.

Transit agencies reported 8,230 collisions between buses and people to the federal National Transit Database over the sixteen years from 2008 through 2023, resulting in 596 deaths and 8,259 injuries. Looking at the more recent stretch of that period, from 2017 through 2023, the largest single share of these collisions, roughly forty percent, happened while the bus was within an intersection. About half of the people killed or injured in those intersection collisions were pedestrians in the crosswalk. These are national figures, not New Jersey figures, and I have not seen a current state-level breakdown published.

What the numbers describe is not a freak occurrence. It is a recurring event with recognizable patterns, happening in intersections, to people in the crosswalk.

 

The Bottom Line

If a public entity in New Jersey injured you, the ninety-day notice is the deadline that decides whether you have a case at all. Everything else in the process comes after it.

The best time to learn what the clock looks like is before it has run.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How long do I have to sue NJ Transit? 

Two deadlines apply, and the first one is short. You generally must serve a formal notice of claim within ninety days of when the claim arises, and any lawsuit must be filed within two years. Missing the ninety-day notice can bar the claim even though the two-year period has not expired.

What is a notice of claim in New Jersey? 

It is a formal written notice presented to the public entity you believe is responsible, telling it that you are making a claim. It is a prerequisite to suing that entity, not the lawsuit itself. Both what the notice says and which entity receives it matter, which is one reason it is worth having a lawyer prepare it rather than sending a letter and hoping.

What happens if I miss the 90-day deadline? 

You may be able to ask a Superior Court judge for permission to file a late notice, within one year of when the claim arose. You would need to show extraordinary circumstances for the delay, and the public entity must not be substantially prejudiced. Permission is discretionary, the standard is demanding, and the two-year deadline to file suit does not change.

Does the 90-day rule apply to a child who was injured? 

Not in the same way. The statute expressly preserves the ability of a minor, or a person who is mentally incapacitated, to bring an action within the time limits after reaching adulthood or regaining capacity. If you assumed a child’s claim expired, that assumption may be wrong and is worth checking.

Is NJ Transit a public entity? 

Yes, for purposes of the Tort Claims Act. New Jersey courts treat NJ Transit as a public entity, while also recognizing that it owes passengers the heightened duty of care required of a common carrier. Both the shorter deadline and the higher standard of care apply.

Who else counts as a public entity in New Jersey? 

The category is broad. It can include counties, municipalities, school boards, state agencies, and public authorities that own or maintain roads and facilities. If a government body of any kind may be responsible for your injury, the ninety-day notice question should be answered early rather than assumed away.

Michael J. Epstein is the managing partner of The Epstein Law Firm, P.A., and a New Jersey Supreme Court Certified Civil Trial Attorney. 

 

The deadline in these cases is short, and most people do not learn about it from the entity that owes them notice of nothing. That is the work we do. If you or a family member has been seriously injured on public transportation or by a public entity in New Jersey, learn more about our New Jersey bus accident practice, or contact our office to talk through your specific situation.

Results may vary depending on your particular facts and legal circumstances.