The short answer is three years — but the three years often does not start when you think, and in fertility cases that is more than a technicality.
The three-year period
A claim for personal injury in Victoria must generally be brought within three years. Under the Limitation of Actions Act 1958 (Vic), that period runs from the date of discoverability: broadly, when you first knew or ought to have known that you had suffered an injury, that it was caused by the act or omission of someone else, and that the injury was sufficiently serious to justify bringing a claim.
So the clock does not necessarily start on the day the mistake was made. It starts when a reasonable person in your position would have appreciated that something had gone wrong and that someone was responsible.
Why this matters so much in fertility cases
In most medical claims the patient knows something has happened, even if not why. In fertility cases people frequently do not. Errors in a laboratory are invisible to the patient. Embryos are stored for years. A clinic's own account may be that a cycle simply failed.
People commonly discover an error in one of three ways: the clinic discloses it, sometimes long afterwards; a discrepancy emerges when records are transferred to another provider; or a class action or news report prompts them to ask questions about their own treatment. Each of those can be years after the event. In the Bopping v Monash IVF proceeding, the underlying testing took place across 2019 and 2020 and the litigation ran into 2025.
Two consequences follow. If you have only just found out, you may be well within time even though the error is old. And once you do suspect something, the clock is probably running — so delay from that point is the risk, not delay before it.
The outer limit
Discoverability does not extend indefinitely. There is a long-stop period of twelve years from the act or omission, after which a claim is generally barred whatever you knew. For treatment provided years ago, that outer limit can be the operative constraint.
Children and people under a disability
Different rules apply where the injured person is a child or is under a disability — including how the period is calculated and when it begins. Where an IVF error has affected a child who was born, the child's own position needs to be assessed separately from the parents'.
If time has already run out
It may not be fatal. A court has a discretion to extend the limitation period in limited circumstances, and whether that discretion would be exercised depends heavily on the reason for the delay and whether the other side can still fairly meet the claim. It is not something to count on, but it is a reason to get advice rather than assume the door is shut.
A separate practical point
Limitation periods are the legal deadline. The real deadline is often earlier, because evidence degrades: storage logs and monitoring data may be retained only for a period, staff move on, and memories fade. The strongest version of a claim is almost always the one investigated soonest.
If you think something may have gone wrong, the useful first step is to request your records — including the laboratory records — and have them read. See What can go wrong in IVF, Time limits for medical negligence claims, or start a free assessment.