Public records workflows for your state.

Alabama rewrote its records law in 2024, and the ten-business-day acknowledgment is only the first of two clocks an office has to answer to:

• Ten business days to acknowledge a request, then fifteen business days to answer it — and the fifteen run from the day you acknowledge, not from the day the request arrived. You can add fifteen business days at a time by telling the requester in writing. The countdown on the request screen runs to the acknowledgment; the app does not count the answer clock for you, so put that date on your own calendar the day you acknowledge
• The 2024 law splits requests at eight hours of staff time. A request that will take eight hours or less runs on the standard clock. More than eight and the office has fifteen business days from its acknowledgment to tell the requester the request is time-intensive, what it is likely to cost, and that they can withdraw it and ask for less — and the forty-five business days to answer start only when the requester elects to go ahead, so the date of that answer is the one that matters
• Silence is not neutral. A standard request that gets no answer within thirty business days or sixty calendar days of your acknowledgment, whichever comes first, is presumed denied — a presumption your office can rebut, and one that does not arise while you keep the requester reasonably informed of where the request stands
• Alabama gives the access right to residents, and the 2024 wording contemplates proof — an Alabama driver license or a voter registration. The form collects the certification the statute asks for, and it never turns anyone away on its own, because that call is yours
• Mardi Gras closes state offices in Mobile and Baldwin counties only, and Rosa Parks Day on 1 December is commemorative rather than a closure — each city elects whether to observe it. Published Alabama holiday lists get both wrong, and a padded calendar pushes your due date later than the statute puts it
• The statute says a reasonable fee and stops there — no per-page cap, no hourly cap, no free page allowance, and no fee waiver or hardship provision spelled out in the Act, so confirm with your attorney before telling a requester none exists. The fee screen carries the schedule your office adopted, because Alabama publishes no statewide rate

Alaska's famous ten-working-day clock lives in regulations that reach state executive-branch agencies and not municipalities, so a city has no state-law response deadline at all — and the setup says so instead of inventing one:

• No deadline is seeded, because Alaska law gives a city none. The ten working days every guide quotes — along with the ten-working-day extension and the sixty-working-day appeal — comes from 2 AAC 96, which covers state executive-branch agencies. Your own ordinance sets your clock, and setup asks you for it.
• The five person-hours of free staff time run per requester per calendar month, across every request that person files — not per request. Past that, AS 40.25.110(c) says the office shall charge personnel costs, so absorbing them is not the clerk's call. The rule is spelled out on the request form and the fee notice instead of left to memory.
• Payment is due before records are released, and Alaska lets an office require it before the search even starts — there is no dollar threshold to cross first. The form collects a spending ceiling up front, so approval is settled before the work rather than after it.
• There is no per-page price in Alaska. A copy fee may not exceed the standard unit cost of duplication your own agency has established, so setup has you record that figure rather than printing a number the statute never set.
• The October closure is Alaska Day on the 18th. There is no Columbus Day in Alaska, and Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday in October is ceremonial rather than a closure. Seward's Day falls on the last Monday in March, so its date moves each year, and Saturday holidays shift back to Friday while Sunday ones shift forward to Monday.
• The denial letter names no state appeal deadline, because Alaska sets none for a city. The sixty working days people quote is that same state-agency regulation, and whether a municipal denial can be taken to superior court is genuinely unsettled. Setup has you name your local route and clear the wording with your agency's attorney before the first denial goes out.

Arizona sets no number of days for the records themselves — they must be produced “promptly,” and a custodian who does not is treated as having denied the request. Since the 2025 amendments, a request must also be acknowledged within five business days (A.R.S. §39-171(B)) — the portal's instant confirmation satisfies that on its own. The setup reflects the statute rather than inventing a countdown:

• No invented deadline, and no false comfort: every request keeps a dated record of what was done and when, which is what a superior court special action under §39-121.02 actually turns on
• Arizona is one of the few states where a commercial requester pays a different rate — §39-121.03 charges the market value of reproduction — so commercial purpose is a question on the form, and it changes the fee screen
• There is no charge for inspecting records and none for a requester photographing them with their own phone, which the fee screen enforces rather than leaving to memory
• Arizona’s confidentiality rules are spread across more than three hundred separate statutes, so the exemption picker is built for looking things up rather than remembering them

The three working days everyone quotes is an exception your office has to certify in writing — Arkansas’s default is that records are open right now:

• Records are open for inspection and copying during your office’s regular business hours, and that is the default. The three working days apply only when a record is in active use or in storage, and only after your office certifies that in writing and names the date and hour the record will be ready
• There is no extension of any kind in the Act — no good cause, no mutual agreement, nothing that buys a day — so an Arkansas request has no extension button
• Arkansas does not allow a charge for staff time, and the cost of separating exempt material from the rest falls on your office rather than the requester — so the fee screen prices copies at what they actually cost and keeps redaction work off the invoice
• Personnel and employee-evaluation records run on their own track: a decision within twenty-four hours, notice to the employee the records are about as well as to the requester, and an Attorney General opinion within three working days that the custodian, the requester, or the employee can ask for — which is why Arkansas gets two denial templates instead of one
• Access runs to Arkansas citizens, and the Act carries a rare mandatory denial covering an incarcerated felon and anyone submitting on their behalf other than their attorney — the form asks, your staff decide, and the app never denies on its own
• Christmas Eve is a statutory closure in Arkansas; the day after Thanksgiving is not, and is proclaimed year by year. Robert E. Lee Day moved to a Saturday in 2017 and Juneteenth is not an Arkansas legal holiday at all — any of those wrongly marked closed quietly hands every deadline that crosses it an extra day

Three business days, and a fee rule that is easy to get wrong because the numbers are published outside the statute:

• Three business days, with CORA's seven additional working days when extenuating circumstances apply
• Research time bills at Colorado's published $41.37 an hour with the first hour free, and copies at 25¢ a page — the caps are enforced on the fee screen, not just printed on it
• Frances Xavier Cabrini Day falls on the first Monday in October, not the federal Columbus Day week, and the deadline math knows the difference
• Your setup checklist covers the duty CORA ties money to: Colorado bars charging for research time at all unless your office has adopted and posted a written fee policy

Connecticut's clock is short and unforgiving — there is no extension to take, and silence is itself a denial:

• Four business days, and a request the office has not answered is deemed denied by operation of law — so the app treats day four as a hard edge, not a target
• There is no extension in the statute. The app does not offer one, because offering a button the law does not have is how an office talks itself into missing a deadline
• Connecticut does not allow a charge for staff time. The fee screen enforces copies only, which is the opposite of most states and the thing an office moving from another state gets wrong first
• Denial letters carry the Freedom of Information Commission appeal and its thirty-day window, which is the requester's real remedy and the deadline your letter has to state

Fifteen business days, and the answer does not have to be the records — but “we need more time” only counts in Delaware if you cite one of the three reasons the statute names and attach a date estimate:

