How Court Deadlines Count Days (and Why Rule 6 Matters)

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(a) governs every "time period specified in these rules, in any local rule or court order, or in any statute that does not specify a method of computing time" — most deadlines in a federal civil case. The method is mechanical, and it defeats intuition. It also changed on December 1, 2009, so anything written earlier describes a method that no longer exists. This is a counting convention, not legal advice; real deadlines also turn on local rules and standing orders.

The three steps of Rule 6(a)(1)

For a period stated in days or a longer unit, Rule 6(a)(1) gives three instructions in order:

• Exclude the day of the triggering event. Served Tuesday, Wednesday is day 1.
• Count every intervening day — Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays included. Since 2009 there is no business-day carve-out for short periods.
• Include the last day, unless it is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday; then the period runs to the end of the next day that is none of those. This cascades: a Saturday deadline ends up on Tuesday if that Monday is a federal holiday.

"Legal holiday" in Rule 6(a)(6) is narrower than people assume. Subsection (A) lists eleven federal holidays: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth (added by amendment after Congress created the holiday in 2021), Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Subsection (B) covers any day the President or Congress declares a holiday. Subsection (C) adds days declared a holiday by the state where the district court sits — but only for periods measured forward from an event. So Good Friday and the day after Thanksgiving, absent from the federal list, move a federal deadline only through route (C), only where the state has declared them holidays, and never on a backward count.

Why pre-2009 guidance gets this wrong

Before December 1, 2009, Rule 6(a) had a length-dependent switch: periods of less than 11 days excluded intermediate Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays, while longer periods counted every day.

The 2009 amendments deleted the switch and rewrote deadlines throughout the rules into multiples of seven, so the shorter effective time would not prejudice anyone. Ten-day periods generally became 14 and 20-day periods became 21; Rule 12(a)'s answer deadline went from 20 to 21 days; motions under Rules 50(b), 52(b), and 59(e) went from 10 days to 28.

That redesign has an exploitable side effect: 7, 14, 21, and 28 are multiples of seven, so a forward-counted period of one of those lengths always lands on the same weekday as the trigger. Served on a Thursday, your 21-day answer is due on a Thursday and can never fall on a weekend; only a legal holiday moves it. Periods of 30, 60, or 90 days have no such protection: 60 days from January 15 ends March 16 in a common year but March 15 in a leap year, one of the traps in our guide to leap years and date-math pitfalls. For genuine business-day counting, see how to count business days.

Worked examples

The three added days, and what changed in 2016

Rule 6(d) adds three days when a party may or must act within a specified time after being served and service was by mail under Rule 5(b)(2)(C), by leaving the paper with the clerk under (D), or by other consented-to means under (F). Three details cause most errors:

• The three days come after the Rule 6(a) computation, not before it. Compute the base period with any rollover, add three calendar days, then roll again if you land on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday.
• Electronic service no longer earns the three days in federal court. Effective December 1, 2016, service through the court's e-filing system — Rule 5(b)(2)(E) — was struck from the Rule 6(d) list because it is instantaneous; FRAP 26(c) was amended the same way. Pre-2017 guidance still tells you to add three days for e-service.
• Rule 6(d) reaches only periods that run from service. The 28-day clock for a Rule 59(e) motion runs from entry of judgment, so nothing is added however the judgment reached you.

Hours, backward counting, and when the day ends

Rule 6(a)(2) handles hour-based periods differently: counting starts immediately on the trigger, every hour counts, and a period ending on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday runs to the same time on the next day that is not one of those.

Rule 6(a)(5) defines "next day" by direction of travel: forward for periods measured after an event, backward for periods measured before one. For "at least 14 days before the hearing," a weekend or holiday makes the deadline earlier, as the last table row shows. You lose days rather than gain them.

Rule 6(a)(4) sets when the last day ends: for electronic filing, midnight in the court's time zone, so counsel in Los Angeles filing in the Southern District of New York is late at 9:00 p.m. Pacific; otherwise, when the clerk's office is scheduled to close. A statute, local rule, or standing order may set an earlier time. Under Rule 6(a)(3), an inaccessible clerk's office — weather, shutdown, building emergency — extends the period to the first accessible day.

Two related traps. Rule 6(b)(2) bars any extension of time under Rules 50(b) and (d), 52(b), 59(b), (d), and (e), and 60(b), whatever the cause. And the appeal clock runs from entry of judgment on the civil docket, not the date typed on the order; where Rule 58 requires a separate document that never gets entered, FRAP 4(a)(7) and Rule 58(c)(2) deem judgment entered 150 days after the docket entry.

State courts do not follow Rule 6 automatically

Most state statutes track Rule 6(a)'s basics. The divergence is in service extensions and units:

• California computes time under Code of Civil Procedure § 12 and extends it under § 1013: five calendar days for mail within California, ten elsewhere in the United States, twenty abroad. It also mixes units: § 1010.6 adds two court days for electronic service, and § 1005(b) requires moving papers served at least 16 court days before the hearing.
• New York uses General Construction Law § 25-a for the rollover and CPLR § 2103(b) for service: five days for mail, one business day for overnight delivery.

California's e-service extension outlived the 2016 federal change, so never carry a federal answer across a state line. Rule 6(a) also yields to any statute that prescribes its own method of computing time.

To check the arithmetic, our days between two dates calculator counts inclusive and exclusive spans, 30 days from today gives the plain calendar result before any rollover, and 14 business days from today handles genuine weekend exclusion. Verify the result against the court's calendar and local rules.