Start here, because it’s the most common stale citation in Minnesota practice: Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.05 was abrogated effective January 1, 2020. The revisor’s entry for it reads, in its entirety, “6.05 [Abrogated].” The three-day extension for service by U.S. Mail didn’t disappear. It moved. The Advisory Committee said so in one sentence: “Rule 6.05 is abrogated only because its text is now incorporated in Rule 6.01(e).”
If a brief, a form, a checklist, or a treatise in your office cites Rule 6.05, nobody’s touched that document since 2019, and you should re-check everything else it says about timing too. The 2020 package rewrote how Minnesota counts.
How do you count a period stated in days?
Rule 6.01(a)(1) gives three steps, and they apply “in computing any time period specified in these rules, in any local rule or court order, or in any statute that does not specify a method of computing time”:
(A) exclude the day of the event that triggers the period; (B) count every day, including intermediate Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays; and (C) include the last day of the period, but if the last day is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the period continues to run until the end of the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday.
Subparagraph (B) is the 2020 change, and the Advisory Committee flagged it as “[t]he most important change”: Rule 6.01(a)(1)(B) “establishes ‘a day is a day’ - all days during a period under the rules, regardless of length, are included, including weekends and legal holidays.” Minnesota tracked the federal amendments here on purpose, and the committee said the goal was “to create substantial similarity between ‘state days’ and ‘federal days.’” It also noted the gap that’s left: “Minnesota and the federal government recognize slightly different legal holidays.”
Short periods are the exception, and it’s a narrow one. Rule 6.01(a)(2): “Only if expressly so provided by any other rule or statute, a time period that is less than 7 days may exclude intermediate Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays.” Even for a 3-day or 5-day period, the default is that you count every day. The weekends come out only where some other rule or statute says so in so many words.
Periods stated in hours run on their own track under 6.01(a)(3). You start counting the moment the triggering event happens, you count every hour, weekends and holidays included, and if the period would end on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, it “continues to run until the same time on the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday.”
When does the last day actually end?
Rule 6.01(b) answers that, and the answer splits in two:
Unless a different time is set by a statute, local rule, or court order, the last day ends: (1) for electronic filing, at 11:59 p.m. local Minnesota time; and (2) for filing by other means, when the Court Administrator’s office is scheduled to close.
Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.03(c) says the same thing from the e-filing side. In practice, if you’re a Registered User in the E-Filing System (and nearly every Minnesota attorney is), your day runs to midnight. See e-filing and e-service under Rule 14.
The paper path has a relief valve. Under Rule 6.01(a)(4), unless the court orders otherwise, if the court administrator’s office is inaccessible on the last day for filing or service under 6.01(a)(1), the time for filing is extended to the first accessible day that isn’t a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday. If the office is inaccessible during the last hour, the extension runs to the same time on the first such accessible day. Electronic filing failures work differently: relief comes under Minn. R. Civ. P. 5.02(d) and Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(c), on motion.
Which days are legal holidays?
Rule 6.01(d) defines the term by cross-reference, plus a second clause that’s easy to miss:
As used in this rule and in Rule 77(c), “legal holiday” includes any holiday designated in Minnesota Statutes, section 645.44, subdivision 5, as a holiday for the state or any statewide branch of government and any day that the U.S. mail does not operate.
Minn. Stat. § 645.44, subd. 5(a), designates eleven: New Year’s Day, January 1; Martin Luther King’s Birthday, the third Monday in January; Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthday, the third Monday in February; Memorial Day, the last Monday in May; Juneteenth, June 19; Independence Day, July 4; Labor Day, the first Monday in September; Indigenous Peoples Day, the second Monday in October; Veterans Day, November 11; Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday in November; and Christmas Day, December 25.
Five of those sit on fixed calendar dates, and the same paragraph moves them around: when New Year’s Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Veterans Day, or Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, the following day is the holiday, and when any of those five falls on a Saturday, the preceding day is the holiday.
Two wrinkles matter for counting. The first is the branch options. Under § 645.44, subd. 5(a), for the executive branch of the State of Minnesota, “holiday” also includes the Friday after Thanksgiving but doesn’t include Indigenous Peoples Day, and other branches of state government and political subdivisions “shall have the option of determining whether Indigenous Peoples Day and the Friday after Thanksgiving shall be holidays.” Because Rule 6.01(d) sweeps in any day designated as a holiday “for the state or any statewide branch of government” (emphasis added), those branch-by-branch choices aren’t academic. They can change whether a given late-November Friday is a legal holiday when you compute. The judicial branch publishes its own observed-holiday schedule on mncourts.gov. Check it there for a specific year rather than relying on this paragraph.
The second is the mail clause. The phrase “any day that the U.S. mail does not operate” is its own, independent basis. It makes Sundays and federal postal holidays legal holidays for Rule 6 purposes even where § 645.44 wouldn’t.
Do you still add three days for service by mail — and what about e-service?
Yes for U.S. Mail. No for e-service. Rule 6.01(e), the relocated former 6.05, reads:
Whenever a party has the right or is required to do some act or take some proceedings within a prescribed period after the service of a notice or other document upon the party, and the notice or document is served upon the party by United States Mail, 3 days shall be added to the prescribed period.
If service is made by any means other than United States Mail and accomplished after 5:00 p.m. local Minnesota time on the day of service, 1 additional day shall be added to the prescribed period.
Here’s how that plays out.
Three days attach to U.S. Mail and nothing else. The rule says “United States Mail.” The Advisory Committee spelled it out when the predecessor rule was tightened in 2007: the rule “explicitly allows three additional days only for service by U.S. mail; the use of any other delivery or courier service does not constitute ‘U.S. mail,’ and therefore does not qualify for additional time.” FedEx isn’t mail. UPS isn’t mail. Hand delivery isn’t mail.
