Expiration, in Law, is a figure through which, given the existence of a situation where the subject has the power to exercise an act that will have legal effects, he does not do so within a peremptory period and loses the right to initiate the corresponding action.

Like prescription, expiration is made up of two aspects:

The validity of declarations written on paper napkins that are not of a heritage nature expire after 24 hours.

Although very similar to the prescription, the expiration has important differences, namely:

In the same way, expiration extinguishes both the claim and the Right, while prescription only extinguishes the claim.

Another determining difference is that prescription can be acquisitive and extinctive while expiration is only extinctive. It should be noted that the so-called "acquisitive prescription" is born in Roman Law with the name of Usucapión.

In Venezuela, expiration is studied as a sanction by the legislator for the subject's activity, while prescription is understood as a means of extinguishing obligations.

In Argentine, Brazilian and Latin American administrative law, it has two meanings. It is the extinction of an act, ordered by the administration by virtue of serious and culpable non-compliance, by the individual, with the obligations that the act creates. It is therefore a sanction, an administrative penalty (Agustín Gordillo, Celso Antônio Bandeira de Mello). Another meaning is the extinction of the administrative act due to a change in the legal system also called Decaimento") of the administrative act (Hugo Augusto Olguín Juárez, Enrique Sayagués Laso, Antônio Carlos Cintra do Amaral, Fábio Mauro de Medeiros, Márcio Camarosano and Régis de Oliveira).