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 the Rules of Court on the Judicial Council's own text. The rules the site launched with were also checked through Westlaw in July 2026; the full pass signed off on August 17, 2026, and every check since, read the official text itself. On September 29, 2026, at the close of a full-site review, the maintaining attorney re-attested every signed rule as of that date. 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 get a second check. The engine derives them from CCP § 135, which adopts the Government Code § 6700 holidays with listed exceptions, and from Cal. Rules of Court, rule 1.11, which moves a judicial holiday that falls on a Saturday to the preceding Friday and one that falls on a Sunday to the following Monday. Every year the Judicial Council publishes is then compared date for date against its published holiday calendar, because that calendar is what closes the courthouse. For 2026 the two agree on all 14 closures. For 2027 they agree on 14 of 15, including Farmworkers Day on Friday, April 9 under SB 1394 (Stats. 2026, ch. 708). The Council's 2027 list does not show Friday, December 31, 2027, which rule 1.11 requires for New Year's Day 2028. The engine closes it, and the 2027 sheet says so at the top. Native American Day is the one the engine once got wrong: an early version treated the fourth Friday in September as a court day. Section 135 does not except it, the published calendar shows the courts closed, and the engine closes it. Later years are projected from the same rules until the Council publishes them.

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 oldest 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 1.3.0. 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

83 rules, 73 of them carrying the date of the last check against their source that covered them, from September 29, 2026 to September 29, 2026. A rule added after the original pass carries the date it was read, or the later date an attorney countersigned it; nothing is backdated to look uniform. 10 of them are listed as not yet verified. Those are values the engine computes that are still waiting for an attorney's sign-off, 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 56 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. A row an attorney has not yet signed off says so in place of a date.

How that total is reached, so it can be checked. There are two county datasets. The trial-preparation rules cover 9 counties and contribute 24 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 neighboring 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 when it is not one of the Discovery Act deadlines counted from trial, which the next paragraph covers. 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 for motion notice and other counts back from a hearing 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.

The same convention still runs the deposition and records subpoena dates counted back from a deposition or a production date: the last day to serve a deposition notice, to issue a records subpoena, and to serve the custodian. Those are Discovery Act time limits, and section 2016.060 reaches "any act provided for in this title," so whether it moves them to the next court day closer to trial, which for a date counted back from a deposition would shorten the notice, is open. This site has not resolved it and rolls those dates back, which keeps the full notice period.

Discovery Act deadlines counted back from trial are not unsettled. CCP § 2016.060 says that when the last day for an act under that title falls on a weekend or holiday, "the time limit is extended until the next court day closer to the trial date." Section 10 makes a holiday every Sunday and each judicial holiday. For the expert demand and exchange, the supplemental expert list, and the discovery and discovery motion cutoffs, all counted from trial, that is the later court day, and every calculator here gives it: the trial countdown, the discovery cutoff calculator, the expert witness calculator, saved matters, calendar feeds and the assistant connector. A row that moved says so and cites the section. The statute extends the time and does not require you to wait for it, so serving or completing earlier is always timely. The last day to serve written discovery is worked back from that cutoff and still moves to the court day before, because a later serve date would leave the responses due after it.

The newest is the changeover on January 1, 2027, when AB 540 (Stats. 2026, ch. 263) takes the two-court-day extension for electronic service out of section 1010.6. The bill has no transition clause, so nothing says which rule governs a document served in 2026 whose period runs into 2027. The calculators key the change to the date of service and take whichever reading cannot hurt you. Counting back from a hearing, e-service in 2026 is held to the old rule, which gives more notice. Counting forward to a response, the date keeps the old extension but the result also names the date without it as the safe one. Counting forward to the earliest hearing or deposition, 2026 service keeps the extension, which can only make that date later. Worked examples, and what the change leaves alone, are on the Electronic service from January 1, 2027 page.

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.