Five business days to respond. One extension of up to ten more. And a distinction that trips up even experienced offices: responding to a request is not the same thing as fulfilling it.
When a written request for public records arrives, a Michigan public body has five business days to respond (MCL 15.235(2)). Business days: skip weekends, skip holidays. The counting convention used across the state is that day one is the first business day after the day of receipt.
Receipt itself has two rules worth memorizing. A request delivered by hand or by mail is received when it arrives. A request sent by email, fax, or other electronic transmission is not considered received until one business day after it was sent (MCL 15.235(1)). And if an emailed request lands in a spam or junk folder, it is not received until one day after the public body first becomes aware of it. The statute expects you to check that folder; the practical lesson is to route FOIA into an inbox someone actually watches.
A Friday-afternoon email illustrates all of it. Sent Friday, it is received Monday. Day one of the five is Tuesday, and the response is due the following Monday, assuming no holidays. Offices that count calendar days, or start the clock on the day of transmission, routinely think they have more or less time than they do.
The statute allows exactly one extension of not more than 10 business days (MCL 15.235(2)(d)). Two details matter. First, the extension notice is itself one of the four permitted responses, which means it must be issued inside the original five-day window. An extension claimed on day six is not an extension; it is a late response. Second, the notice must be in writing and must state the reasons for the extension and the date by which the public body will respond.
There is no second extension. After 5 plus 10 business days, the public body must have granted the request, denied it in writing, or granted in part and denied in part with the exemptions cited. Anything else is a violation with real consequences, covered below.
Here is the point that trips up requesters and public bodies alike. The 5-plus-10 deadline governs the response: the letter that grants, denies, or partially grants the request. It does not set a date by which the records themselves must be in the requester’s hands.
The Michigan Court of Appeals confirmed this in ACLU of Michigan v City of Grand Rapids (December 2025), declining to read a fixed production deadline into the Act. That is not a license to sit on records. The court left intact the requester’s ability to challenge unreasonable delay as an arbitrary and capricious refusal or delay under section 10, and when a public body requires a deposit, its fee-estimate response must include a best-efforts estimate of when the records will be ready (MCL 15.234(8)). Blowing well past your own estimate is exactly the fact pattern that draws lawsuits.
The operational takeaway for a clerk: treat the response deadline as absolute, put a realistic production estimate in writing, and then track your own estimate the way you track the statutory clock.
Michigan FOIA attaches money to missed deadlines in several places:
For a small office, the fee reduction is the one that bites quietly: a big request answered a week late can forfeit half the labor recovery the statute otherwise allows.
Dekree computes the response deadline the moment a request arrives, using holiday-aware business-day math anchored to your organization’s calendar, applies the email receipt rule automatically, tracks the one extension, and shows every open request’s remaining time on one screen. The response letters (acknowledgment, extension notice, grant, denial with exemption citations) are drafted for you; nothing sends without the clerk’s approval.
Log the request the day it arrives. Apply the receipt rule (electronic = next business day). Count five business days. If you need more time, send the written extension notice before the window closes, with reasons and a date. Respond with one of the four statutory responses by the deadline. Include a best-efforts production estimate with any deposit request. Then deliver on the estimate. Every step above leaves a paper trail; if a dispute ever comes, the office with the log wins. A free log template is in our FOIA request log guide, and the fee rules are covered in the fee guide.
Five business days after the request is received, under MCL 15.235(2). The public body may take one extension of not more than 10 additional business days by sending a written notice within the original five-day window that states the reasons and the date it will respond.
A request sent by email, fax, or other electronic transmission is not considered received until one business day after it was sent (MCL 15.235(1)). If the email landed in a spam or junk folder, it is not received until one day after the public body first becomes aware of it. Counting then begins on the first business day after receipt.
No fixed one. The 5-plus-10 business-day deadlines govern the response: granting, denying, granting in part, or extending. In late 2025 the Michigan Court of Appeals confirmed in ACLU of Michigan v City of Grand Rapids that the Act imposes no specific production deadline, while unreasonable delay can still be challenged as an arbitrary and capricious refusal or delay. Production should follow within a reasonable time, and a fee-estimate response must include a best-efforts time estimate.
Failure to respond can count as a final determination to deny the request under MCL 15.235(3) when the failure was willful and intentional, or when the request clearly identified itself as a FOIA request. That opens the door to an appeal or a lawsuit, and a late response can also cut the labor fees you may charge by 5% per day, up to 50%, under MCL 15.234(9).
This article is educational information for Michigan public bodies, current as of the publication date. It is not legal advice, and statutes and court decisions change. Confirm specifics with your municipal attorney. Statute text: legislature.mi.gov.