E-service through the court’s system gets no three days. Service through the E-Filing System is complete when the transmission is complete (Minn. R. Civ. P. 5.02(c); Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.03(e)), and the first paragraph of 6.01(e) is limited to United States Mail. What e-service can get you is the second paragraph’s single day, and only where the transmission was completed after 5:00 p.m. local Minnesota time.
The 5:00 p.m. rule cuts both ways. Service after 5:00 p.m. is still timely service that day. It just adds a day to the responding party’s period. The committee’s stated purpose was “to discourage the unseemly practices of sliding a ‘service’ under the door of opposing counsel or sending a facsimile transmission after the close of business and asserting timely service.” Watch the “local Minnesota time” qualifier. It went in during 2015 precisely because e-service can come from anywhere.
Add first, then count. The text says three days “shall be added to the prescribed period,” which makes the addition a change to the period itself, not a tail you tack on afterward. A 21-day answer period after service by U.S. Mail is a 24-day period: exclude the day of service, count 24 days including weekends and holidays, and if day 24 is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, run to the end of the next day that isn’t.
How do you count backward from a hearing?
Rule 6.01(c) supplies the direction: “The ‘next day’ is determined by continuing to count forward when the period is measured after an event and backward when measured before an event.” The Advisory Committee’s 2019 comment spells out what that means: “when counting backwards from an event, and the last day falls on a weekend or holiday, the counting continues to the next earlier date that is not a weekend or holiday.”
Earlier, not later. If you roll a backward-counted deadline forward onto the next Monday out of forward-counting habit, you’ve served late.
Backward counting is where most Minnesota motion deadlines live, and the numbers aren’t in Rule 6. Rule 6.04 sends you elsewhere: “The deadlines for service and filing of motions, as well as affidavits and other documents in support of or responding to motions, are governed by the Minnesota General Rules of Practice.” That’s Rule 115. One backward-counted floor does sit in the civil rules: Minn. R. Civ. P. 56.02, which requires compliance with Gen. R. Prac. 115.03 “provided that in no event shall the motion be served less than 14 days before the time fixed for the hearing,” and which separately bars filing a summary judgment motion “more than 30 days after the close of all discovery” unless the court orders otherwise.
What can the court enlarge, and what can it not?
Rule 6.02 gives you two paths and one list of exclusions:
When by statute, by these rules, by a notice given thereunder, or by order of court an act is required or allowed to be done at or within a specified time, the court for cause shown may, at any time in its discretion, (1) with or without motion or notice order the period enlarged if request therefor is made before the expiration of the period originally prescribed or as extended by a previous order, or (2) upon motion made after the expiration of the specified period permit the act to be done where the failure to act was the result of excusable neglect; but it may not extend the time for taking any action under Rules 4.043, 59.03, 59.05, and 60.02 except to the extent and under the conditions stated in them.
Before the period runs out, the standard is cause shown, and the court may act with or without a motion or notice. After it runs out, you need a motion and excusable neglect. That’s a much harder showing, and it gets harder still when you have to explain why you didn’t ask sooner.
There are four excluded periods, and they’re worth memorizing because they’re the ones people keep trying to stretch: Rule 4.043 (permission to defend after service by publication), Rule 59.03 (the 30 days to serve a notice of motion for a new trial and the 60 days within which it must be heard), Rule 59.05 (the 14 days in which the court may order a new trial on its own initiative), and Rule 60.02 (relief from a judgment or order). The exclusion isn’t absolute. The court may extend “to the extent and under the conditions stated in them” — so for any of the four, the answer is inside that rule, not inside Rule 6.02. What the Rule 60.02 limits mean for a client is covered in vacating a Minnesota default judgment.
Two related points. Minn. R. Civ. P. 5.04(a)’s one-year filing deadline isn’t on the Rule 6.02 exclusion list, but 5.04(a) supplies its own extension mechanism, and this article takes no position on how the two interact. See the one-year filing deadline. And Rule 6.03 removes an old trap: “The continued existence or the expiration of a term of court does not affect or limit the period of time provided for the taking of any action or proceeding, or affect the power of the court to act or take any proceeding in any action which has been pending before it.”
One last warning, and it belongs on every timing article. Once a judge is assigned, that judge’s standing order and practice pointers frequently set requirements the rules don’t: earlier submission dates, chambers-copy deadlines, different courtesy-copy expectations. They’re published on each judicial district’s page at mncourts.gov. Read them before you count anything backward from a hearing date.
Madgett Law, LLC associates with lawyers from other states on Minnesota matters. If you want a deadline computation checked against Minnesota’s rules before you rely on it, send us a message.
Sources: Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.01(a)(1)(A)–(C), 6.01(a)(2), 6.01(a)(3), 6.01(a)(4), 6.01(b)(1)–(2), 6.01(c), 6.01(d), 6.01(e); Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.02, 6.03, 6.04; Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.05 [Abrogated] (abrogated effective January 1, 2020); Advisory Committee Comments to Rule 6 — 1996 Amendment, 2007 Amendment, and 2019 Amendments; Minn. R. Civ. P. 5.02(c), 5.02(d); Minn. R. Civ. P. 5.04(a); Minn. R. Civ. P. 56.02; Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(c), 14.03(c), 14.03(e); Minn. Stat. § 645.44, subd. 5(a). Rule text: the Minnesota Revisor of Statutes court rules database; statutory text: the Revisor’s statutes database; August 10, 2026. Minnesota Judicial Branch, Court Holidays (mncourts.gov). This article is general information about Minnesota civil procedure for other lawyers, not legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney–client relationship; no outcome is promised or implied.