Free legal deadline tool
Turn a triggering date and a number of days into a filing deadline. Choose court days or calendar days, skip weekends and legal holidays, roll the last day to the next business day, and save the date to your calendar. Informational only — always confirm with the controlling rule and a licensed attorney.
The day of service, the order, the breach, or the hearing. The trigger day itself is not counted.
The period set by the rule, order, or contract.
"Before" is for notice deadlines (serve a motion N days before a hearing).
Court days skip weekends and holidays while counting; calendar days do not.
All periods are counted in calendar days. If the last day is a Saturday, Sunday, or federal legal holiday, the deadline rolls to the next business day.
Computed deadline
July 13, 2026
Monday
Counting mode
Calendar days
Period
21 after
Last-day adjustment
Rolled forward
The count landed on July 11, 2026, which is Saturday. The deadline was moved to the next business day, July 13, 2026.
Fed. R. Civ. P. 6(a); legal holidays per 5 U.S.C. §6103.
Common deadlines
Almost every deadline in litigation is expressed the same way: a number of days measured from a triggering event. You were served, an order was entered, a judgment came down, a hearing is set. The trap is that "21 days" almost never means "add 21 to today's number." Courts compute time under a specific rule, and three parts of that rule are easy to get wrong, which is exactly why a quick mental calculation, or an AI Overview that just adds days, will hand you the wrong date.
The first part is the exclusion of the trigger day. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(a)(1)(A) says to exclude the day of the event that starts the clock and begin counting on the next day. If you are served on a Monday and have five days to respond, Tuesday is day one, not Monday. State codes phrase it differently but reach the same result: the first day is dropped, the last day is included.
The second part is the unit you count in. Before the 2009 federal amendments, short periods skipped weekends and holidays while counting. The amendments simplified this so that all federal periods now count calendar days — every day counts, and only the final day is adjusted if it falls on a weekend or holiday. Many state systems did not follow, and still count short periods in court days, where Saturdays, Sundays, and court holidays are skipped during the count itself. California, for example, counts certain notice periods in court days under Code of Civil Procedure section 12c. A five-court-day notice and a five-calendar-day notice can land on completely different dates, so the calculator above lets you switch between the two and shows how many non-business days the court-day mode skipped.
The third part is what happens when the period ends on a non-business day. Under FRCP 6(a)(1)(C), if the last day of a forward period is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the deadline continues to run until the end of the next day that is none of those things. A deadline that would land on the Fourth of July moves to the next open court day. The subtle case is a backward deadline — "serve and file a motion at least 14 days before the hearing" under FRCP 6(c)(1). Here you count backward from the hearing, and if that date is a weekend or holiday it rolls earlier, never later, so the opposing party always receives the full notice the rule guarantees. The calculator handles both directions and flags any roll it makes.
A deadline tool is only as honest as the things it admits it cannot see. This one does not apply service add-on days — for example, the three extra days FRCP 6(d) grants when a paper is served by mail or certain electronic means. It does not know your district's electronic-filing cutoff time, which can make a filing "late" even on the correct calendar day. It does not account for tolling, the discovery rule, local standing orders, or emergency administrative orders that close a courthouse. And the holiday calendars are general reference sets; a specific court may close for a local civic holiday that is not on any statewide list. Use the output as a first draft of your deadline, then confirm it against the rule that actually governs and your court's own calendar.
Say a federal complaint is served on a defendant in the United States on a Friday. FRCP 12(a)(1)(A)(i) gives 21 days to answer. You exclude Friday, count 21 calendar days, and land on a Friday three weeks out. If that day were a holiday, the answer would be due the following Monday instead. To preserve the date, set a personal reminder several days early using the add-to-calendar button, which exports a standards-compliant .ics file with a one-week alert. If you need to count plain business days for a contract term instead of a court rule, switch the jurisdiction to the generic business-days mode, which counts Monday through Friday with no holidays applied. For raw day counting between two known dates, the days-between calculator and the working-days calculator cover the non-deadline cases, and the statute-of-limitations calculator handles the outer filing window for a claim.