Legal Question in Construction Law in California

It depends on the claim. A claim for latent defects can be up to 10 years.

You have to distinguish between the duration of the warranty or guarantee, on the one hand, and the time within which suit can be brought for defective workmanship or materials at the time of construction, on the other. There is a statutory ten-year cutoff for claims against contractors, architects, etc. for their mistakes during construction which result in latent defects being imbedded in the building that only show up later on. In contrast, you probably would be unsuccessful filing suit after seven years for something that was initially covered by a five-year warranty.

Many contractors mistakenly believe they can create a limited warranty on their work. They are wrong. Certain components, such as stoves, fans, etc., that are "goods" not "construction," may be subject to Uniform Commercial Code warranty law, but the construction itself is subject to the Civil Code. Defective construction is subject to various, up to 4-year, statutes of limitations depending on the type of problem and the damage it causes. Those limits run from date of discovery of the defect if it is hidden, or date it should have been discovered if it is clearly apparent to anyone who bothers to pay attention. The ten-year limitation is not actually a statute of limitations; it is a statute of repose. The difference being that a statute of repose is an absolute deadline. There are no excuses for delayed discovery even if there was no way to discover the cause of action until later. Once ten years has passed, the contractor is off the hook period, unless there is some new independent cause of action such as fraud in dealing with the defect. So you have possibly as short as one year to file from the day you first knew about the leak, but possibly two, three or four years. However, you have an absolute cut-off of ten years from the date the construction was finished on the house to file, regardless of the statute of limitations that may apply. You should also bear in mind, however, that a roof leaking after nine years is not necessarily a defect, depending on the type of roof. Some types of roof have as little as a five-year life. So if they leak in year 9, there is nothing defective about them.