• Fifteen business days from the day the request arrives, and Delaware counts three answers: the records, a denial with the reasons for it, or notice that more time is needed. The third only works if you cite one of the statute's three reasons — voluminous records, a request requiring legal advice, or a record in storage or archived — and attach a good-faith estimate of how much longer.
• Delaware does not let you charge for the legal review of whether a record is exempt. Senate Bill 155 from 2021 would have reversed that rule and is still quoted online as though it passed. It never became law, and the fee screen follows the statute that is actually on the books.
• The first 20 pages of standard black-and-white copies are free, and so is the first hour of staff time. After that it is 10¢ a sheet, 20¢ double-sided, and staff time in quarter-hour increments at the pay rate of the lowest-paid employee who can do the work — with an itemized written estimate going out before the office runs up any administrative fees.
• Delaware's access right runs to citizens of the State, and Delaware businesses count. The form asks the question so it is on the record, but it stays a question your staff answer — never an automatic denial, and the statutory definition of “citizen” is one to settle with your agency's attorney before you lean on it.
• The FOIA coordinator duty is a standing one, not a one-time form: designate the coordinator, publish the contact information on your website, report it to the Attorney General, and update all of it within 20 working days of any change. The setup checklist carries all four, plus the written FOIA policy.
• The calendar is the State's, not Washington's and not your office's — the Attorney General's coordinator guidance counts a business day as a day State offices are open, so your own snow day does not add time. Delaware works Presidents' Day and Columbus Day, closes Good Friday and the day after Thanksgiving, and when a holiday lands on a Saturday the Friday before closes instead, which is why 4 July 2026 is observed on Friday 3 July.

The District runs on the federal model, and the piece that catches offices out is that how the requester will use the records changes the bill but never changes their right to have them:

• Fifteen business days to hand over the records or state what you are withholding and why — a determination with reasons, not just an acknowledgment. Extendable by exactly ten more business days for unusual circumstances, in writing. The cleanest extension rule in the country: a fixed ceiling rather than an open-ended “reasonable” one
• Requester category sets the fee, not eligibility. Commercial use pays search, review and copying; news media, educational and scientific requesters pay copying alone; everyone else pays search and copying. The form asks as a billing question and says so, because asking it as a gatekeeping question is how an office ends up either overcharging a journalist or handing a commercial requester the media rate
• The first hour of searching is free, and after that search bills at the pay grade of whoever does it — roughly $16 to $40 an hour — rather than a flat statutory rate. Copies are 25¢ a page
• Two fee facts that reliably surprise requesters, so the portal states them up front: the search fee is owed even if nothing is found, and even if everything found turns out to be exempt
• Appeals go to the Mayor and are decided by the Office of Legal Counsel, and the form is unusually prescriptive — “FOIA Appeal” has to appear in the subject line and on the outside of the envelope, with the original request, the denial, the argument, and a daytime phone number all enclosed. The denial letter spells that out, because an appeal that arrives in the wrong shape is an appeal the requester loses on procedure
• The ten-business-day deadline for deciding an appeal is real in the statute and not met in practice — the deciding office has published an advisory opinion about its own backlog. The letter does not promise a ten-day answer

Florida sets no fixed number of days — Chapter 119 asks for prompt acknowledgment and a good-faith response. So the product is honest about it instead of inventing a countdown:

• No fake deadline — and no false comfort: every request keeps a day-by-day record of what was done and when, which is exactly what you need when a delay is judged for reasonableness after the fact
• Florida law says a requester cannot be required to give a name or a purpose — the form keeps contact details optional and anonymous requests lawful, out of the box
• The email public-records warning Florida mandates (§668.6076) is posted on your request form for you, and your setup checklist walks you through the custodian-contact posting §119.12(2) expects
• Fee rules quoted to requesters on the form — 15¢ per one-sided page and the $1 certified-copy cap — with extensive-use special service charges tracked per request
• The Florida holiday calendar reflects the days state offices actually close — nothing padded in

Three business days, and a state holiday calendar that looks nothing like the federal one:

• Three business days, with no extension — because Georgia has none, and inventing one would put your office past a deadline it never had
• The calendar is the Governor's, not Washington's: offices work the federal Presidents' Day, observe Washington's Birthday at Christmastime, and take the April state holiday on Good Friday
• Copies at 10¢ a page, with the first quarter-hour of staff time free
• A Georgia records-officer designation only counts if it is made in writing and sent where the statute says — the setup checklist walks through it

Idaho rewrote its public records law on July 1, 2025, and the request forms and policy PDFs still posted on Idaho city websites were written for the version it replaced:

• Three working days to grant or deny — not to acknowledge, and not to send an estimate. Where records take longer to locate or retrieve, Idaho wants written notice and production no later than ten working days from the request, not ten on top of the first three. Reading it the other way puts your office three working days past its deadline.
• Since July 1, 2025 a request has to carry the requester's name, mailing address, email address and telephone number, plus a declaration under oath of whether they are an Idaho resident. Anonymous requests are no longer allowed in Idaho, and the residency answer decides the fees — the free hours, the free pages and the fee waiver are for residents only. The same 2025 amendments also set a separate, longer response schedule for nonresidents; the day count on it is one to confirm with your agency's attorney, and until you do, every request here runs on the three-working-day clock.
• An Idaho denial letter has to say one of exactly two things about legal review: that the agency's attorney reviewed the request, or that the agency had the chance to consult an attorney and chose not to. There is no third version and no way to leave it out, so it is a choice your staff make on the denial screen rather than a blank in a template.
• An Idaho denial starts a retention duty, not just an appeal clock. The records in question have to be kept until the appeal period ends, until a court rules, or for as long as any other law requires, whichever is longest — and that appeal period runs 180 calendar days from the date the denial was mailed. So the mailing date is captured on the request and the hold keeps your retention schedule from clearing source files while the period is still open.
• The first two hours of staff time and the first 100 pages of paper copies are free — for Idaho residents only. Labor bills at the hourly pay of the lowest-paid administrative staff employee or public official who is necessary and qualified to process the request, attorney redaction time is capped at your lowest-paid qualified agency attorney, and fee statements have to be itemized rather than sent as one total. Idaho's statute carries no per-page figure, so the app does not print one.
• Idaho's holiday list closes offices on Columbus Day — which Idaho agencies publish as Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples' Day — and works the Friday after Thanksgiving, which cross-state calendars routinely get backwards. The third Monday in January is Martin Luther King, Jr.–Idaho Human Rights Day, Juneteenth is a standing closure, and your own office's closure days are confirmed during setup because Idaho cities set their own.

