Court deadline calculator
Count forward or back from a triggering date, with weekends and the court holidays taken out. Free, and there is nothing to sign up for.
A negative number counts backwards, for a step that has to happen so many days before the event.
Enter a date and a whole number of days.
What it does and doesn’t know
It knows which days the courts are closed and how to count around them. Counting business days skips those days; a date that lands on one moves to the next open day, and moves earlier rather than later when you are counting backwards, so a period of notice never quietly gets shorter.
Those days are published in full, by jurisdiction and by year, with the substitute day named whenever a holiday falls on a weekend: court holidays by jurisdiction.
It does not know what any deadline is. It will not tell you that a defence is due in twenty days, and it cannot know about a day proclaimed after this page was updated or a closure at your own courthouse. Check the answer against the rule you are working to.
Questions this page answers
- Is this court deadline calculator free?
- Yes, and there is nothing to sign up for. It runs in the browser, needs no account, and no date entered into it is sent anywhere or recorded.
- Which jurisdictions does it cover?
- Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and the Federal Courts. Each uses that jurisdiction's own court holiday list, taken from the instrument cited on its page, which is not the same as the jurisdiction's employment-standards holidays.
- What happens when a deadline lands on a weekend or a court holiday?
- It moves to the next day the courts are open, and it moves in the direction that does not shorten the period: counting forward it moves later, and counting backwards it moves earlier. A period of notice therefore never quietly gets shorter than the rule requires.
- Will it tell me what the deadline is for a statement of defence?
- No. It does not know what any deadline is, and it is not a substitute for reading the rule. You bring the triggering date and the period the rule gives you; it does the arithmetic around weekends and court holidays. It also cannot know about a day proclaimed after these pages were last updated, or a closure at your own courthouse.
What does your firm keep its deadlines in today?
One click, nothing to fill in. It tells us which of these tools is worth keeping up to date.
Doing this by hand for every file
Freeboard runs this calculation inside the matter, records the triggering date and the offset it came from, and locks the result so a limitation date cannot be changed quietly afterwards. Your firm keeps its own holiday list, so the days it counts are the ones your court actually observes.