Federal Court Deadlines Cheat Sheet: Every FRCP Deadline in One Table

Nothing here is legal advice, and local rules and standing orders override a good deal of it. Every period below is quoted from the current Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, with the rule number attached so you can check it in thirty seconds rather than trusting a table you found on the internet.

How do you calculate court deadlines?

Under Rule 6(a)(1) you exclude the day of the event that triggers the period, count every day after it including intermediate Saturdays, Sundays and legal holidays, and include the last day. If that last day is a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, the period continues to run until the end of the next day that is not one of those. Then, and only then, add any service extension.

Four sub-rules do the rest of the work, and they are the ones people forget. Rule 6(a)(4) fixes when the last day actually ends: midnight in the court's time zone for electronic filing, but only when the clerk's office is scheduled to close if you are filing by other means. Rule 6(a)(5) defines the "next day" as forward when the period is measured after an event and backward when it is measured before one, which is what makes a notice period count in the opposite direction. Rule 6(a)(3) extends the deadline if the clerk's office is inaccessible on the last day. And Rule 6(a)(2) runs periods stated in hours continuously, straight through nights and weekends.

The federal deadlines cheat sheet

Every period here is stated in calendar days and counted under Rule 6(a)(1). Where a rule sets the deadline by reference to trial or to another event rather than to service, that is noted in the trigger column.

Do you get 3 extra days for electronic service in federal court?

No, and this is the single most common miscalculation in federal practice. The 2016 amendment removed electronic service from Rule 6(d). Three days are added only for service by mail under Rule 5(b)(2)(C), by leaving a copy with the clerk under 5(b)(2)(D), or by other means consented to under 5(b)(2)(F). Service through CM/ECF is Rule 5(b)(2)(E), and it adds nothing at all.

Practically speaking, almost everything in a modern federal case is served electronically, so the three day extension has become the exception rather than the rule. Lawyers who trained before 2016 still reach for it by reflex, and a response calendared three days late is late. The other half of the trap runs the other way: the extension is added after the underlying period expires, not before, so you compute the base deadline under Rule 6(a) first and then extend from that date.

Do weekends count for federal court deadlines?

Yes. Rule 6(a)(1)(B) counts every intermediate Saturday, Sunday and legal holiday toward the total. Weekends matter only at the end of the period: if the last day falls on a weekend or legal holiday, the deadline rolls forward to the next open day. A 21 day answer period that starts on a Friday still ends on the twenty first day, whatever day of the week that is.

This is the opposite of the method most state courts use for notice periods, where the closed days are skipped as you count rather than counted and adjusted at the end. If your rule is written in court days rather than plain days, the arithmetic changes completely and a five day period can span eleven calendar days. The court days calculator handles that unit, and there is a longer treatment in our guide on whether you count weekends for court deadlines.

The state holiday rule almost nobody applies

Rule 6(a)(6) defines a legal holiday to include the federal holidays and any day declared a holiday by the President or Congress. But it does not stop there. For a period measured forward after an event, it also includes any day declared a holiday by the state where the district court is located.

That means a federal deadline in the Central District of California can roll off Cesar Chavez Day, and one in a Texas district court can roll off San Jacinto Day, even though neither is a federal holiday. The asymmetry is deliberate: the state holiday only counts for forward-measured periods, not for a notice period counted backward from a hearing. It is a small rule that shows up two or three times a year and is almost never in a default calendar app.

Which federal deadlines can a court not extend?

Rule 6(b)(2) forbids a court from extending the time to act under Rules 50(b) and (d), 52(b), 59(b), (d) and (e), and 60(b). These are the post-trial motions, and each of the first four carries a 28 day clock from entry of judgment. No stipulation, no showing of excusable neglect and no finding of good cause will rescue a late filing under any of them, because the court has no authority to grant the extension in the first place.

That is worth calendaring differently from everything else. A missed discovery response gets a meet and confer and usually a second chance. A Rule 59(e) motion filed on day 29 is simply gone, and with it the tolling of the appeal clock under FRAP 4(a)(4). If a post-trial deadline is going to be tight, the move is a timely placeholder motion rather than a request for more time, and if the parties do agree on a schedule for something the court can extend, getting the stipulation signed by every party and back in your hands the same day is usually what decides whether it gets filed before the deadline or after it.

What are the federal discovery response deadlines?

Thirty days after service for all three written devices: interrogatories under Rule 33(b)(2), requests for production under Rule 34(b)(2)(A), and requests for admission under Rule 36(a)(3). The uniformity is convenient and it hides one sharp difference.

Requests for admission are self-executing. Under Rule 36(a)(3) a matter is admitted unless a written answer or objection is served within 30 days. There is no motion to compel, no order, and no opportunity to argue about proportionality. The other party simply has your admission, and getting it back requires a Rule 36(b) motion to withdraw that you may not win. Interrogatories and document requests fail loudly, with a motion and a hearing. Requests for admission fail silently, which is why they belong on a different tier of your calendar.

How many days do you have to respond to a complaint in federal court?

Twenty one days after being served with the summons and complaint, under Rule 12(a)(1)(A)(i). If the defendant timely waived service under Rule 4(d), it becomes 60 days from the date the waiver request was sent, or 90 days if the request went to a defendant outside any judicial district of the United States. The United States, its agencies, and its officers and employees sued in an official capacity get 60 days under Rule 12(a)(2).

Notice that the waiver clock runs from when the request was sent, not from when the defendant returned it. That detail favors a defendant who signs promptly and quietly punishes one who sits on the request for three weeks before returning it, since the 60 days were already running the whole time.

A worked example

A defendant is served with the summons and complaint on Friday, July 3, 2026. Exclude July 3. Day one is Saturday, July 4, and intermediate holidays still count toward the total, so Independence Day does not stop the clock. Counting 21 days lands on Friday, July 24, 2026. That is a business day, so the answer is due July 24. Service was personal rather than by mail, so Rule 6(d) adds nothing.

Change one fact and the answer moves. Had the same papers been served by mail under Rule 5(b)(2)(C), three days would be added after the base period expired, pushing the deadline to Monday, July 27. Note the order of operations: you do not count 24 days from service. You count 21, land on July 24, then add three and roll off the weekend.

Calendaring this across a docket

A cheat sheet is fine for one deadline. The failure mode on a real docket is not arithmetic, it is propagation: a trial date moves, and the expert disclosure deadline, the rebuttal deadline and the pretrial disclosure deadline all move with it, because Rule 26 measures each of them backward from trial rather than forward from an event. Recalculating that chain by hand every time a continuance issues is where firms quietly lose days.

That is the argument for rules-based calendaring rather than a shared Outlook calendar, and it is a real software category with its own economics. We compare what it costs and what it actually automates in our guide to legal calendaring and docketing software. For a single date right now, the court deadline calculator applies the Rule 6(a) method above and shows every roll it made. If you want the FRCP event picked by name rather than a raw day count, the federal court deadline calculator carries all twenty six deadlines in this table, decides for itself whether Rule 6(d) adds three days, and applies the Rule 6(a)(6)(C) state holiday rule for the district you are in.