Five business days, and the Public Access Counselor reviews the denials. The clocks and the fee limits are all preloaded:

• Five business days with the statutory 5-day extension; commercial requests run on their own 21-working-day track; recurrent-requester categories are built in
• The fee limits are enforced, not just displayed: the first 50 pages are free, and search-and-retrieval time is billable only on commercial requests, only after 8 free hours, at the $10/hour cap — with the 15¢ page rate quoted to requesters on the form
• Denial letters name the person responsible and carry the Public Access Counselor block — address, phone, and the 60-day review window
• If a request runs past its deadline, the fee screen warns you that a late response forfeits the fees before you charge one
• Lincoln's Birthday, Casimir Pulaski Day, Election Day, and the rest of the Illinois calendar are in the business-day math

Indiana runs two response clocks at once, and the shorter one belongs to the person standing at your counter:

• A request made in person or over the telephone is deemed denied if nobody responds within 24 hours. That is Indiana's shortest clock, and it belongs to the walk-in and the phone call
• Mail and fax get seven days, and those are plain calendar days, not business days. The Public Access Counselor reads email and online requests onto that same seven-day track — but that reading rests on advisory opinions rather than statutory text, so the safe habit is answering everything the day it arrives
• What the clock buys is a response, not the records. Indiana sets no outer limit on production — the standard is a reasonable time — so every request keeps a dated record of what was done and when, which is what a reasonableness question turns on
• A written denial has to carry the specific exemption and the name and title or position of the person responsible for it. The letter fills in both, and states the Public Access Counselor complaint route and its 30-day window
• Inspection is free, and so is the time spent searching — the charge is for copies. Indiana's copy fee rule sets an ordinary black-and-white page at 10¢ and a color page at 25¢, and the fee screen carries those rates so nobody has to look them up
• The closure list is Indiana's own: Good Friday, both election days, Lincoln's Birthday kept the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Washington's Birthday kept at Christmastime — never in February. It marks the days your office is closed; it does not add days to a clock that runs on the calendar

Iowa’s records law sets no number of days — the standard is as soon as feasible, and the Public Information Board has said so directly — so the setup starts by not inventing a countdown:

• No invented deadline, and no false comfort: every request keeps a dated record of what was done and when, which is what a reasonableness question actually turns on — and any working target is tracked as yours, never as a statutory one
• Iowa gives a requester a board, not just a courthouse. Denial letters carry the Public Information Board route, its sixty days under §23.7 running from when the requester could reasonably have learned of the problem, and district court under §22.10
• Iowa’s 2022 fee rewrite recovers actual cost only — benefits, depreciation, maintenance, electricity and insurance are named in the statute as costs you may not pass on — and the under-thirty-minutes rule is built as a threshold, not a half-hour credit off every bill
• Iowa does not let an office condition access on knowing who is asking or why, so contact details stay optional on the form — with the plain warning that records and a cost figure cannot reach a requester the office has no way to contact
• The calendar is the nine days §1C.2 closes offices for: Iowa works Presidents’ Day and Juneteenth and closes the Friday after Thanksgiving, the reverse of a national template — and your office’s own closures are confirmed during setup
• Your setup checklist covers the standing duty §22.5 names: appointing a lawful custodian for your records and making that delegation known

Three business days in Kansas is a deadline to act on a request — not to produce the records — and the fee rules underneath it were rewritten in July 2025:

• Three business days to act — as soon as possible, and no later than the end of the third. Acting means granting access, denying it, or writing to explain the cause of the delay and give the earliest date, time and place the records will be available. That explanation is owed the moment access cannot be granted right away, not after three quiet days, and Kansas sets no fixed extension — what holds the delay is the date certain you put in writing.
• HB 2134 rewrote the Kansas fee section on 1 July 2025. Staff time spent reviewing records and blacking out what has to be withheld is chargeable now, at the pay rate of the lowest-cost category of staff reasonably necessary to do the work. Any Kansas fee guidance in your files from before that date is superseded.
• Once an estimate passes five hours of staff time or $200, Kansas requires reasonable efforts to contact the requester and talk through bringing the cost down. It is a step you take and log, not a gate that stops the work — the app records the attempt whether or not anyone answers.
• The fee-reasonableness appeal to the Secretary of Administration reaches executive-branch agencies only. It is not open to a city, so no Kansas letter here names it. Your denial letters point where the statute points: the county or district attorney, the Attorney General’s open-government unit, or district court.
• Kansas names the local freedom of information officer in statute for local bodies specifically, and the role carries a duty as well as a title — plainly written information for requesters about their rights, your responsibilities, and how to inspect and get copies. Setup records your designation and drafts that information for your portal, so you are reviewing text rather than writing it.
• The legal holidays listed in K.S.A. 35-107 are not your closure list — Kansas state offices work Presidents’ Day and Columbus Day, and two of the closures come from the Governor’s proclamation each year rather than from statute. Kansas cities set their own calendar, so setup asks your office to confirm the year’s dates instead of assuming them.

Five business days — and an Attorney General decision that nobody appeals is not advice in Kentucky, it is enforceable law:

• Five business days — Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays do not count — to tell the requester in writing what you decided. The ten-day window Kentucky ran in 2020 was temporary and expired with the statute that created it, so an office still working off that number is late on day six.
• Records in active use, in storage, or not otherwise available do not buy you silence. The custodian has to notify the requester immediately and name a place, a time, and a date — and any further delay on those same records needs a detailed explanation of the cause together with the earliest date the record will be available. Four pieces, every time: the cause, the place, the time, and the earliest date.
• Kentucky does not let you bill the staff time a request takes. An ordinary copy charge is the actual cost of the media and the machine and nothing else. The 10¢-a-page figure everyone quotes comes from a 1985 Court of Appeals decision rather than the statute, and the Attorney General treats it as a ceiling, not a rate you are entitled to charge.
• Only residents of the Commonwealth may request, and “resident” reaches far past where somebody sleeps — working at a Kentucky location counts, owning property here counts, acting on behalf of someone who qualifies counts, and news-gathering organizations count on their own. The form asks for the single statement the statute requires and leaves the judgment to your staff.
• Commercial requests are the one place staff time and the cost of obtaining the record become billable, and only after a certified statement of the purpose. Newspapers, periodicals, radio, and television are not commercial for publishing or broadcasting what they get — the Sixth Circuit upheld that carve-out in January 2025.
• Your setup checklist covers what Kentucky ties to the office rather than the request: the rules KRS 61.876 makes you adopt and post, your official custodian and request address, checking your portal form against the Attorney General’s OAG-1 — which every Kentucky agency has to accept and none may replace with a form of its own — and the holidays your office counts, which we leave to you because Kentucky’s two holiday lists do not agree with each other.

