When a Federal Conviction Becomes Final

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

When does a federal conviction become final?

A federal conviction becomes final on the day direct review ends. If you appealed and lost but did not petition the Supreme Court, that is 90 days after the court of appeals entered judgment — not 90 days after the mandate. If you never appealed, it is 14 days after the district court entered judgment. If you petitioned for certiorari, it is the date the Supreme Court denied the petition or decided the case.

Key takeaways on when a conviction becomes final

• The finality date is not the sentencing date, the mandate date, or the date you arrived at your facility. It is the date direct review ended, and it depends entirely on what was filed after sentencing.
• Supreme Court Rule 13.3 says the 90 days run from entry of judgment “and not from the issuance date of the mandate.” In a federal criminal appeal the mandate issues about 21 days after judgment, so counting from it makes you roughly three weeks late.
• Clay v. United States, 537 U.S. 522 (2003) is the controlling authority for federal prisoners. The Supreme Court held that for § 2255 purposes, “a judgment of conviction becomes final when the time expires for filing a petition for certiorari contesting the appellate court’s affirmation of the conviction.”
• If you never filed a notice of appeal, finality arrives fast — 14 days after entry of judgment under Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(1)(A), which means your § 2255 year is already most of the way gone by the time you reach your designated facility.
• 28 U.S.C. § 2255(f)(1) gives you one year from that date. An untimely § 2255 motion is generally barred regardless of what it says.
• A timely petition for rehearing moves the start date; an untimely one filed after the mandate does not. Rule 13.3 draws that line expressly.

The four paths to finality

Everything on this page comes down to one question: what happened after the district court entered judgment? There are four answers, and each produces a different finality date. Find your path in the table, then read that path’s section for the detail and the authority.

Your path	What you did after judgment	Conviction becomes final on	Governing authority
Path 1	Never filed a notice of appeal	14 days after entry of the district court’s judgment	Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(1)(A); Moshier v. United States, 402 F.3d 116, 118 (2d Cir. 2005)
Path 2	Appealed, lost, filed no certiorari petition	90 days after the court of appeals entered judgment — not 90 days after the mandate	Sup. Ct. R. 13.1, 13.3; Clay v. United States, 537 U.S. 522, 525 (2003)
Path 2a	Appealed, lost, filed a timely petition for rehearing, rehearing denied	90 days after the order denying rehearing	Sup. Ct. R. 13.3
Path 3	Filed a certiorari petition; it was denied	The date certiorari was denied	Clay, 537 U.S. at 527
Path 4	Certiorari granted; the Supreme Court decided the case	The date of the Court’s decision, unless the case is remanded for further proceedings	Clay, 537 U.S. at 527

Table: the four paths to finality in a federal criminal case, with the controlling rule for each. “Entry of judgment” means the date the judgment is entered on the docket — Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(6) says so expressly for district court judgments.

Two notes before the detail. First, “final” here means final for collateral review — for filing a § 2255 motion. It does not mean the same thing as “final” in other contexts, and Clay is explicit about that distinction: a federal judgment is final for appellate-review and claim-preclusion purposes at a different point, “when the district court disassociates itself from the case, leaving nothing to be done at the court of first instance save execution of the judgment.” Second, none of these dates depend on when you learned about them. The clock is not tolled because nobody told you it was running.

Path 1: you never filed a notice of appeal

If no notice of appeal was filed, your conviction became final 14 days after the district court entered judgment. Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(1)(A) provides that “[i]n a criminal case, a defendant’s notice of appeal must be filed in the district court within 14 days after the later of: (i) the entry of either the judgment or the order being appealed; or (ii) the filing of the government’s notice of appeal.” The Second Circuit stated the resulting rule directly in Moshier v. United States, 402 F.3d 116, 118 (2d Cir. 2005): “for purposes of § 2255 motions, an unappealed federal criminal judgment becomes final when the time for filing a direct appeal expires.”

This is the path that surprises people most, and it is the one where the most time is already gone by the time anyone starts counting. Consider what the calendar actually looks like. Judgment is entered the day of sentencing or a day or two after. Fourteen days later — before you have been designated, before you have been transported, often before your lawyer has sent you the file — the conviction is final and the § 2255 year has begun. By the time you arrive at your facility, get access to the law library, and write your first letter asking about post-conviction options, two or three months of that year may be gone.

Three details matter here.

