Pennsylvania’s House Bill 462 would create a two-year revival window for childhood sexual abuse claims and, in a provision with no parallel in recent state legislation, waive sovereign immunity for public entities. The bill passed the House 122-80 in June 2025 and has sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee since June 18. A discharge petition was filed in 2026 to force the bill to the Senate floor after the committee failed to schedule a vote.
What separates HB 462 from every other active revival window bill is the sovereign immunity waiver. California’s AB 250 explicitly exempts public entities from its two-year window. New York City’s GMVA lookback targets institutional “enablers” but operates outside the traditional sovereign immunity framework. Pennsylvania’s bill goes further: it would amend the exceptions to both sovereign and governmental immunity in Title 42, directly exposing state agencies, public school districts, and other governmental units to civil liability for abuse committed by their employees. The bill also eliminates damage caps for these claims.
Going forward, HB 462 would extend Pennsylvania’s civil statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse to 37 years after a survivor’s 18th birthday (effectively to age 55). A companion constitutional amendment, HB 464, offers a parallel path requiring passage in two consecutive legislative sessions and voter approval no earlier than 2027.
Who it affects
Self-insured public school districts, intermediate units, state agencies, municipal pools, and joint insurance funds in Pennsylvania carry the most direct exposure. Because the revival window imposes no limit on how far back claims can reach, exposure potentially spans every year a public entity supervised minors, from school districts to state-run residential facilities.
The February 2026 Parkland School District settlement provides a severity reference point: $6 million resolved three claims involving a teacher who abused students between 2005 and 2009, where the district allegedly failed to act on reported red flags. Under a revival window reaching back decades, similar patterns from the 1980s and 1990s would become actionable at scale.
The reserve mechanism
For public entity self-insurance programs, the sovereign immunity waiver creates a category of GL exposure that currently carries zero IBNR. Frequency is unknowable from historical data because these claims were legally barred. Severity benchmarks from recent settlements ($6 million for Parkland, $14 million for Springfield, Massachusetts) suggest per-claim costs well above typical public entity GL averages. And the development tail is effectively uncapped during the two-year window because there is no maturity pattern to reference for claims arising from decades-old conduct.
New Jersey’s Supreme Court already ruled that its Child Victims Act supersedes Tort Claims Act immunity for school districts, establishing cross-jurisdictional precedent that reinforces Pennsylvania’s legislative approach.
What this means for your next review
If your public entity pool or self-insured program operates in Pennsylvania, put a contingent reserve scenario on the agenda before the next study. Ask your actuary to model a frequency assumption for the two-year window using per-claim severity benchmarks from recent school district settlements. Even if HB 462 stalls in the Senate, HB 464’s constitutional amendment path keeps the exposure live through at least 2027.