The three-day figure that circulates in Louisiana training material is not your response deadline — it is either out of date or a different rule doing a different job, so the setup follows the statute as it reads today:

• Five business days for the written determination, with the reasons for it and the legal basis for anything withheld. Saturdays, Sundays and legal holidays do not count. The statute gives no extension, so neither does the app.
• The three-day rule in §44:33(B) fixes a date, not a deadline: if a record is in active use when the request arrives, you promptly certify that in writing and name a day and hour within three days for the requester to see it. A record that is not in active use is due immediately. Neither of those is your response clock.
• A requester may go to court once five business days pass with no determination. An estimate of the time that collection, redaction and review will reasonably take also heads that off under §44:35(A) — but it does not discharge the written determination your office still owes.
• Nothing can be charged for copies until your office has adopted a reasonable fee schedule and posted it where the public can readily access it. Act 247 of 2023 made that posting a precondition, not a formality. Louisiana gives a local office a standard — reasonableness — rather than a set per-page rate, so the setup leaves the rate blank for you to fill in and confirm. Inspection is free.
• Mardi Gras, Good Friday and general election day in even-numbered years are legal holidays by statute in Louisiana, so they stop the clock. Memorial Day and Presidents' Day are not — they close offices only when the governor proclaims them, which is why Louisiana deadlines are checked against the year's published state calendar rather than assumed.
• The access right runs to any person of the age of majority, so the form carries a one-click age attestation. §44:32(A) limits what your office may ask a requester to age and identification — nothing else, and never why they want the records — and lets you require enough to establish both on an electronic request, unless you already know who they are.

Maine’s five days are not a deadline to hand over the records — they are a deadline to answer, and an office that stays silent has already denied the request:

• Five working days to acknowledge the request with a good faith estimate of when the response will be complete, or to deny it in writing — there is no fixed deadline for producing the records themselves, so the app tracks the answer and the estimate instead of inventing a production countdown
• Silence is a refusal. Withholding records without a written denial inside those five days counts as a failure to allow inspection or copying, and the requester can go straight to Superior Court — with no written notice to date the appeal from, which is why the acknowledgment is timestamped rather than remembered
• A Maine denial has to name the statutory authority it relies on, not just give a reason — the exemption you pick is written into the letter, along with the thirty calendar days the requester has to file in Superior Court
• Reviewing and redacting count as compiling a record in Maine, so that time is billable — two free hours, a $25-an-hour cap after that, copies at up to 10¢ a page, and no per-page charge at all on records sent electronically. An office arriving from a state that bars redaction charges has this exactly backwards
• An office may go to Superior Court for a protection order against a request — or a whole series of them — but the filing is due within sixty days of the request arriving. That deadline runs against your office rather than the requester, and the app does not count it for you — put it on your own calendar the day the request lands
• Patriot’s Day and Indigenous Peoples Day are Maine legal holidays, and state employees also get the Friday after Thanksgiving even though the holiday statute does not list it — but a town office may well be open that day, and the law never defines “working day,” so setup asks you to confirm the days your own office is closed

Maryland runs two clocks in two different kinds of day, and the longer one is a ceiling rather than an allowance:

• Thirty calendar days to grant or deny a request, and to produce the records if you grant it. The shorter clock counts working days: if you expect producing the records to take more than ten working days, a written notice is due within ten working days of receiving the request. The countdown on the request screen is the thirty days; the app does not count the ten working days for you, so put that date on your own calendar the day a large request arrives
• Thirty days is the outer bar, not the target. Maryland's standard is production “immediately or within a reasonable period that is needed to retrieve the public record,” so treat the countdown as a limit you work inside, not a budget you spend down
• That delay notice has to carry three things: how long you expect to take, an estimate of the range of fees, and the reason for the delay. Producing late counts as a denial either way; without that notice and good-faith work with the requester, the law will not treat it as a bona fide dispute
• There is no extension you can take on your own. The only one Maryland offers runs on the applicant's agreement and is capped at thirty more days, so the app does not offer an extension for Maryland — any extra time has to come from the requester
• A denial needs a written statement, due within ten working days, that gives the reasons and the legal authority, briefly describes what was withheld, and names the requester's remedies — the letter carries those remedies, starting with the free mediation the Public Access Ombudsman offers
• Independence Day 2026 falls on a Saturday, so the Maryland closure is Friday, July 3 — the app counts the day offices actually close, and setup walks you through striking any state closure day your own building works

Ten business days, a rate cap, and two holidays that close Boston but not your office:

• Ten business days, with the statutory fifteen-day extension
• Patriots' Day is a closure. Evacuation Day and Bunker Hill Day are not — they are Suffolk County only, and offices elsewhere have been required to stay open on them since 2011
• The first two hours of staff time are free, the rate is capped at $25 an hour, and copies are 5¢ a page
• Miss the deadline and Massachusetts forfeits the fees — the fee screen warns you before you charge one

Five business days, and a fee rule that starts with a publishing duty:

• Five business days, with the statutory ten-day extension
• Election Day closes Michigan offices in even years only; Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve close them every year. All three are in the business-day math
• Fringe benefits bill at 50% of labor, and a deposit can be requested once the estimate passes $50
• Michigan bars charging anything at all until your FOIA procedures, guidelines, and a plain-language public summary are published — so the setup checklist puts that first

Minnesota sets no number of days — the standard is a reasonable time, judged after the fact. So the product is honest about it instead of inventing a countdown:

• No fake deadline, and no false comfort: every request keeps a dated record of what was done and when, which is what a reasonableness question actually turns on
• Minnesota law does not condition access on identifying yourself, so contact details stay optional on the form and anonymous requests work out of the box
• The fee rules are enforced as the statute writes them — copies, not the time spent finding them
• Your setup checklist covers the two duties Minnesota names: designating the responsible authority, and publishing your data-access procedures
• The holiday calendar closes the Friday after Thanksgiving, which Minnesota observes and most cross-state calendars miss

Mississippi is the one state where your own written policy is the deadline — the seven working days everyone quotes is only the ceiling on what that policy is allowed to say:

• The statute caps your procedure at seven working days; it does not hand you seven. If your adopted policy says five, five is what binds you — so the seven working days seeded here is a ceiling rather than your answer, so change it in Settings → Agency to whatever your own policy says if yours is shorter
• An office with no written procedure at all falls to one working day. That is the single most consequential fact in Mississippi records law and the easiest to be unaware of, so it leads this panel rather than sitting in a fee table
• Fourteen working days is the outer wall. Past seven you owe a written explanation with particulars, and past fourteen you need the requester's agreement — both are dated events on the request rather than notes in an email folder
• Mississippi lets you charge for searching and reviewing, not just copying, plus postage — and staff time bills at the pay rate of the lowest-paid person able to do the work, contractors included. Payment is due before records go out rather than after, which is the opposite of most states
• Denials are kept on file for three years and open to inspection, which the app does by default rather than asking you to remember
• Complaints go to the Ethics Commission, not a court or the Attorney General, and you get fourteen days to answer one. Penalties of up to $100 a violation attach to the person who denied the request, not just the office
• Mississippi observes neither Juneteenth nor Columbus Day — § 3-3-7 names the second Monday in October only to say it is not a legal holiday. Published lists carry both, and each one wrongly marked closed hands every deadline crossing it an extra day it does not have

Missouri gives this office three business days from the day the custodian receives a request, and the extra time the statute allows for reasonable cause only counts if the office puts the cause in writing along with the earliest date and the place the records will be ready:

