Tools & Calculators
Ticket Response Deadline Calculator
A simple way to work out how much time remains to respond to an Ontario traffic ticket. The interactive version is still in development — here’s how it will work, and the general deadline you need to know right now.
What this tool will do
Once live, the Ticket Response Deadline Calculator will let you enter the date you received a ticket and get back the date your response is due, along with a short reminder of what each response option generally involves. It will handle the basic date math for you, so you don’t have to count fifteen days by hand on a calendar. It will not track your ticket for you, send reminders, or confirm receipt with the court — it will simply calculate a date based on what you enter, the same way you could do manually today.
The general deadline (in the meantime)
Ontario’s general rule is that you have 15 days from the date you receive a traffic ticket to respond to it. What “respond” means depends on the option you choose — it could mean mailing in a guilty plea with payment, requesting a meeting with a prosecutor, or requesting a trial. The 15-day window is the deadline to choose and act on one of those options, not a deadline to have your case fully resolved.
To use the general deadline manually until the calculator is live: take the date printed on your ticket (or the date you were served with it, if different), and count forward 15 days. If that date falls on a weekend or holiday, build in a small buffer and aim to act a day or two earlier rather than right at the edge, since mailing times and court office hours can affect when your response is actually received.
What happens after you respond
The deadline itself only governs when you need to act, not what you should choose to do. Ontario generally gives you a few different paths once you’ve decided to respond — paying the ticket as an admission of guilt, requesting a meeting with a prosecutor to discuss the charge, or requesting a trial to contest it — and each path has its own next steps and timelines after the initial 15-day window closes. Missing the 15-day deadline entirely does not make the ticket disappear; provincial offences courts generally have a process for tickets that go unanswered, which can lead to a conviction being entered without your input.
For a fuller walkthrough of what each response option involves and what tends to happen next, see our guide to the ticket response process.