Statute of Limitations for Oral Contract in Illinois

How the limitation period applies

The controlling primary authority for Illinois statute of limitations for actions on oral (unwritten) contracts is 735 ILCS 5/13-205.

735 ILCS 5/13-205. Sec. 13-205. Five year limitation. Except as provided in Section 2-725 of the "Uniform Commercial Code", approved July 31, 1961, as amended, and Section 11-13 of "The Illinois Public Aid Code", approved April 11, 1967, as amended, actions on unwritten contracts, expressed or implied, or on awards of arbitration, or to recover damages for an injury done to property, real or personal, or to recover the possession of personal property or damages for the detention or conversion thereof, and all civil actions not otherwise provided for, shall be commenced within 5 years next after the cause of action accrued.

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DocketMath's statute-of-limitations tool can model these timelines once you identify the controlling claim type and accrual date. Use the source panel for the verified primary-source citations.

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Sources

• 735 ILCS 5/13-205 — Five year limitation.

All sources are official primary law published by www.ilga.gov.

Corroboration method: Two independent browser-UA fetches of the official Illinois General Assembly fulltext page for 735 ILCS 5/13-205 (https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=073500050K13-205) returned byte-identical HTML (2062 bytes both times). The page identifies the section by both its current ILCS citation (735 ILCS 5/13-205) and its prior code citation (Ch. 110, par. 13-205) with source note P.A. 82-280. NOTE: www.ilga.gov returns HTTP 404 to non-browser User-Agents (validator default UA included) on the legacy fulltext.asp path, and the redesigned /Legislation/ILCS/Articles path is JavaScript-rendered with no statute text in the initial HTML; hence verification_method 'spa_subagent_dual_fetch' substitutes for in-process R6.