• Three business days, counted from the day the custodian receives the request. Missouri lets the production period run past day three for reasonable cause and sets no outside limit on it, which is exactly why the app keeps counting, keeps the deadline on screen, and keeps the written delay notice — the cause, the earliest date, and the place — on the file where a court would look for it
• Missouri makes every public governmental body appoint a custodian of records and keep that person’s name and office location publicly available, and the clock runs from the custodian’s receipt, not the front counter’s. Setup records the custodian and the routing habit that makes those the same day
• Missouri splits the bill two ways: the labor of making copies is billed at no more than your clerical staff’s average hourly rate, while research time bills at actual cost and has to be done by whichever capable employees produce the lowest charge. Paper up to 9 by 14 inches is up to 10¢ a page
• A denial has to name the specific section of chapter 610 it rests on, in writing, and Missouri’s penalties turn on state of mind — up to $1,000 for a knowing violation, up to $5,000 for a purposeful one. Denial letters carry the grounds and the circuit-court route without anyone having to remember
• Two fixed dates most cross-state calendars leave out — Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Truman Day on May 8 — plus Columbus Day, which Missouri’s state calendar still carries. City observance varies on all three, so setup asks which ones your office actually closes rather than padding your deadline with days you work

Montana rewrote this law in 2025, and the version that took effect on 1 July 2026 sorts agencies by type — which means most of what is published about Montana deadlines does not apply to a city:

• A city has no response deadline. Montana asks a local government to respond “in a timely manner” by making records available or by giving an estimate of the time and cost — and that is the whole obligation. No countdown is seeded, because inventing one would show a legal deadline that does not exist
• The five business days you will find in every published summary of Montana law is the rule for state agencies, and the statute says in terms that it does not reach local governments. An office moving from a checklist written for the state gets this wrong first
• The estimate is the mechanism. There is no separate extension concept in Montana because there is nothing to extend — so the estimate you give is the commitment, and it belongs on the request record where the audit trail will hold it
• The fee cap does reach you, even though the deadline does not: the first hour is free and everything after it is capped at $25 an hour, on top of a rule that the fee may not exceed what the work actually costs. Before the 2025 rewrite Montana quotes reportedly ran into the thousands
• Reviewing is expressly inside the chargeable clock in Montana, which is the opposite of several neighbouring states — do not carry another state's fee card across. The statute also requires the fee to be documented, so the fee record is itemised rather than a single number typed into a letter
• There is no records appeal board and no ombudsman. A denial goes to district court, where costs and attorney fees can be awarded against the office — and Montana's access right is constitutional, reaching cities directly rather than through a statute

Four business days — and a fee rule that reverses the Nebraska Supreme Court’s holding on charging for staff review time, because the Legislature rewrote the statute days after the opinion came down:

• Four business days, counted from the day after the request arrives — and that is the outside limit, not the target, because the statute also says as soon as practicable and without delay. Nebraska requires a cost estimate with every response, including a straight yes with nothing to charge. Where a request cannot in good faith be filled in four days because it is unusually difficult or extensive, the office owes a written explanation naming the earliest practicable date and offering the requester a chance to narrow the request or say which items they want first
• A business day in Nebraska is a day your office is open: the statute excludes Saturdays, Sundays, and any day the custodian’s offices are closed, so the countdown runs off your closure calendar rather than the state’s. The thirteen statutory days are loaded to start from — Arbor Day on the last Friday in April and the day after Thanksgiving included — and setup asks you to confirm them
• Residents are never charged for review time. For a resident, the first eight cumulative hours of searching for, identifying, physically redacting, or copying are free, and no charge at all is allowed for an attorney — or anyone else — reviewing the records to find a basis to withhold them. Non-residents get neither protection. The Nebraska Supreme Court held the opposite on staff review time and the Legislature reversed it days later, so a fee schedule written before April 2024 is out of date
• “Resident” is a fee tier in Nebraska, not an eligibility test. Anyone may ask for records, but the eight free hours and the review-time ban belong to residents — and the statute counts news media as residents wherever they are based. The form asks it as a cost question, which is what keeps an out-of-state reporter from being billed at the non-resident rate
• A Nebraska denial letter has to correlate each withheld portion to the particular statute and subsection relied on, name the employee responsible for the decision, and set out the requester’s rights of review — the Attorney General petition as well as district court, because in Nebraska the Attorney General route does reach cities. The exemption code tagged on each redaction is what the correlation requirement runs on

Nevada rewrote its fee rules in 2019, and a great many agencies never noticed:

• Five business days to produce the records or say in writing when they will be ready and why
• The hourly “extraordinary use” charge that Nevada offices still bill was repealed in 2019. NRS 239.055 is gone; the fee screen will not let you charge staff time under it, because the statute it came from no longer exists
• Nevada Day falls on the last Friday in October and the deadline math knows it — and knows that Nevada works Columbus Day, which most calendars get backwards
• Denial letters carry the specific statutory basis Nevada requires, rather than a general assertion that something is confidential

New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Ombudsman has sat vacant since July 1, 2025, so a denial letter written from an older template sends the requester to an office that cannot act on it:

• Denial letters route to the superior court under RSA 91-A:7 — not to the Right-to-Know Ombudsman, whose post has sat empty since July 1, 2025, with the state itself saying nothing filed there can be acted on. The Right-to-Know Law sets no filing deadline running from a denial, so the letter prints none and tells the requester this office cannot advise on what time limits a court may apply
• Anything immediately available goes out right away; after that, day five is a deadline to act, not to produce — release, deny in writing with the reason, or acknowledge in writing and state the time reasonably necessary to decide. New Hampshire sets no maximum behind that third option, so the acknowledgment asks for a real date instead of a sentence someone types
• Inspection is free, and so is any delivery that does not involve making a copy. Where your office makes the copy, the ceiling is what that copy actually costs — not staff time spent responding, retrieving or redacting, with the one exception below. There is no per-page figure in the statute and no binding case on what “actual cost” covers, so the fee screen asks your office for its own number rather than printing one you would have to defend
• Past 250 electronic communications you may add a reasonable per-communication charge on top of copy cost, capped at $1.00 each — the first 250 are free, an attachment rides with its message, and a thread under one subject line counts once. The waiver is mandatory, not discretionary: indigence as established by the federal poverty line, or a public-interest purpose that is not primarily commercial, and the charge comes off
• Business days run off the national and state holiday lists the statute names, not off the days your building is closed — the Friday after Thanksgiving is on neither list, so the safe reading is that it still counts against your five even with the office dark. No New Hampshire court has construed that phrase, so setup asks your office to confirm the calendar with counsel before the first deadline

Seven business days or the request is deemed denied — and the 2024 amendments rewrote enough of the procedure that the form on your counter may be out of date. Here, it isn't:

