The 552.301 Deadline: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What Happens If You Miss It

Of all the ways a government body can lose an open records dispute, missing a deadline is the most avoidable and one of the most common. The 552.301 deadline is not complicated. But it has enough wrinkles that getting it wrong is easier than it should be, and the consequences are serious enough to warrant understanding it completely.

Two deadlines, not one

Most people who have dealt with the PIA know there is a deadline for responding to open records requests. What is less commonly understood is that Section 552.301 actually creates two distinct deadlines, with two distinct purposes.

The 10-day deadline is a notice requirement. Within ten business days of receiving a written request, a government body that intends to withhold any responsive information must notify the Office of the Attorney General that it is seeking a decision, and identify specifically the exceptions it believes apply.

The 15-day deadline is a submission requirement. Within fifteen business days of receiving the request, the government body must submit the actual request, its written arguments, and the responsive information or a representative sample to the ORD for review.

Both deadlines run from the same starting point: the date the request was received. They are not sequential. You do not get fifteen days after the ten-day notice. The clock on both starts the moment the request lands.

What counts as a business day

The PIA defines business days specifically, and the definition matters more than people expect.

Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays, and state holidays do not count. Neither do optional holidays, if the public information officer observes them. If a holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday and the government body observes it on the adjacent Friday or Monday, that day does not count either.

Beyond holidays, a government body may designate up to ten non-business days per calendar year, days when the administrative offices are closed or operating with minimum staffing. For independent school districts, that designation must be made by the board of trustees. For other government bodies, it must be made by the executive director or chief administrative officer. These designated days do not count toward the deadline, but the government body needs to inform the ORD of them when submitting its brief.

The practical implication: your ten and fifteen business day windows may be longer in calendar terms than they appear, depending on when the request arrives and what holidays or designated days fall within it. Know your calendar before you start counting.

When does the clock actually start?

The default rule is straightforward. The clock starts on the day you receive the request. If the request arrives after business hours or on a weekend, it is treated as received on the next business day. A request that hits your inbox at 6:00 PM on a Friday does not start the clock until Monday morning.

For requests received by mail, there is a specific provision worth knowing. If a government body cannot establish the actual date it received a mailed request, Section 552.301(a-1) treats the request as received on the third business day after the postmark date.

There is also a legitimate mechanism for resetting the clock entirely: clarification. If a request is genuinely ambiguous or overbroad, a government body may ask the requestor to clarify the scope. When a proper clarification is sought and the requestor responds, the ten and fifteen business day deadlines restart from the date of the clarification response.

Two important limits on this. First, the clarification request has to be proper. It must be about defining or narrowing the scope of the request, not about discouraging the requestor or confirming they really want the information. "Are you sure you want all of this?" is not a proper clarification. "Does your request include records from a specific date range?" might be. Improper clarification requests do not pause the clock.

Second, if the requestor does not respond to a proper clarification request within 60 days, the request is considered withdrawn.

How to submit

Section 552.3031, added by the 88th Legislature, requires certain government bodies to use the AG's electronic filing system when seeking an open records decision. The requirement applies unless the government body has fewer than 16 full-time employees, is located in a county with a population under 150,000, or the volume or format of the responsive information makes electronic filing impractical or impossible.

For government bodies that do not use the electronic filing system, submissions sent by mail are considered timely if they are postmarked by the deadline. The ORD checks postmarks, not receipt dates.

A note on the 10-day brief: specificity is now required

This is recent and worth flagging. Government bodies used to submit what the ORD calls a "shotgun letter" for their 10-day brief, raising every exception in the PIA and then arguing the applicable ones in the 15-day brief. The ORD has stopped accepting this practice. The 10-day brief must now specifically identify the exceptions the government body actually intends to argue. Broad, catch-all exception lists are no longer sufficient.

This raises the stakes on the 10-day brief considerably. You need to know going into it which exceptions you are relying on, not as a placeholder, but as a considered legal position.

What happens if you miss the deadlines

Missing either the 10-day notice deadline or the 15-day submission deadline constitutes a violation of Section 552.301, and the consequences are the same regardless of which one you miss.

What happens next depends on how far the failure goes. If a government body misses the deadlines and never submits the information at all, the requested information is presumed public and must be released. The same result follows if a government body submits arguments but never submits the actual information. Arguments without the records are not enough.

What a 552.301 violation costs is the ability to raise discretionary exceptions. Those arguments are foreclosed once the deadline passes. What the ORD will still consider even after a violation are mandatory exceptions and third-party interests, situations where the law requires withholding regardless of the government body's procedural missteps, or where a third party has raised confidentiality arguments about their own information. A late submission is not worthless, but it closes doors that a timely one would have left open.

The practical implication

The 552.301 deadline is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the mechanism by which a government body preserves its right to make arguments. Miss it, and you lose most of them.

The government bodies that handle this well treat the deadline as the first thing they track when a request arrives, not the last. They know what counts as a business day, they know what proper clarification looks like, and they know which exceptions they are raising before they send the 10-day notice.

If you are managing open records requests in-house, put the deadline on your calendar the day the request comes in. Count the business days carefully. And if the request is one where the arguments are genuinely complex, the deadline is the reason not to wait.