Entry, not sentencing. Rule 4(b)(6) provides that “[a] judgment or order is entered for purposes of this Rule 4(b) when it is entered on the criminal docket.” If sentence was pronounced on a Thursday and the written judgment was docketed the following Tuesday, the 14 days run from Tuesday. Pull the docket sheet and look at the entry date; do not count from memory of the hearing.

Beware the “ten days” you will find in older cases. A great many decisions — including ones still quoted in current filings — say the judgment becomes final “ten days” after entry. That was correct before the December 1, 2009 amendments to the federal time-computation rules, and Moshier itself computed a ten-day window because that was the rule in that case. The holding survives; the number does not. It is 14 days now.

An extension does not obviously move finality. Rule 4(b)(4) allows the district court, “[u]pon a finding of excusable neglect or good cause,” to “extend the time to file a notice of appeal for a period not to exceed 30 days from the expiration of the time otherwise prescribed by this Rule 4(b).” Whether a granted extension moves the finality date, and what happens if the extension is granted but never used, is not uniformly answered across the circuits. Do not build a filing schedule on the assumption that it does.

If your lawyer was asked to file an appeal and did not, that is a distinct problem with its own remedy and its own page — see what to do when your lawyer did not file an appeal. It does not change the finality date, but it may change what claims you have.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: The first document I want in a post-conviction intake is the docket sheet, not the judgment. The judgment tells me what the sentence was. The docket sheet tells me the entry date, whether a notice of appeal was filed and when, whether a rehearing petition was filed and when it was denied, and when the mandate issued. Every date on this page comes off that one document, and reconstructing it from a client’s recollection is how deadlines get missed.

Path 2: you appealed, lost, and filed no certiorari petition

This is the most common path and the one where the most § 2255 motions are lost to the calendar. Your conviction became final 90 days after the court of appeals entered its judgment — not 90 days after the mandate issued.

Supreme Court Rule 13.1 sets the window: a certiorari petition “is timely when it is filed with the Clerk of this Court within 90 days after entry of the judgment.” Rule 13.3 then says where those 90 days start, and it says it in words that leave no room:

“The time to file a petition for a writ of certiorari runs from the date of entry of the judgment or order sought to be reviewed, and not from the issuance date of the mandate (or its equivalent under local practice).”

The Supreme Court applied that rule to the § 2255 clock in Clay v. United States, 537 U.S. 522 (2003), which is the controlling authority for federal prisoners. The holding: “For the purpose of starting the clock on § 2255’s one-year limitation period, we hold, a judgment of conviction becomes final when the time expires for filing a petition for certiorari contesting the appellate court’s affirmation of the conviction.” The Court described the settled meaning of finality in this context as follows: “Finality attaches when this Court affirms a conviction on the merits on direct review or denies a petition for a writ of certiorari, or when the time for filing a certiorari petition expires.” And Clay quoted Rule 13(3)’s mandate sentence directly, which is why the rule and the case say the same thing.

Why counting from the mandate is wrong by about three weeks

The mandate is the document that formally returns jurisdiction to the district court, and it is the piece of paper most defendants actually receive. It feels like the end of the appeal. It is not the date the law counts.

Here is the arithmetic in a federal criminal appeal. Fed. R. App. P. 40 gives a party 14 days after entry of judgment to file a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc. (The 45-day period some sources cite applies, by the rule’s own terms, only “in a civil case” where the United States is a party — it does not apply to a criminal appeal.) Fed. R. App. P. 41(b) then provides that “[t]he court’s mandate must issue 7 days after the time to file a petition for rehearing expires, or 7 days after entry of an order denying a timely petition for panel rehearing, petition for rehearing en banc, or motion for stay of mandate, whichever is later.”

Fourteen days plus seven days. In the ordinary case the mandate issues about 21 days after the court of appeals entered judgment. A defendant who counts 90 days from the mandate believes the certiorari deadline — and therefore the finality date, and therefore the § 2255 deadline — falls about three weeks later than it does. That defendant files a § 2255 motion three weeks late and it is dismissed as untimely without any court ever reaching the merits of the claim.

The half of Rule 13.3 most pages leave out

Rule 13.3 does not end with the mandate sentence. It continues:

“But if a petition for rehearing is timely filed in the lower court by any party, or if the lower court appropriately entertains an untimely petition for rehearing or sua sponte considers rehearing, the time to file the petition for a writ of certiorari for all parties (whether or not they requested rehearing or joined in the petition for rehearing) runs from the date of the denial of rehearing or, if rehearing is granted, the subsequent entry of judgment.”

