FOI Deadline Calculator — 20 Working Days Under FOIA 2000
Section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives a public authority 20 working days to respond. Counting those by hand is where FOI requests quietly die — the clock excludes weekends and bank holidays, and a deadline missed by the requester is rarely chased by the authority.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
FOI Deadline Calculator
Calculate your 20-working-day deadline under section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Enter the date you sent the request and this tool returns the statutory deadline, a 15-day reminder, and a chase date — plus a ready-to-send follow-up email.
The clock starts the day after the authority receives your request (or the day you send it if sent electronically and received during business hours).
How it works
- Enter the date you sent the request. The count starts the first working day AFTER it — the day of receipt is not day one.
- Weekends and UK bank holidays are both excluded. Section 10(6) treats a bank holiday in any part of the United Kingdom as a non-working day, so a Scottish or Northern Irish holiday pushes back an English authority’s deadline too — the count runs on all three nations’ calendars from the GOV.UK feed, and the result names the holidays it skipped.
- It returns three dates: the statutory 20-working-day deadline, a 15-working-day reminder so you can nudge before it expires, and the first working day after the deadline, which is when a chase becomes an overdue chase.
- The date is read from your own browser on load, so the calculation is always against today rather than against whenever the page was last published.
When to use it
- The moment you send an FOI, so the deadline is in your calendar rather than in your memory.
- Before writing a chase, to be certain the deadline has actually passed — an early chase weakens the follow-up.
- When an authority claims it is still in time and you need the date arithmetic in front of you.
- When preparing an internal review request, where the failure to respond in time is itself part of the complaint.
What it does not do
- The published bank-holiday calendar only runs a few years ahead. Where a deadline falls beyond it the tool declines to give a date rather than counting weekends alone, because a weekends-only answer is always too early. It also does not model the section 10(2) suspension, under which the working days between a fees notice and its payment are disregarded.
- It does not model the public interest test extension. Where an authority claims a qualified exemption it may extend by a “reasonable” period, which is not a fixed number of days.
- Environmental information requests run under the EIR 2004, not FOIA, and have their own 20-working-day clock with a 40-day extension for complex requests. Use the FOI vs EIR selector first if you are unsure which regime applies.
- It calculates a date. It does not tell you whether the authority is entitled to refuse.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.
Related guides
Primary sources
- FOIA 2000 s.10 — time for compliance— legislation.gov.uk
- UK bank holidays— GOV.UK