• The public request form carries the statutory content the GRC model form requires — the commercial-purpose certification, the conviction certification, the legal-proceeding certification, and the fee, response-time, and appeal statements
• Commercial requests classify themselves onto the 14-business-day clock the moment the requester answers the certification, and immediate-access records (budgets, bills, vouchers, contracts, salary and overtime) have their own zero-day clock ready to apply
• Denial letters carry the 45-day appeal statement — Government Records Council or Superior Court — automatically
• The form quotes OPRA's copy fees to every requester — 5¢ letter, 7¢ legal — and states the deposit rule correctly limited to anonymous requests
• New Jersey's holiday calendar, including Juneteenth on the third Friday in June and Good Friday, is already in the deadline math

New Mexico pairs the sharpest damages provision in the country with a rule that silence costs more than a denial:

• Fifteen days to produce the records or deny in writing, and a written denial is what stops the meter — damages of up to $100 a day can run until one is issued, so answering badly beats not answering at all. A court has to find the delay unreasonable first, so nothing here tells you the meter is already running — but issuing the written denial is the action that ends the exposure, and the deadline card says so
• Three business days is a conditional duty, not an acknowledgment right. It fires only if you have not already let the requester see the records, and what you owe is a written note saying either when the records will be ready or when this office will respond — the second option is the one most offices actually use
• You may not ask why. New Mexico expressly forbids requiring a statement of purpose, so the request form carries no purpose field at all — not even an optional one, because an optional field on a government form reads as a request
• New Mexico is the rare state that does require contact details: a written request must give the requester's name, address and telephone number. A missing phone number does not make a request deniable, though, so the form asks for it without blocking the submission — the Attorney General's guidance treats a request missing an element as one to help cure rather than one to reject
• Copies are capped at $1.00 a printed page up to 11 by 17 inches, and there is no charge for the time spent deciding whether a record can be released. Electronic delivery runs on its own actual-cost track outside that cap
• Fee-shifting is mandatory rather than discretionary: a requester who is denied and then wins in court shall be awarded damages, costs and attorney fees. No bad faith needs to be shown, and no administrative appeal needs to be exhausted first

Five business days to acknowledge, and a subject-matter list most agencies forget they owe:

• Five business days to acknowledge, with FOIL's twenty-day rule for what follows
• Election Day is a New York legal holiday and is in the deadline math
• Staff time is billable only after two hours; copies are 25¢ a page
• Setup covers both standing duties: designating a records access officer, and keeping the subject-matter list current — FOIL wants it updated at least once a year

No fixed deadline, a twelve-day state calendar, and a hard rule about asking why:

• No fixed deadline — and none invented. Copies go out as promptly as possible, and every request keeps a dated record of what was done and when
• The calendar is the State Human Resources twelve: no Presidents' Day, no Indigenous Peoples' Day, and three days at Christmas
• Purpose may never be demanded in North Carolina, so contact details stay optional on the request form
• Denial letters carry the civil action and the mandatory mediation that comes with it

North Dakota is the only state in the country where an office is forbidden from asking who is making the request — and the request form is built around that rather than working around it:

• You may not ask who they are or why they want it. The Attorney General reads the statute as barring both, and asking for a name as a condition of getting records is the violation. So the North Dakota form has no name field, no purpose field and no required field of any kind beyond a description of the records — and your agency's “allow anonymous requests” setting cannot switch that off, because switching it off is the thing the statute forbids
• Clarifying what records are sought is permitted, and it is the only clarification that is. The app keeps that distinction rather than leaving it to a clerk to remember mid-conversation
• No day count is seeded, because North Dakota sets none. The standard is a reasonable time, what you owe is the records or the legal authority for withholding them, and there is a separate duty to say why if there is a delay — so the request keeps a dated record of what was done and when, which is what an Attorney General review actually turns on
• Copies are 25 cents an impression, the first hour of locating records is free, and after that the charge is capped at $25 an hour. Payment can be required before locating, copying or mailing — there is no dollar threshold to cross first, which is unusually broad
• The appeal route is the Attorney General with a real thirty-day filing deadline, and it has teeth: if the AG finds a violation, your office has seven days after the opinion to release the records whether or not the requester also sues, and the people responsible can be held personally liable. Denial letters carry that window because a requester who misses it loses the route entirely
• Whether redaction time falls inside the $25-an-hour charge is genuinely unsettled — the statute's chargeable verb is locating, and “redacting” appears only in the clause about when you may collect. The fee screen does not quietly assume either answer

No deadline in days, and a fee rule that is narrower than most offices assume:

• Ohio sets no day count, so the product does not invent one. Records are prepared promptly and every request keeps a dated record you can hand to a court
• Ohio charges at cost, and at cost means duplication only — the fee screen suppresses staff time entirely rather than letting your office bill something a court would refuse
• Denial letters carry Ohio's two routes and the fact that a requester must choose one, not both: the $25 public records complaint, or mandamus
• Columbus Day is an Ohio closure day, and it is in the business-day math

Oklahoma sets no number of days. SB 535 changed the Open Records Act on November 1, 2025, but it did not add a clock — the duty is still the standard the Act has always used, and the app does not invent a countdown the statute does not give you:

• The duty is promptness, not a day count. Section 24A.5(6) says a public body "must provide prompt, reasonable access to its records," and that any delay is limited to the time needed to prepare the documents and avoid excessive disruption. There is no statutory number to count to, so the app shows none and keeps the dated day-by-day record the promptness standard is actually judged against instead.
• Oklahoma forbids parking a small request behind a big one. The statute says a current request may not be unreasonably delayed until an earlier, substantially longer request is finished — a rule an ordinary first-in-first-out queue breaks by accident.
• A vague request can now be closed. Since November 2025 an Oklahoma office may require a request form, send a request back for a date range and search terms, and deny it if it stays too broad to work from. The statute puts no time limit on that exchange, so the form asks for both up front rather than leaving it to a second round of email.
• Search time is billable only two ways: when a request is solely for a commercial purpose, or when filling it would clearly disrupt the office's essential functions — and then only the direct cost of the search. Never for a request in the public interest. Copies are capped at 25¢ a page, certified copies at $1. Oklahoma sets no hourly rate in statute, so the app invents no cap and carries the limit that does bind instead: a fee set to discourage requests or obstruct disclosure violates the Act.
• Denial letters carry both routes Oklahoma added recently: the Attorney General's Public Access Counselor Unit, created in 2025, with its thirty-day filing window — and the ten-business-day written notice of intent to sue a requester must give before going to district court. A letter that omits that notice sets the requester up to lose the round.
• The calendar closes the day after Thanksgiving by statute, and the Christmas holiday moves — in a year when Christmas falls on a Sunday there is no December 24 closure at all. Oklahoma also gives each employee one floating personal holiday, spendable on Good Friday, Juneteenth, Statehood Day, Indigenous Peoples' Day or a birthday — an individual day off, not an office closure, so it stays out of the deadline math.