Read that carefully, because it cuts in the defendant’s favor and it is routinely omitted. If a timely petition for rehearing or rehearing en banc was filed — by you, by the government, or by a co-defendant in the same appeal — the 90 days do not run from the original judgment at all. They run from the date rehearing was denied. That can push the finality date, and the § 2255 deadline with it, months later than the naive calculation.

The word doing the work is timely. A rehearing petition filed after the 14 days have run, and after the mandate has issued, does not restart anything — unless the court of appeals “appropriately entertains” it or takes up rehearing on its own. That is the distinction the brief-shorthand version of this rule flattens, and getting it backwards in either direction is costly: assume the later date when the petition was untimely and you file too late; assume the earlier date when a co-party filed a timely petition and you may abandon months you actually had.

A note on Rule 13.5 extensions

Rule 13.5 permits a single Justice, “[f]or good cause,” to “extend the time to file a petition for a writ of certiorari for a period not exceeding 60 days,” on an application filed “at least 10 days before the date the petition is due.” The Rule adds that such an application “is not favored.”

Whether a granted extension moves the § 2255 finality date when no petition is ultimately filed is not settled uniformly. Do not assume it does. The safe course is to treat the original 90-day expiration as your trigger date and to have the § 2255 motion filed well before the anniversary of it. Nothing is lost by filing early; everything is lost by filing late.

Path 3: you filed a certiorari petition and it was denied

If a petition for a writ of certiorari was filed and the Supreme Court denied it, your conviction became final on the date of the denial. That follows directly from Clay‘s statement of the rule: “Finality attaches when this Court affirms a conviction on the merits on direct review or denies a petition for a writ of certiorari, or when the time for filing a certiorari petition expires.”

The denial date is the date the order appears on the Court’s order list. It is not the date the order was mailed to you, not the date your lawyer forwarded it, and not the date the court of appeals afterwards issued its mandate. Fed. R. App. P. 41(d)(3) provides that “[t]he court of appeals must issue the mandate immediately on receiving a copy of a Supreme Court order denying the petition, unless extraordinary circumstances exist” — so on this path there is a second mandate, arriving after finality, offering one more opportunity to count from the wrong document.

One wrinkle worth knowing: a party may file a petition for rehearing of an order denying certiorari under the Court’s rehearing rule. Those are granted very rarely. If you are in that posture, do not calculate your own deadline — the interaction between a rehearing petition in the Supreme Court and the § 2255 clock is exactly the kind of question that should be answered by counsel looking at your docket rather than by a general page.

For what a certiorari petition involves, how the Court’s discretionary review actually works, and what the realistic odds are, the firm covers it at length on the certiorari petition page and the Supreme Court appeal page. This page does not restate that material — it only tells you what a denial does to your clock.

Path 4: certiorari was granted and the Supreme Court decided your case

If the Supreme Court granted certiorari and affirmed your conviction on the merits, finality attached on the date of that decision — again from Clay: finality attaches “when this Court affirms a conviction on the merits on direct review.”

If the Court reversed or vacated and sent the case back, the analysis changes, because direct review has not ended. The case returns to the court of appeals or the district court, further proceedings occur, and a new judgment may be entered. Where a defendant is fully resentenced, courts have treated the resulting judgment as a new judgment for limitations purposes; the Eleventh Circuit took that view in Murphy v. United States, 634 F.3d 1303 (11th Cir. 2011), reasoning that a judgment consists of both the conviction and the sentence, so that a defendant who is resentenced is held under a new judgment. That is not a uniform national rule for every kind of post-judgment change, and the boundary matters: the Eighth Circuit held in Byers v. United States, 561 F.3d 832, 835 (8th Cir. 2009), that a sentence reduction under Rule 35(b) “was not a ‘judgment of conviction'” and therefore did not restart the § 2255 clock.

The practical takeaway is narrow and worth stating plainly: a full resentencing may produce a new judgment and a new clock; a reduction of your existing sentence generally does not. If your case has been through a remand, a resentencing, an amended judgment, or a Rule 35(b) reduction, the finality question is genuinely contested and circuit-specific. That is a question to put to counsel with the docket in hand, not one to resolve from a chart.

