Business days vs. calendar days: statutory deadline math by jurisdiction

Last reviewed: August 2026

Ask three FOI coordinators when a request received on a Wednesday is due and you may get three different answers — and all three can be right, because they are picturing three different statutes. Access laws disagree on the unit of counting, on when the clock starts, on what pauses it, and on which holidays exist. Each rule is simple on its own. Stacked together, they are where practitioners — and their spreadsheets — go wrong. This guide walks the mechanics, then computes one real request under four regimes.

Two kinds of days

The first question for any deadline is the unit. Calendar days count every day: Canada's federal Access to Information Act gives institutions 30 days, weekends and holidays included. Business or working days skip weekends and holidays: the UK FOIA's 20 working days, Washington State's five business days for an initial response, Queensland's 25-business-day processing period, and — since July 1, 2026 — Ontario's 45 business days under FIPPA and MFIPPA.

The trap is that “working day” is itself defined per statute, and the definitions have teeth. Under the UK FOIA, a working day is any day other than a Saturday, a Sunday, Christmas Day, Good Friday, or a day that is a bank holiday in any part of the United Kingdom. That means St Patrick's Day — a bank holiday only in Northern Ireland — is a non-working day for a council in Cornwall, and a one-off bank holiday proclaimed at short notice (the late Queen's funeral on September 19, 2022 was one) silently moves every open FOI deadline in the country. Queensland goes the other direction: under its Right to Information Act, a business day is assessed in the place where the agency is making the decision, so an agency's due dates depend on its local show-day holiday — two Queensland agencies can receive the same request on the same day and owe answers on different dates.

When the clock starts

Almost as important as the unit is day one. Most regimes start counting the day after receipt, but they say it differently:

• Canada (federal ATIA): the 30-day period begins the day after the institution receives the request, per the Information Commissioner's guidance on section 7.
• United Kingdom (FOIA s. 10): the ICO treats day one as the first working day after receipt — and a request that needs clarification is not yet valid, so the count runs from the working day after the clarification arrives.
• Washington State (RCW 42.56.520): day one is the next business day after the agency receives the request.
• Queensland (RTI Act s. 18): the processing period starts on the business day after a compliant application arrives; a noncompliant application does not start the clock at all until it is made compliant.

“Received” has its own edge cases — a request emailed at 11pm, or delivered on a day the office is closed, may count as received the next working day depending on the regime. If your statute or its regulator guidance addresses this, write the rule into your intake procedure once, rather than re-arguing it per request.

What pauses, extends, or resets the clock

A due date computed on day one is a hypothesis, not a fact. Four kinds of events change it:

• Clarification. In the UK, an unclear request is not a valid request, so the clock restarts when clarification arrives. In other regimes clarification has no effect on the clock at all — which makes asking early a matter of survival, not courtesy.
• Fees and deposits. Under UK FOIA section 10, the working days between issuing a fees notice and receiving payment are disregarded from the count. In Ontario, a fee estimate of $100 or more lets the institution require a 50 percent deposit, and processing — and the clock — stops until the deposit is paid; the 2026 amendments expressly pause the response time from when a fee estimate is given until the fee is paid or waived.
• Third-party consultation. Canada's federal Act handles it through extensions: section 9 permits extending the 30 days for large volumes, consultations that cannot reasonably be completed in time, or third-party notice under section 27 — with notice to the requester, and to the Information Commissioner for extensions over 30 days. Ontario has an analogous affected-party notice mechanism that moves the decision date.
• Extensions proper. Each regime has its own: Canada's section 9 extensions taken at the start, the UK's public-interest-test extension (a “reasonable” further period, which the ICO says should normally not exceed another 20 working days, and which applies only to qualified exemptions), Queensland's extensions by agreement with the applicant. Every extension changes the computed date and usually carries its own notice obligation — an extension taken but not properly notified may be no extension at all.

Holidays are a jurisdiction question, not a country question

Even inside one country, there is no single holiday calendar. Canada's National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (September 30) is a federal statutory holiday but not a general statutory holiday in Ontario — so it affects a federal ATIP office's business-day arithmetic differently than a provincial ministry's. The second Monday of October is Thanksgiving in Canada and Columbus Day for the US federal government, but it is not a Washington State legal holiday under RCW 1.16.050 — so a Washington city counts that Monday as a business day while a US federal FOIA office does not. The UK counts a bank holiday anywhere in its four nations as a non-working day for FOIA everywhere. Queensland localizes down to the agency's town. And every jurisdiction adds one-off holidays — royal funerals, coronations, days of mourning — that exist in no calendar published the year before.

