The Carmack Amendment time limits are nine months to file a loss or damage claim and two years to file suit, and both numbers are floors rather than deadlines. 49 U.S.C. 14706(e)(1) bars a carrier from providing, by rule, contract or otherwise, a claim-filing period shorter than nine months, or a period for bringing a civil action shorter than two years running from the date the carrier gives written notice that it has disallowed any part of the claim.
That distinction is not pedantry. The nine months in the statute is the shortest deadline the carrier is permitted to write into its bill of lading, not your deadline. Your actual deadline is whatever the governing document says, and the statute only stops it from going below nine months. Most standard bills of lading sit exactly at the floor, which is why the industry talks about the nine-month rule as if Congress wrote it. Some contracts give you twelve months or more. Read yours.
The second half of the sentence is the part that gets misremembered most often. The two-year suit period does not run from delivery. It runs from the carrier’s written disallowance. A claim that is still open, unanswered, and undenied has not started that clock.
Where each number comes from
Freight has a lot of clocks and they live in different places. Carmack, codified at 49 U.S.C. 14706, is about the carrier’s liability for the goods. It is not where the billing deadlines live, and mixing the two is the most common way people miss a deadline that mattered.
| Clock | Length | Runs from | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filing a loss or damage claim | Whatever the BOL says, never less than 9 months | Delivery, or a reasonable delivery date if the goods never arrived | 49 U.S.C. 14706(e)(1) |
| Bringing suit on a denied claim | Whatever the BOL says, never less than 2 years | The carrier’s written notice disallowing the claim | 49 U.S.C. 14706(e)(1) |
| Carrier suing to collect freight charges | 18 months | Accrual, which is delivery or tender of delivery | 49 U.S.C. 14705 |
| Shipper suing to recover overcharges | 18 months, or 3 years if filed as a complaint with the Board or the Secretary | Accrual | 49 U.S.C. 14705 |
| Carrier billing charges beyond the original bill | 180 days | Your receipt of the original bill | 49 U.S.C. 13710 |
| You contesting a bill to preserve your right to challenge | 180 days | Your receipt of the bill | 49 U.S.C. 13710 |
Read down that table once and the structural point lands: the goods and the money are on separate tracks. Damaged freight is a Carmack question. A wrong fuel surcharge is a billing question. If a load has both problems, both clocks are running independently and neither one waits for the other. The full set, including the carrier-processing deadlines in 49 CFR 370 and 378, is collected in every freight billing deadline that can cost you money.
What starts the nine months
Delivery. The claim-filing period in a standard bill of lading runs from the date of delivery of the goods.
The harder cases are the ones where delivery never happened or happened in stages.
Total loss, nothing arrived. There is no delivery date to count from, so the period is generally measured from a reasonable date for delivery: when the shipment should have arrived given the transit. The practical answer is not to litigate the concept. If a shipment has gone missing, file the claim while you keep tracing. A claim filed on a load that later turns up is trivially withdrawn. A claim filed after the window closed is nothing.
Partial delivery or split delivery. Each delivery is its own event. Do not let the last stop’s date govern a shortage discovered at the first stop.
Concealed damage. The nine months still runs from delivery, but the practical problem is different and earlier: the delivery receipt was signed clean, and the damage surfaced when the carton was opened. The filing window is rarely what kills a concealed damage claim; the notice interval and the preserved packaging are.
Reconsigned or diverted freight. Delivery means delivery at the final destination as actually performed, not the address on the original bill of lading.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up in every carrier conversation: noting damage on the delivery receipt is not filing a claim. Under 49 CFR 370.3, a notation of shortage or damage on a freight bill or delivery receipt does not by itself constitute a claim, and neither does a bad-order report or an appraisal report. Those are evidence. The claim is a separate written document containing the elements set out in valid freight claim requirements under 49 CFR 370.3.
What starts the two years
The carrier’s written notice disallowing the claim, in whole or in part.
This is the sentence to internalize. Three consequences follow from it, and all three cut against the way most operations handle claims.
A claim the carrier never answers has not started the suit clock. That sounds like it favors you, and in a narrow sense it does. It also means an unanswered claim can sit in a queue indefinitely while the file goes cold, the people who handled the freight leave, and the photographs get archived somewhere nobody can find. Silence is not a win.
A partial denial starts the clock on the denied part. If a carrier writes back offering to settle a $12,000 claim for $3,000, that is a disallowance of the rest, in writing. The date on that letter matters.
The written disallowance is the document to preserve. Not the phone call, not the adjuster’s verbal position. Ask for denials in writing, and file them with the claim.