What that date starts: the § 2255 one-year clock

28 U.S.C. § 2255(f) provides that “[a] 1-year period of limitation shall apply to a motion under this section,” and that the period “shall run from the latest of” four dates. The first is “(1) the date on which the judgment of conviction becomes final.” That is the date you just calculated.

One year. Not one year from when you found a lawyer, not one year from when the transcripts arrived, not one year from when you learned that § 2255 existed. An untimely § 2255 motion is generally barred no matter how meritorious the claim inside it — a court that finds the motion late usually never reaches the ineffective-assistance argument, the Brady claim, or the sentencing error at all. That is what makes finality the highest-consequence date in federal post-conviction practice and the reason this page exists as its own page.

What a § 2255 motion is, what claims it can raise, how to file one, and what happens after it is filed are covered across the firm’s § 2255 motion pages — including grounds for a § 2255 motion, ineffective assistance of counsel, and the overall map of post-conviction deadlines. This page names the year and stops.

Two mechanical points do belong here, because they are about the calendar rather than the claim. First, the year runs to the anniversary of the finality date, so a conviction final on June 1, 2026 produces a deadline of June 1, 2027 — and the safest practice is to treat that as an outer wall, not a target. Second, a motion prepared by a person in custody is generally treated as filed when it is delivered to prison officials for mailing rather than when it reaches the clerk; that is the prisoner mailbox rule, and it is a backstop, not a plan.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: People in federal facilities consistently underestimate how long the preparation takes, because the parts that take longest are the parts that happen outside the institution. Getting the transcripts, the presentence report, and the defense file assembled can take weeks or months; a lawyer reading a trial record properly takes more. When someone writes to us with four months left on the year, the honest answer is that the schedule is tight. When they write with ten months left, there is room to do it right. The year is not the drafting time — it is everything.

The other three trigger dates in § 2255(f)

Subsection (f)(1) is not the only start date. Section 2255(f) says the year runs from “the latest of” four dates, which means a reader whose (f)(1) year has already run may still have a door open on a particular claim. The other three, named here and covered in depth elsewhere:

Trigger	The statutory text	What it means in practice
(f)(2)	“the date on which the impediment to making a motion created by governmental action in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States is removed, if the movant was prevented from making a motion by such governmental action”	The government itself blocked the filing — the clock starts when the obstruction ends
(f)(3)	“the date on which the right asserted was initially recognized by the Supreme Court, if that right has been newly recognized by the Supreme Court and made retroactively applicable to cases on collateral review”	A new Supreme Court right, applied retroactively — see the trap below
(f)(4)	“the date on which the facts supporting the claim or claims presented could have been discovered through the exercise of due diligence”	Newly discovered facts, measured by diligence, not by when you actually learned them

The (f)(3) trap. The year runs from the date the Supreme Court recognized the right, not from the later date a court held the right retroactive. That is the holding of Dodd v. United States, 545 U.S. 353 (2005), which read the subsection as identifying “one, and only one, date from which the 1-year limitation period is measured: ‘the date on which the right asserted was initially recognized by the Supreme Court.'” The Court acknowledged “the potential for harsh results in some cases” and held that it was “not free to rewrite the statute that Congress has enacted.” In plain terms: when a decision that might help you comes down, the year starts then — not when someone finally establishes that it applies to cases like yours. The firm’s page on retroactive Supreme Court decisions covers how to tell whether a new decision fits.

There is also equitable tolling, which is not a trigger date but a doctrine that can excuse a late filing in narrow circumstances involving diligence and an extraordinary obstacle. It is difficult, it is fact-intensive, and it is not something to plan around. The firm’s § 2255 pages cover it on the equitable tolling page.

A worked example, day by day

Abstractions cost people their remedies. Here is the most common path — appeal affirmed, no certiorari petition — walked through with real dates on a real calendar.

Assume the court of appeals affirms and enters judgment on Tuesday, March 3, 2026.