Oregon runs two clocks, and missing the second one is what opens the door to an appeal:

• Five business days to acknowledge the request, then fifteen business days to complete it or give a reasoned completion date — both tracked separately, because a requester may appeal to the district attorney once the fifteen days pass
• Attorney time spent reviewing and redacting is chargeable; attorney time spent researching whether something is exempt is not, and the fee screen separates the two rather than lumping them as legal time
• Oregon bars any fee over $25 unless you sent a written estimate and the requester agreed to it — so the estimate is a required step in the workflow, not an optional courtesy
• A request goes quiet for sixty days after a fee notice and Oregon closes it by operation of law; the app counts those days for you instead of leaving a request open forever

Five business days, and an extension that is measured in the other kind of day:

• Five business days. Pennsylvania's thirty-day extension is calendar days, so no business-day figure is stated — converting it would overstate your time by nearly two weeks
• No staff-time charges: the Right-to-Know fee schedule does not allow them
• Denial letters carry the Office of Open Records appeal and its fifteen-business-day window
• Setup covers what Pennsylvania makes you post: your open-records officer, the OOR's contact details, and accepting the OOR's own form

Rhode Island ties money directly to the clock — miss the deadline and you lose the right to charge for the work you did:

• Ten business days, extendable by twenty more for good cause — thirty in total, not twenty. The extension has to be asserted in writing inside the original ten, so it is a dated action on the request rather than a decision made quietly at day eleven
• Missing the ten days is a denial by operation of law, and it waives every copying and search fee. That is the single most expensive fact in Rhode Island records work, so the app treats day ten as a hard edge. The one carve-out is that production is not late while you are waiting on payment the requester already owes you
• You may not ask why, and you may not require personal information about the requester as a condition of filling the request — the strongest protection for anonymous requests in the country. The Rhode Island form asks for less than most states' on purpose
• Copies run 15 cents a page and staff time is capped at $15 an hour with the first hour free — and Rhode Island expressly puts redaction inside that chargeable hour, which several neighbouring states do not. The fee card is state-specific rather than templated
• State offices do not close for Presidents' Day, even though the holiday statute lists it — the statute is a legal-holiday list, not the closure calendar. Cities differ here, so the per-agency holiday override matters more in Rhode Island than anywhere else
• Three appeal routes, none of them mandatory: the chief administrative officer of this body, who owes a final answer in ten business days; the Attorney General, who investigates and can litigate for the requester; or straight to Superior Court. A court finding wrongful denial must order the records released free and award the requester's fees

South Carolina splits the clock in two, and the second half is the one offices forget:

• Ten business days to determine whether the records will be produced — then a separate window to actually produce them. Both are tracked, because meeting the first and missing the second is still a violation
• The deposit rule is applied where the statute puts it: up to a quarter of the estimated cost, requested before the work starts
• The South Carolina holiday calendar handles the Christmas block — the state closes 24, 25 and 26 December — and knows the state works Columbus Day and Juneteenth
• Fee rules quoted to requesters on the form, with the search-and-redaction time South Carolina allows tracked per request

South Dakota is the one state where your own estimate becomes binding — miss the date you gave and, without a revised one, the request counts as denied:

• Ten business days from the written request, and day ten is an acknowledge clock rather than a production one. Three ways to satisfy it: hand over the records on payment of fees, deny in writing citing the specific exemption, or acknowledge and give an estimate of how long it will take
• Two deemed-denial triggers, and the second is unique in the country. Missing the ten days denies the request — and so does missing the estimate you gave yourself without issuing a revised one. So a South Dakota request runs two countdowns, the statutory one and your own, and “send a revised date” is a first-class action that resets the second and averts the denial
• The date you give the requester is recorded as a dated commitment with its reason, and a revision is logged as its own event carrying the date it replaced — because that is exactly what a dispute over a deemed denial would turn on
• Copy prices go by size — 25¢ letter or legal, 50¢ for 11×17, $3.00 above that — or the actual cost, whichever is larger. Read that clause carefully: for oversize documents the published schedule is a floor rather than a cap, and a fee card presenting $3.00 as the maximum would be wrong
• The first hour of staff time is free, and fees can be waived where that would be in the public interest — a real discretionary waiver, so the form offers the requester a place to make the case
• The denial and appeal letters are not published yet. A 2026 act amended the foundational section of the open records chapter and its enrolled text could not be obtained from any reachable source, which leaves the appeal window and the public-record-officer designation unconfirmed. Rather than print an appeal deadline that might be wrong in the one letter where being wrong costs a requester their remedy, South Dakota ships without those templates until the text is read

Seven business days, and an October that is a working month:

• Seven business days
• Tennessee moves Columbus Day to the Friday after Thanksgiving, so October stays open and that Friday does not — the deadline math follows the state, not the federal calendar
• The citizenship question from the Office of Open Records Counsel's form is on the request form as a question your staff answer, never an automatic denial
• Setup covers adopting the written public records policy and naming your Public Records Request Coordinator

Ten business days — and when your office asks to withhold something, the Attorney General rules on it. The parts of the PIA that generate paperwork are generated for you:

• The $40 itemized-estimate workflow is built in: the written, itemized statement of estimated charges, the requester's 10-business-day window to respond in writing, the automatic-withdrawal rule, and the 20% variance guard
• Cost rules from the AG's fee schedule are preloaded — and enforced: staff time bills at the $15/hour cap even if your configured rate is higher, with the 50-page labor bar applied
• The written notices Texas added for requests received on or after September 1, 2025 — the no-responsive-records notice and the previous-determination notice — are generated, not drafted from scratch
• The Texas holiday calendar is loaded, including the state-only days like Texas Independence Day, San Jacinto Day, and LBJ Day, and setup asks your office to confirm which ones it actually closes for
• Your setup checklist covers the one-time duties: the required public-records sign and designating where requests must be sent

Utah rebuilt its appeal ladder in 2025, and any template still naming the old State Records Committee is now wrong:

• Ten business days to approve, deny, or otherwise respond — and five where a requester shows the records benefit the public rather than themselves, with a duty to say so within five days if you decline to expedite
• Denial letters carry the current route: your chief administrative officer within thirty days, then the Government Records Office director, then district court. 2025’s SB 277 abolished the State Records Committee
• Staff time bills at the wage of the lowest-paid person who can do the work, with the first fifteen minutes free — and the app does not print a per-page figure, because Utah’s statute does not carry one
• Extraordinary circumstances buy more time in Utah, but the allowance depends on which circumstance applies, so the app declines to state a length until your office sets one rather than quoting a number the statute does not give
• Pioneer Day on 24 July is in the deadline math, and Utah works Good Friday

Vermont’s three business days are not an acknowledgment window — they are the deadline to produce the records or to certify in writing why you are not:

