What Is Georgia’s Statute of Repose for Product Liability, and How Does It Interact With the Filing Deadline?
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Georgia bars a strict product liability action “after ten years from the date of the first sale for use or consumption” of the product (O.C.G.A. § 51-1-11(b)(2)), no matter when the injury happened. Separately, the injury claim must be filed within two years of the injury (§ 9-3-33). A claim has to clear both dates, and for some negligence theories the ten-year bar has statutory exceptions.
Two dates, measured from different events
| Filing deadline (limitation) | Repose | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts | When the injury claim accrues | The first sale of the product "for use or consumption" |
| Length | 2 years for personal injury (§ 9-3-33); 4 years for damage to personal property (§ 9-3-31) | 10 years (§ 51-1-11(b)(2)) |
| Can it be extended? | Tolling rules can apply (for example, a minor under § 9-3-90) | The statute is written as a flat bar |
| Effect when it runs | The claim is time-barred | The cause of action "simply does not exist" (Campbell, quoted in Burroughs) |
For example, imagine a space heater first sold to a household in 2014 that causes a burn injury in 2026. The two-year filing period has just begun, but the ten-year repose ended in 2024, so the strict liability claim is barred before the limitation question is reached.
Where the ten years start
As the Supreme Court of Georgia restated the rule in Burroughs, citing Campbell v. Altec Industries, Inc. (2011), a single-product claim is barred “if the product in question was sold as new to its intended end user on a date more than ten years before the action was filed”. The date of manufacture and the date of injury are not the trigger. Purchase receipts, warranty registrations, and serial-number records are the documents that fix the date.
Products bought again and again: each unit has its own clock
In Burroughs v. Strength of Nature Global, LLC (2025), a woman alleged that hair-relaxer products she bought and applied every six to eight weeks from 1995 to 2014 caused uterine fibroids, diagnosed in 2018; she sued in 2022. The manufacturers argued that the ten years ran from her first purchase in 1995 or 2003. The Supreme Court disagreed: “because the statute of repose applies to each unit, a cause of action still may exist for units sold to an intended end user less than ten years before the action was brought”. Units sold more than ten years before suit are barred.
The Court added a limit on what that means in practice. The plaintiff still has to prove that the units within the ten-year window were “the proximate cause of the injury sustained”, which the Court acknowledged may be a “tricky undertaking” when “a significant portion of the units” used fall outside the window.
Negligence claims and the statutory exceptions
Section 51-1-11(c) applies the same ten-year limit to a claim “claiming negligence of a manufacturer”, except:
- an action for injuries “arising out of the negligence of such manufacturer in manufacturing products which cause a disease or birth defect”, and
- an action “arising out of conduct which manifests a willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for life or property”.
The same subsection says nothing in it “shall relieve a manufacturer from the duty to warn of a danger arising from use of a product once that danger becomes known to the manufacturer”. That sentence keeps the duty to warn of a danger the manufacturer learns about in place after the ten years; the elements of that claim are covered in what must be proved in a Georgia failure-to-warn claim.
Burroughs decided only the strict liability claims. Its footnote notes that the plaintiff’s claims of negligent failure to warn, general negligence, and fraud remained pending after the Court of Appeals had refused to dismiss them.
Running the two checks
- Repose: when was each product unit first sold as new to its end user? If more than ten years before the filing date, is the claim one of the negligence exceptions in § 51-1-11(c), or a post-sale failure to warn?
- Limitation: when did the injury occur, and has a discovery-type accrual question arisen? The narrow discovery rule for injuries that develop slowly is explained in how the discovery rule works in Georgia.
- Theory: strict liability under § 51-1-11(b) reaches only manufacturers; the theories available against other parties are compared in legal theories in a Georgia product liability case.
Sources
- O.C.G.A. §§ 9-3-31, 9-3-33, 9-3-90, 51-1-11.
- Burroughs v. Strength of Nature Global, LLC, 322 Ga. 722 (2025)
General information about Georgia law as of October 2026. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.