Short answer. Five years. The Family Code requires an action for legal separation to be filed within five years from the time the cause occurred, so the clock runs from the event you are complaining of and not from the day you decided to separate or moved out.
What the law says
An action for legal separation shall be filed within five years from the time of the occurrence of the cause.
Family Code, Article 57 — Prescriptive Period. Read the full provision →
Five years, counted from the cause and not from the decision to act
Article 57 of the Family Code is one sentence long: An action for legal separation shall be filed within five years from the time of the occurrence of the cause. Two things follow. The period is five years, and its starting point is the occurrence of the ground being invoked. It does not begin when the marriage finally became unbearable, when a spouse moved out, or when a lawyer was first consulted. Where the ground is a single identifiable event, that event starts the clock.
Which cause you are relying on decides which date matters
Because the period runs from the cause, identifying the ground precisely is not a drafting nicety — it decides whether the case can be filed at all. The grounds listed in the Family Code range from single events to conduct that continues over time, and a petition often has more than one available. A ground that occurred seven years ago may be barred while a separate ground arising last year is not, so it is worth working out the date attaching to each one before concluding that the door has closed. Conduct that repeats rather than happens once — repeated violence, or an abandonment that continues — raises a further question about which occurrence the five years run from, and that is a question of fact about the particular history, not something the article answers in the abstract.
The deadline is unusually strict for family cases
Legal separation sits in a small group of family actions that prescribe at all. An action to declare a marriage void, by contrast, does not fall away with the passage of time. That contrast is worth knowing, because a spouse who has run past five years on a legal separation ground is not necessarily without a remedy — the question becomes whether some other action is available on the facts. If your five years are running or arguably spent, the sensible step is to have the dates of each incident reviewed against the ground it would support, rather than to assume either that you are safe or that you are too late.
Related provisions
- Family Code, Article 57 — Prescriptive Period
- Family Code, Article 55 — Grounds for Legal Separation