The default: the clock starts on the date of injury
Under Ark. Code Ann. § 16-56-105, Arkansas's three-year deadline generally begins running on the date of the underlying injury itself — the "occurrence rule" — rather than the date a claim is reported, or the date a lawyer is hired. Arkansas courts have recognized discovery-based exceptions in specific, narrower circumstances where an injury or its cause genuinely wasn't apparent at the time it happened, though the baseline expectation in most cases is that the clock runs from the injury date itself.
Minors: tolled all the way to 21
This is genuinely unusual compared to most states. Under Ark. Code Ann. § 16-56-116(a), a person injured before turning 21 has three years after their 21st birthday to file — not the 18th birthday that serves as the reference point in the large majority of other states. A child injured at age 10 in Arkansas has until age 24 to file, a considerably longer window than the equivalent claimant would have almost anywhere else in the country.
Incapacity: the same extended protection
The same statutory provision extends a parallel protection to anyone "disabled by insanity" at the time of the injury — that person has three years to sue, running from whenever they are found to no longer be insane, rather than a clock that could otherwise expire while they remained genuinely unable to act on their own behalf.
A defendant who hides: the clock genuinely stops
Here's a real, distinctive Arkansas rule worth understanding. Under Ark. Code Ann. § 16-56-120, when an injured person is unable to start a lawsuit because the defendant has left Arkansas or gone into hiding specifically to avoid being sued, the statute of limitations stops running for the period during which that concealment or absence genuinely prevents the lawsuit from being filed. This doesn't apply to every case where a defendant simply can't be easily located — whether the absence or concealment actually prevented the lawsuit is a real factual question worth discussing directly with an attorney.
What doesn't pause the clock
A genuinely common and costly misunderstanding: actively negotiating a settlement with an insurance company does not toll or pause Arkansas's filing deadline. The three-year clock keeps running the entire time talks are ongoing, regardless of how close the parties seem to a resolution.