§ 8.01-246.Personal actions based on contracts.

Section 8.01-246 organizes Virginia’s contract-limitations periods around how formal the underlying promise is, subject always to the injury-to-person-or-property rules of § 8.01-243 and the fiduciary-bond rules of § 8.01-245. A recognizance gets ten years to sue, except a recognizance of bail in a civil suit, which gets only three years, with time the right to execute was suspended by injunction or supersedeas excluded from that computation. A written contract signed by the party being sued, or the party’s agent, gets five years, whether sealed or not, and the same five years applies to a partner’s suit against another partner to settle partnership accounts, or to merchant-to-merchant accounts, running from when the dealings between them ceased. Everything else — a written contract not signed by the party to be charged, or any unwritten contract, whether express or implied — gets three years.

Subsection B carves out its own three-year rule for collecting medical debt, defined as a debt arising directly from a health care service and originally owed directly to the provider. That three years runs from the due date on the final invoice, unless the contract sets up a longer payment plan, in which case a breach of the payment plan starts a fresh three years from the date of breach. This medical-debt rule does not reach debt arising from services paid under Department of Medical Assistance Services programs.

Subsection C then steps entirely outside this framework for one category of dispute: where the Uniform Commercial Code’s own limitation provision, § 8.2-725, applies to a sales contract, that section controls instead — except that products liability claims for injury to a person, or to property other than the property covered by the contract, still follow § 8.01-243 rather than the UCC’s period.