Utah contract deadlines: the REPC clocks a deal runs on, from acceptance to settlement

Deadlines are the load-bearing dates in any purchase contract, but Utah’s earn a guide of their own because the state is unusually tidy in one respect and unusually easy to misread in another. Tidy: there is one contract, and its four load-bearing dates live in a single section. Easy to misread: those dates are entered as fixed calendar dates, not periods you count off, and the buyer’s escape hatch is contractual rather than statutory. An agent who arrives from a disclosure-rescission state and waits for a clock Utah never provides will wait past the only date that would have saved the deal.

The organizing idea for the whole page: in Utah the REPC is the clock. The statutes set the settlement machinery and one narrow disclosure duty, but the dates a transaction lives or dies on are the ones the parties wrote into Section 24. Read the contract, count from Acceptance, and know which date is the real off-ramp.

One contract, four dates, one paragraph. Utah does not run on competing form families. Licensees are required to use the REPC, the state-approved residential contract published by the Utah Association of REALTORS® and approved by the Real Estate Commission. Its Section 24 holds the four deadlines that structure the deal: Seller Disclosure, Due Diligence, Financing & Appraisal, and Settlement. Learn that one paragraph and you know where a Utah deal keeps its time.

Dates, not counted-off periods. This is the habit that trips agents trained elsewhere. Section 24 is filled in with actual calendar dates, so the contract does not hand you a period to count off for due diligence; it names the day. The spacing between those dates is negotiated deal by deal, not fixed by statute, so the date written on the page is what governs — read it rather than assume a customary window.

The exit is contractual, and that is the whole trap. In Utah the buyer’s way out is the Due Diligence Deadline, not a statutory rescission right triggered by a late disclosure. There is no such statutory window here. An out-of-state agent expecting one will let the only real off-ramp pass while watching for a clock that does not exist, which is why this page leads with it rather than burying it.

A December 2024 refresh you should confirm you are on. As of mid-2026 the current form is the REPC effective December 4, 2024, a post-NAR-settlement update that moved buyer-broker compensation into Section 4.3(e)/(f). It left the Section 24 deadline framework and the Section 7 disclosure list unchanged. The UAR and the Commission revise the form periodically, so confirm no newer version has superseded it before you count a single date from it.

Start with Section 24, because in Utah it is almost the whole schedule. Each date runs from Acceptance, which Section 23 defines as the moment an offer or counteroffer is signed and that signing is communicated to the other party. From there the contract counts calendar days, with performance due by 5:00 PM Mountain Time and time of the essence. Treat the descriptions below as the shape of each clock; the actual day lives in the blank on your deal.

Seller Disclosure Deadline (Section 24(a)). The date by which the seller delivers the Section 7 disclosures — the Seller’s Property Condition Disclosure under Section 7(a) and, for a home built before 1978, the federal lead-based paint disclosure under Section 7(b); confirm the current Section 7 list against the REPC. Read the next section closely on this point: the Property Condition Disclosure is a form the contract calls for, not a state-mandated one, and a late delivery does not open a statutory escape hatch. It feeds the buyer’s Due Diligence review instead.

Due Diligence Deadline (Section 24(b)). The date the whole deal pivots on, covered in full below. It is the buyer’s inspection and investigation window and the last day to cancel and recover the earnest money. Inspections ride this deadline rather than a separate contingency addendum, so the general mechanics of an inspection window still apply; see the home inspection contingency guide for the shape of it.

Financing & Appraisal Deadline (Section 24(c)). The date tied to the buyer’s loan approval and the appraisal. A buyer still waiting on the lender past this date may hold a different contract than they assume, which is why the date on the page matters more than the lender’s informal timeline. The state-neutral version lives in financing and appraisal contingencies.

Settlement Deadline (Section 24(d)). The target close. Under Section 3, Settlement is complete once the parties have signed and delivered the documents and funds to the escrow/closing office. What happens next, Recording and disbursement, is governed by the form and Utah’s Good Funds rules rather than a negotiated blank, and it gets its own treatment below.

Everything above is a date the parties negotiate. This section is about the one that functions as the buyer’s exit, and about the statutory ground it sits on, which looks different from the disclosure-driven regimes on the East Coast.

This is Utah’s signature mechanism. The Due Diligence period runs from Acceptance to the fixed date in Section 24(b). During it the buyer inspects and investigates the property. On or before that date the buyer has to choose, and Section 8.1(b) makes the choice binary: cancel the REPC in writing and recover the earnest money, or resolve objections and proceed. Doing neither is itself a decision.