One request, four regimes: a worked example

Take a request received on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, and compute the initial statutory response date under four real sets of rules. (Assume no extensions, fees, or clarification — each of which would change the answers below.)

Three things worth noticing. The same Monday — October 12, 2026 — is invisible to Canada's federal calendar-day count, deleted from Ontario's count, an ordinary business day in Washington State, and would be excluded by a US federal FOIA office. The spread between the fastest and slowest answer is nearly two months, for the same request received the same day. And Ontario's answer depends on the request's date: the identical request received June 30, 2026 — one week earlier — would have fallen under the old 30-calendar-day rule and been due in late July. A statute can change the arithmetic mid-year, and in 2026 Ontario's did.

When the date passes: deemed refusal and constructive denial

Deadline math matters because in most regimes the consequence of getting it wrong is automatic. Canada's federal Act deems an institution that misses its time limit to have refused access (subsection 10(3)), opening the door to an immediate complaint to the Information Commissioner — while the duty to respond survives. Ontario deems refusal on the last day notice should have been given, and the requester can appeal to the IPC at once. Under US federal FOIA, a missed deadline constructively exhausts the requester's administrative remedies: they can sue without waiting. Queensland treats a lapsed processing period as a deemed decision refusing access. The UK has no deemed-refusal doctrine, but a breach of section 10 grounds a complaint to the ICO — whose recent enforcement notices against chronically late authorities show how far that can escalate. In every case the point is the same: a miscomputed due date is not an administrative slip; it is an adverse decision issued in your name, on a date you did not know about.

Why spreadsheets get this wrong

Most FOI offices that track deadlines in Excel use some form of WORKDAY() or date addition, and the failure modes are structural rather than careless:

• Holiday calendars are data, not formulas. WORKDAY() is only as correct as the holiday range someone typed in — per jurisdiction, per year, per locality in a place like Queensland. Sheets are routinely copied forward with last year's holidays, and one-off holidays proclaimed mid-year appear in no one's range.
• Pauses are events, not dates. A fee estimate issued, a deposit paid, a clarification received — each requires recomputing the due date from event history. A static formula cannot represent “the clock stopped for 19 days in the middle.”
• Extensions layer. A section 9 extension changes the base period; a later consultation may change it again. Each layer is a chance for the cell and the file to disagree.
• No audit trail. When a regulator or a court asks why the file says the response was on time, “the spreadsheet said so” is not a computation history. You need the received date, the start rule, the pauses with their trigger events, and the extension notices — reconstructable per request.
• The cost of one wrong cell is asymmetric. A typo in most spreadsheets is a typo. Here it is a deemed refusal.

None of this means a spreadsheet cannot be made to work — small offices run careful ones for years. It means the maintenance burden is real, permanent, and mostly invisible until the day it fails.

Sources

• Access to Information Act, RSC 1985, c A-1, ss. 7, 9, 10(3) (Justice Laws, current to 2026); Information Commissioner of Canada, “When and how institutions are to respond to access requests” (guidance, accessed August 2026).
• Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, “Frequently Asked Questions — FIPPA and MFIPPA Amendments” (2026) — the 45-business-day period for requests made on or after July 1, 2026, and the fee-estimate pause; IPC, “Fees, Fee Estimates and Fee Waivers” (June 2018).
• RCW 42.56.520 (Washington Public Records Act five-business-day response); MRSC, “Responding to Public Records Requests” (accessed August 2026); RCW 1.16.050 (state legal holidays).
• Freedom of Information Act 2000, s. 10; UK Information Commissioner's Office, “Time limits for compliance under the Freedom of Information Act (Section 10)” (accessed August 2026).
• Office of the Information Commissioner (Queensland), “Timeframes under the RTI Act” (accessed August 2026).

If you process requests under more than one of these regimes — or under any of the 106 jurisdictions AccessPoint ships packs for — this arithmetic is exactly what the jurisdiction packs encode: the statute's counting unit, start rule, pauses, extensions, and holiday calendar, computed per request with the history kept. Run the FOI workflow quick check to see where deadline handling sits among your risks, read how FOI request management computes and tracks the dates, or book a demo configured for your jurisdiction.