How these deadlines are verified

This site makes one substantive claim: that each rule value was taken from the code and checked by a person on a stated date. This page sets out the procedure behind that claim so you can test it.

What gets verified

For each rule, four things are checked separately, because each fails differently:

• The period. The number itself.
• The triggering event. What the clock runs from. A correct period measured from the wrong event is the most common error in secondary sources.
• The unit. Calendar days or court days. Several statutes say only “days,” and at least one California Rule of Court changed units in 2010 without changing its number.
• Whether a service extension applies, and in which direction. On a response deadline an extension gives you more time; on a notice period it moves your filing date earlier.

Against what source

Statutory text is read on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, the Legislature’s own publication, and cross-checked against Westlaw. Every citation on this site links to the operative section so you can read it yourself rather than take our word for the number.

Court holidays are the exception, and deliberately so. They are validated against the published Judicial Council holiday calendar rather than derived from CCP § 135 and the Government Code alone, because the two sources disagreed. Statutory analysis suggested courts were open on Native American Day, while the published calendar showed them closed. The engine was corrected to follow the calendar. This is the one place on the site where reading the statute alone would produce a wrong answer.

Individual superior courts may also close by emergency order under Government Code § 68115. See Rowan v. Kirkpatrick (2020) 54 Cal.App.5th 289. Those closures cannot be predicted and are not in the dataset.

Cadence

A full re-verification pass at least annually, plus a targeted re-check whenever a cited section is amended or a published decision resolves one of the open questions below. Two sections are on a watch list because stale authority for them is still in circulation: Evidence Code § 1043, which changed in 2020, and California Rule of Court 4.111, which changed units in 2010.

If the verification date is more than twelve months old, both this page and the footer say so. The notice is shown rather than suppressed so that you can weigh how current the figures are.

Rules engine

Version 1.0.0. Every computed date is produced by unit-tested functions, and the test suite pins specific worked examples, including ones that cross Lincoln’s Birthday, Native American Day, and the Thanksgiving cluster. A change in the arithmetic fails the build rather than shipping.

Per-rule verification dates

77 rules, 74 of them carrying the date they were last read against the code. Where a rule area was reviewed later than the original pass it carries the later date; nothing is backdated to look uniform. 3 of them are listed as not yet verified. Those are values the engine computes but that have not been read against the code by a person, and they are shown rather than withheld so the gap is visible in the same table as everything else.

County local rules

The front page counts 49 county local rules across 17 counties under a badge that points here, so the count is broken down here. They are a different kind of value from the statutes above and are treated as such: each one is a paraphrased summary of a local rule, not its text, and each carries its own verification date because the counties were not all checked on the same day.

How that total is reached, so it can be checked. There are two county datasets. The trial-preparation rules cover 9 counties and contribute 17 rule rows, listed in the tables below. The ex parte rules cover 17 counties and contribute 32 provisions, counted as one for each county’s published filing deadline, one for each published opposition deadline, and one for each reservation requirement. A county whose filing deadline was searched for and not found contributes nothing, which is why 17 counties yield fewer than 17 filing deadlines. The 9 trial-preparation counties are a subset of the 17 ex parte counties, so the counties-covered figure is the union rather than the sum. Full ex parte detail is on the county ex parte rule sheet.

Two limits worth stating plainly. A local rule can change without any statute changing, so these age faster than the code. And no local rule set reaches an individual department’s standing order, which is where page limits, courtesy copies and reservation practice usually live. Check the court’s published rules and the assigned department before relying on any row below.

The counties below are the trial-preparation local rules, which is a separate dataset from the ex parte local rules. The ex parte research covers seventeen counties, carries its own edition date per county, and is published in full on the county ex parte rule sheet rather than here, because it is read from general orders and department procedure documents as well as the local rules and does not fit the anchor-and-offset shape of the table below.

On both datasets, and on ex parte especially, the department-standing-order limit is not a caveat but the operative rule: in several counties the assigned department, not the county, fixes the filing deadline and the reservation requirement, and at least one department is stricter than its own county rule. Where a court publishes no rule on a point, this site records that it published none. It does not fill the gap from a neighbouring county, and it does not report the absence as though no deadline existed.

Where the authority is unsettled

Several questions have no settled answer. The calculators state how each one is resolved and on what basis, rather than resolving it silently. Those disclosures appear with the calculators they affect: civil motions and criminal motions.

The largest of them is the direction a backward-counted deadline rolls. Section 12c supplies the counting method and says nothing about holidays. The rules that do speak to holidays, CCP § 12a(a) and rule 1.10(b), extend a deadline forward, and both are written for periods running forward from an event. Rolling a notice deadline forward would shorten the notice the statute requires, so this site rolls backward instead and labels that a convention rather than a holding. It is listed as such in the time-computation table above, and the same disclosure sits next to the calculators it drives on civil motions and criminal motions.

Reporting an error

Report an incorrect date to errors@calcourtdeadlines.com Please include the calculator, your inputs, the date produced, and the date you believe is correct with its authority. See also who maintains this and what the site does not calculate.