Utah is a caveat-emptor state with one narrow statutory disclosure. The only transaction disclosure Utah statute compels is methamphetamine contamination, and only where the owner has actual knowledge the property is currently contaminated (Utah Code Section 57-27-201). Beyond that, Utah is buyer-beware, subject to a common-law duty to disclose known material or latent defects that a reasonable inspection would not reveal. The Seller’s Property Condition Disclosure that most deals include is a UAR contract form the REPC calls for in Section 7, not a form the state requires.

So there is no late-disclosure escape hatch. In several other states, a seller who delivers disclosures after ratification hands the buyer a statutory termination right that runs from delivery. Utah has no equivalent. If Section 7 disclosures arrive late or read badly, the buyer’s remedy is the Due Diligence Deadline, not a separate statutory window. That is the single most important thing to carry across a state line into a Utah deal, and the reason an agent should never quote a client a “disclosure rescission period” here. Verify the current Act text, since the statute can be amended.

Utah closes through title/escrow, not an attorney. Settlement and disbursement are handled by an escrow/closing office, typically the title company that issued the title commitment, and an attorney is optional rather than required. Under Section 3, Settlement is complete by the Settlement Deadline once documents and funds reach the escrow/closing office, and Closing (loan proceeds delivered plus Recording) must be completed no later than four calendar days after Settlement. That four-day gap between Settlement and Recording surprises agents from same-day-record states, so plan the file around it. For the mechanics of the office that runs this step, see title and escrow explained.

Good Funds decides when money can move. Utah’s Good Funds framework under the Title 31A Insurance Code requires the settlement agent to have collected and cleared funds before disbursing, which increasingly means wired funds at closing rather than a check that has not settled. Treat the precise Good Funds subsection as approximate and spot-check it against the current statute before citing it, since these provisions are amended.

Federal law sets two more clocks the REPC never touches, and because they come from Washington rather than the Commission, they are the only deadlines on this page that carry no Utah-specific hedge. On most residential mortgages the Closing Disclosure has to be in the borrower’s hands at least three business days before closing — the federal TRID rule — and any home built before 1978 triggers the federal lead-based paint disclosure. Both hold in every state, Utah included, which is why they need no qualifier here. The three-day rule gets its own fuller treatment in the Closing Disclosure 3-day rule.

The REPC counts one way, and it is worth memorizing. Section 24 deadlines run in calendar days from Acceptance, counted from the day after the triggering event, with performance due by 5:00 PM Mountain Time and time of the essence under Section 21. Because the dates are filled in as actual calendar dates, most of the counting is done when the contract is written; the risk is entering the wrong date, not miscounting later.

Do not assume a weekend rollover. A widely repeated bit of agent lore says a REPC deadline landing on a weekend or holiday rolls to the next business day. The verified form sets fixed, time-of-the-essence dates and does not spell out that rollover, so treat the printed date as a hard stop and confirm the rule against the current REPC before you rely on it. When a statutory clock is involved — such as Good Funds disbursement timing — count the statute’s way rather than the contract’s; the four-day recording window, by contrast, is a REPC term. A deadline calculator built for the counting conventions is cheap insurance against being a day off on the date that bites.

Put it together and a clean Utah file is disciplined about two things: the four Section 24 dates counted correctly from Acceptance, and a clear-eyed understanding that the Due Diligence Deadline is the buyer’s exit with no statutory rescission clock behind it. The file that misses in Utah is usually the one that treated a late seller disclosure as opening a fresh termination window, or let the Due Diligence date pass while waiting for a protection the state does not grant. For the state-neutral version of all this, the deadlines that decide a deal covers the mechanics a Utah file inherits.

Ratifyly approaches a state like Utah with a purpose-built rule pack rather than a generic template, and it reads the document itself rather than depending on a single board’s form. You forward the paperwork the way you would send it to a coordinator; it reads every page, extracts the parties, the price, and the dates, along with the counting convention each date runs on, and builds the transaction and its timeline from the documents rather than from data entry. When an amendment lands, it re-reads the file and re-flows the schedule, so a moved Settlement Deadline pulls the Recording window with it instead of leaving a stale date on the calendar.

A human approves every call. Nothing about a Utah deadline, whether the Due Diligence Deadline or the four-day Recording window after Settlement, should ship on the software’s word alone, so a compliance audit of the file surfaces the finding and a person rules on it. Everyone on the deal reads from one shared live timeline, and a clock escalates before it runs out rather than after. For a brokerage running Utah deals, that is the line between trusting the REPC clocks are handled and being able to prove it on demand. Ratifyly is in honest early access; you can follow the whole path a forwarded email takes on the how-it-works page, and see where it stands in Utah specifically.