How these deadlines are verified

The site’s only real claim is that each number came from the code and that someone checked it on a stated date. This page says exactly how, so the claim is falsifiable rather than decorative.

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 disagreed. Statutory analysis suggested courts were open on Native American Day; the published calendar showed them closed. The calendar won, and the engine was corrected to match it. That is the one place where reading the statute would have produced 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, this page says so at the top and so does the footer. That is deliberate: a calculator that quietly ages is worse than one that admits it.

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 — so a change in the arithmetic fails the build rather than shipping.

Per-rule verification dates

40 rules, each with the date it was last checked. Where a rule area was reviewed later than the original pass it carries the later date; nothing is backdated to look uniform.

Where the authority is unsettled

Some questions have no answer yet. Rather than pick one silently, the calculators state which way they resolve each and why. Those disclosures live with the calculators they affect: civil motions and criminal motions.

Reporting an error

A wrong date is the only bug that matters here. errors@calcourtdeadlines.com — 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.