§ 214.Actions to be commenced within three years: for non-payment of money collected on execution; for penalty created by statute; to recover chattel; for injury to property; for personal injury; for malpractice other than medical, dental or podiatric malpractice; to annul a marriage on the ground of fraud.

CPLR 214 is the workhorse three-year period that governs claims not handled by a more specific section elsewhere in Article 2. It covers seven categories: suits against a sheriff, constable, or other officer for failing to hand over money collected on an execution; actions to recover a statutory penalty or forfeiture; replevin-type claims to recover a chattel or damages for taking or holding one; property damage claims; personal injury claims; malpractice other than medical, dental, or podiatric malpractice, whether pled in contract or tort; and actions to annul a marriage for fraud, which accrue from the discovery of the fraud rather than from the marriage itself.

Several of these categories carry their own escape hatches built directly into the text. The penalty-and-forfeiture category yields to CPLR 213 and 215. The property-damage category yields to CPLR 214-c's discovery rule for latent exposure injuries. The personal-injury category yields to 214-b, 214-c, 214-i, and 215. That layering means CPLR 214 functions as the default rule a litigant checks only after ruling out the more specific carve-outs that Article 2 places around it.

The malpractice category deserves particular attention: it reaches professionals like accountants, engineers, and attorneys, and applies the same three years regardless of whether the claim is framed as a breach of contract or a tort. That matters because an ordinary contract claim would otherwise get six years under CPLR 213 — pleading a professional's error as a contract breach doesn't buy extra time when the underlying claim rests on how that professional performed the work.

The marriage-annulment provision works differently from the rest of the section. Instead of running from the marriage or from any fixed event, the three years starts when the plaintiff discovers the facts constituting the fraud — or, if the plaintiff isn't the spouse whose consent was obtained by fraud, from the earlier of that spouse's own discovery.