• Three business days from the day the request arrives, met by producing the records or by certifying in writing that they are exempt, that they do not exist, or that they are in active use or storage with a date and hour set within one calendar week. All four outcomes are on the screen, because Vermont does not accept a bare acknowledgement
• The extension ceiling is ten business days from receipt, not ten additional days. An office carrying a thirteen-day worst case in its head is counting Vermont wrong, and the countdown here will not
• Miss the clock and Vermont deems the request denied and deems the requester’s administrative remedies exhausted — they can file in Superior Court with no further step, so the overdue warning says exactly that instead of nagging politely
• Inspecting records is free, including the staff time spent redacting so that inspection is possible — the Vermont Supreme Court settled that in 2019, and the fee screen branches on inspect versus copy rather than billing the same work either way
• Staff time on a copy request bills only past the first 30 minutes, and until your selectboard adopts its own charges at a public hearing the Secretary of State’s schedule is your town’s by law — 5¢ a single-sided page, 9¢ a double-sided page
• Bennington Battle Day is fixed to August 16, not the third Monday in August, and Town Meeting Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day are in the business-day math — with your own closure days on top, because no Vermont statute sets a municipal clerk’s hours

Five working days, a deposit threshold with a number in it, and a holiday nearly every calendar misses:

• Five working days, with VFOIA's seven additional working days
• Election Day has been a Virginia legal holiday every year since 2020, odd years included. Most calendars still miss it; this one does not
• The deposit rule is applied where the statute puts it — only once charges are likely to exceed $200
• Setup covers the two duties Virginia offices most often overlook: designating and training a FOIA officer, and publishing the rights-and-responsibilities notice

Washington has the most expensive silence in the country — penalties run up to $100 a day for improper withholding — so the five-day response is treated as the hard edge it is:

• Five business days to produce the records, point to them on your website, acknowledge with a reasonable time estimate, or ask for clarification — all four are valid responses under §42.56.520, and the app tracks which one you gave
• Installment production is built in, because Washington expects large requests to arrive in instalments rather than as one late delivery
• No charge for locating or preparing records — Washington bars search and retrieval labour outright. Copies default to 15¢ a page where an office has not calculated actual cost, with the electronic rates and the $2 flat-fee option built in
• Washington’s one-year records-dispute window is reflected in the retention settings, so source files are not cleared while a challenge is still possible

Five business days, no extension clause anywhere in the statute, and a fee rule that bars charging for staff time:

• Five business days, and West Virginia has no extension — not for good cause, not by written notice, not by agreement — so the app never offers you one. What day five owes is an answer, not the records: copies, a time and place to come inspect, or a written denial with reasons.
• A 2025 bill would have moved the deadline to fourteen days and allowed a search fee. It passed both chambers and then died at the end of the session, so a fourteen-day figure you find online comes from that bill and not from the code. The clock here is five.
• No staff-time charges at all. West Virginia bars any fee figured on a man-hour basis — added in 2015 to overturn a court ruling that had allowed it — so there is no search fee, no retrieval fee, and no charge for the hours spent reviewing and blacking out material. The fee screen carries the actual cost of the copies and nothing else.
• West Virginia Day and Lincoln’s Day — the day after Thanksgiving — are on the state’s legal-holiday list, and a Saturday holiday shifts backwards to the Friday before, which puts West Virginia Day 2026 on Friday 19 June, not Monday the 22nd. Juneteenth is not on that list. Election days and the Governor’s proclaimed half days are counted here as working days, which is the shorter-deadline side of a question nothing in the code or the Attorney General’s handbook answers.
• Every FOIA request has to be reported to the Secretary of State’s public database — what was asked, how you answered, how long it took, and what you charged. Those four are already in the request file; the records themselves never go.
• A custodian who willfully violates West Virginia FOIA faces a misdemeanor: a fine of $200 to $1,000 and up to twenty days in jail. West Virginia is one of the few states that puts the clerk personally on the hook, so treat the five-day count as a hard date and route requests to the custodian the day they arrive.

Wisconsin sets no number of days, and its fee rules are narrower than most offices assume — starting with the hours your staff spends blacking out confidential information, which are never billable:

• No fixed deadline — and none invented. Wisconsin requires your office to fill or deny a request “as soon as practicable and without delay,” so every request here keeps a dated record of what was done and when. Any day count you have seen quoted for Wisconsin comes from compliance guidance, not from the statute.
• Redaction time is not billable in Wisconsin. Wisconsin's courts settled that in 2012: the hours spent removing information the office is not allowed to release are the office's own cost, no matter how many pages it takes.
• Wisconsin allows charges for exactly four things — copying and transcription, photographing, locating records, and postage — each capped at what the work actually costs the office, with no markup. Locating is free unless that work alone reaches $50, payment can be demanded up front only once the total tops $5, and inspection at the office costs nothing.
• Wisconsin's holiday calendar does not look like anyone else's: state offices close Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve but work Presidents' Day, Good Friday, Columbus Day, and the day after Thanksgiving. Nine closures are confirmed, Juneteenth and Veterans Day were proposed as additions, and municipal practice varies — so setup has you confirm the days your own office actually closes.
• Wisconsin has no records appeal board, so a written denial has to carry what the statute requires: the reasons for the denial, and notice that it can be reviewed by mandamus in circuit court or by asking the attorney general or a district attorney to act. Denial letters generated here come with that language already in them.
• A request cannot be refused because the requester will not give a name or say why they want the records, so contact details stay optional on your form. Setup also walks you through the public records notice Wisconsin requires every authority to post — the custodian's name, when and where records can be seen, the costs, and how to ask.

Since 2003 a Wyoming office has not been allowed to charge a cent for records until the charge itself was adopted by ordinance, resolution, rule, or other like authority — which makes the fee schedule, not the deadline, the first thing to fix here:

• Two clocks, and Wyoming mixes the day types on purpose: seven business days to tell a requester the records are in storage, in active use, or in someone else’s hands, and thirty calendar days to release — both counted from the date the request was acknowledged, so acknowledgment is a dated step here rather than a courtesy. Those are the 2019 numbers and they still are: the shorter deadlines written up during the 2026 session failed introduction.
• There is no fixed extension to take. Past thirty days Wyoming wants good cause and a release date the requester agrees to, and the app records that agreed date — missing it is one of the things a district court petition turns on. Good cause is defined, and delay in payment of fees is one of the items named in the definition.
• No statutory page rate and no free page allowance, so every number on your fee screen comes from the schedule your board or council adopted — not from a state agency table, and not from one we picked for you.
• Fee waivers belong to the public records ombudsman, who can also set a release timeline, so a waiver ask is something your office routes rather than settles at the counter. The penalty for a knowing or intentional violation runs up to $750, and only the attorney general or the county attorney can bring it.
• Wyoming asks for a filing no other state here does: your designated public records person, with a business email and mailing address, is filed with the Department of Administration and Information and published on the state website. Your setup checklist walks it, and it is checkable — your office is on that published list or it is not.
• Nine closure days, not eleven: no Columbus Day, no Juneteenth, and December 10 — Wyoming Day — is a commemoration rather than a closure. January is Martin Luther King, Jr. / Wyoming Equality Day, February is Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, and counties and cities close on days the state does not, so your own calendar overrides the seeded one.