Because the two-year period keys off carrier action rather than the shipment, you can push the carrier toward a dated document using the processing rules. Under 49 CFR 370.9, the carrier must pay, decline, or make a firm written compromise offer within 120 days of receiving the claim, and if the claim is still unresolved at 120 days it must issue a written status report explaining the delay and another every 60 days after that. Under 49 CFR 370.5 it must acknowledge the claim in writing within 30 days of receipt, record the date received, and assign a claim file number, unless it has already paid or declined in writing inside that window.
Be honest with yourself about what those rules do. They are claim-processing obligations on the carrier. A missed 120-day disposition is not a judgment in your favor and does not make the claim payable. What it gives you is a specific, citable request to make, and requests with a rule number attached move differently inside a claims department than “any update on this?” does.
The 18-month clocks in 14705, and why they are not Carmack
Practitioners frequently cite 18 months as “the Carmack limitation.” It is not. It comes from 49 U.S.C. 14705, and it governs money rather than goods.
Under 14705, a carrier must begin a civil action to recover freight charges within 18 months of the claim accruing, and a shipper must begin a civil action to recover overcharges within 18 months, or within three years if the matter is brought as a complaint to the Board or the Secretary. Actions for damages under those provisions run on a two-year period. There is a six-month extension where the carrier gives written disallowance, plus 90 days where the carrier has begun collection, and three-year periods apply for shipments made by or for the federal government. Claims under 14705 accrue on delivery or tender of delivery.
Two takeaways for a settlement or AP desk:
- An 18-month-old carrier invoice for a load that delivered two years ago has a limitation problem, separate from any argument about whether the charge is right. That is worth checking before you spend an afternoon reconciling it.
- Overpayments you discover in an audit are on their own clock too, and it is not the nine-month claim window. If you already paid, the recovery path is an overcharge claim, and under 49 CFR 378.8 the processing carrier must pay, decline or settle a written overcharge claim within 60 days of receipt absent a written agreement to extend.
The reason this matters operationally is that audit findings and claims arrive through different doors. A duplicate invoice caught five months after payment, the kind described in how duplicate freight invoices hide in your AP, is an overcharge, not a Carmack claim, and running it through the claims process wastes the window that actually applies.
Can the time limits be changed by contract
Upward, yes. Downward, no, below the statutory floors.
A carrier cannot write a six-month claim window into its rules tariff and enforce it, because 14706(e)(1) forbids providing a shorter period by rule, contract or otherwise. A carrier can agree to a longer one, and shippers with negotiating leverage sometimes get twelve or eighteen months written into a transportation agreement. If you have that, it lives in the contract, not in the bill of lading, and the two documents will disagree. Know which one governs.
Where this bites brokers is the mismatch between two agreements on the same load. Your customer contract may give the shipper twelve months to claim against you. The carrier’s bill of lading gives you nine against the carrier. That three-month gap is money, and it is entirely avoidable by aligning the windows at contract time. The same principle applies to billing windows and accessorial schedules, which is why the reconciliation discipline in rate con versus carrier invoice reconciliation starts with reading the documents against each other rather than against the invoice.
What to actually do
- Find the claim-filing period in your bill of lading and your transportation agreement. Note which governs and whether it exceeds nine months.
- Treat delivery as the start date. For a shipment that never arrived, use a reasonable expected delivery date and file early.
- File a real claim, not a delivery receipt notation and not an email with a photo attached.
- Calendar day 30 and day 120 from the filing date and send a short citation-bearing follow-up at each.
- Insist that any denial or partial denial arrive in writing, and calendar two years from the date on that letter.
- Keep claims and billing disputes in separate queues, because they resolve on different clocks and go to different people.
- Check carrier invoices arriving more than 18 months after delivery against 14705 before reconciling them.
- At contract renewal, align the claim window you owe your customer with the window you hold against your carriers.
None of this makes a weak claim strong. What it does is stop a good claim from dying on a date, which is how most of them die.
Sources
- 49 U.S.C. 14706, Liability of carriers under receipts and bills of lading (Cornell LII)
- 49 U.S.C. 14705, Limitation on actions by and against carriers (Cornell LII)
- 49 U.S.C. 13710, Information and records, billing and contesting windows (Cornell LII)
- 49 CFR 370.3, Filing of claims (Cornell LII)
- 49 CFR 370.5, Acknowledgment of claims (Cornell LII)
- 49 CFR 370.9, Disposition of claims (Cornell LII)
- 49 CFR 378.8, Overcharge claim resolution within 60 days (Cornell LII)
- Freight claim time limits, practitioner summary (FreightClaims.com)