Public records request deadline calculator.
Enter the date a records request was received and read the date the response is due, counted the way the statute counts: presets for the Texas Public Information Act, the California Public Records Act, Florida's Public Records Act, New York's FOIL and Illinois's FOIA, or your own period. Free from FireInspection360, the fire prevention platform built by fire inspectors.
When is the response due?
The count starts the day after receipt and skips weekends and the holidays you choose. Pick the statute and the period, the counting and the extension cap follow it; Custom leaves them to you.
Ten business days is rarely fourteen calendar days.
Every state's public records law puts a clock on the agency. Under the Texas Public Information Act a governmental body has ten business days from receipt to produce the records, tell the requester when they will be ready, or explain why they are withheld, and the same ten business days to ask the Attorney General for a ruling if it wants to withhold anything under an exception. Miss the second deadline and the information is presumed public. Other states count differently: some in calendar days, some with a short acknowledgment deadline and a longer production deadline, some with no fixed number at all beyond "promptly". The period is easy to remember; the counting is where deadlines are missed.
Business days skip weekends and the holidays the agency observes, and the observed date matters. A holiday that falls on a Saturday is observed on the Friday before it, and one on a Sunday on the Monday after; a request received the Friday before Thanksgiving loses two days to the holiday and the weekend around it before the count reaches the following week. Some offices work Columbus Day and some do not, and a state calendar can replace a federal holiday with its own. The calculator names every day it skipped so a clerk can check the count against the office calendar rather than trust it.
A request can also stop the clock. Asking the requester to clarify, sending a cost estimate that needs acceptance, or waiting on a required deposit tolls the response period under most statutes, and a written extension adds days to it. The referral deadline usually does not move for any of these, which is why a records officer tracks the two dates separately.
How FireInspection360 runs the clock for a department
The Public Records Requests module in FireInspection360 runs this same clock on every request a fire department receives: the due date and the referral date from the day received, paused while the requester owes a clarification or a deposit, extended by a written extension, and a queue of what is due this week with a reminder before the referral deadline. The fee worksheet, the released records and the response letter live on the same record.
See the whole platform with your own records workflow.
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