Date	What happens	Why it matters	Source
Tue., March 3, 2026	Court of appeals enters judgment affirming the conviction	This is the date the 90 days run from	Sup. Ct. R. 13.1, 13.3
Tue., March 17, 2026	Deadline to file a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc (14 days)	If a timely petition is filed, the 90 days restart from the denial of rehearing instead	Fed. R. App. P. 40; Sup. Ct. R. 13.3
Tue., March 24, 2026	Mandate issues (7 days after the rehearing period expires)	The wrong date to count from. This is the document you actually receive	Fed. R. App. P. 41(b)
Mon., June 1, 2026	90th day after entry of judgment; time to petition for certiorari expires	The conviction becomes final on this date	Clay v. United States, 537 U.S. 522, 527 (2003)
Tue., June 1, 2027	One year later — the § 2255 filing deadline	Motions filed after this date are generally time-barred	28 U.S.C. § 2255(f)(1)
Mon., June 22, 2026	90 days after the mandate — the date a reader gets by counting wrong	Produces a believed § 2255 deadline of June 22, 2027 — 21 days too late	— the error this page exists to prevent

Table: a worked finality calculation on the most common path, with the incorrect mandate-based calculation shown for contrast. Dates assume no rehearing petition was filed and no Rule 13.5 extension was sought.

And the same exercise for the no-appeal path. Assume the district court enters judgment on Monday, January 12, 2026, and no notice of appeal is filed:

Date	What happens	Source
Mon., January 12, 2026	Judgment entered on the criminal docket	Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(6)
Mon., January 26, 2026	14-day notice-of-appeal window closes — conviction becomes final	Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(1)(A); Moshier, 402 F.3d at 118
Tue., January 26, 2027	§ 2255 filing deadline	28 U.S.C. § 2255(f)(1)

Notice what the second table implies. A defendant sentenced in mid-January who is designated in March and arrives at a facility in April has already used roughly a quarter of the year before writing the first letter about it.

One caution on both tables: where a deadline falls on a weekend or a federal holiday, the federal time-computation rules generally carry it to the next business day, and Supreme Court Rule 30 governs computation for filings in that Court. The dates above were chosen to fall on business days so the arithmetic is visible. Check your own dates against a calendar rather than assuming.

What does not extend or restart the clock

This is where remedies are lost — not by ignoring the deadline, but by believing something has paused it. None of the following stops the § 2255 year once it has started.

The thing people believe pauses the clock	What actually happens
An untimely petition for rehearing filed after the mandate	Does not move the certiorari start date under Sup. Ct. R. 13.3 unless the court of appeals appropriately entertains it or considers rehearing on its own
A pending compassionate release or § 3582(c) motion	The § 2255 year keeps running the entire time the sentence-reduction motion is pending. Two separate remedies, two separate clocks
A pending Rule 35(b) motion, or a granted reduction	The Eighth Circuit held in Byers, 561 F.3d at 835, that a Rule 35(b) modification “was not a ‘judgment of conviction'” and did not restart the year
Waiting for transcripts, the PSR, or your file	Not a tolling event. It is a reason to start the records request immediately, not a reason the deadline moves
Waiting for trial counsel to respond to a letter	Not a tolling event, and the most common single cause of a late filing we see
A state court proceeding, or a pending immigration matter	Unrelated to the federal § 2255 clock, which runs on the federal judgment
Being in transit, in the SHU, or without law library access	Ordinarily not enough on its own. These are facts that go to equitable tolling, which is a narrow exception and not a plan
Filing a § 2241 petition instead	A different statute with different requirements — see § 2255 vs. § 2241. Filing the wrong one does not preserve the right one

The two mistakes that cost the remedy

Everything above reduces to two errors. Both are avoidable, and both are common enough that they deserve to be named rather than implied.

Mistake one: counting from the mandate. The mandate is the document you receive, so it feels like the operative date. It is not. Supreme Court Rule 13.3 removes the ambiguity in a single clause — the 90 days run from entry of judgment “and not from the issuance date of the mandate” — and the Supreme Court repeated that language in Clay. In a federal criminal appeal, the mandate issues roughly 21 days after judgment, so this mistake makes a § 2255 motion about three weeks late. Three weeks is enough. Courts dismiss on that.

Mistake two: treating a pending certiorari petition as a reason to wait. A certiorari petition is pending for months, and it feels premature to be preparing a collateral attack while direct review is still alive. But the § 2255 year begins the day the petition is denied, and a properly investigated § 2255 motion is not a document that can be produced in a few weeks. It requires the trial and sentencing transcripts, the presentence report, the defense file, sometimes a declaration from prior counsel, sometimes an investigator. Assembling those materials routinely takes months on its own — and it can be done while the certiorari petition is pending, because none of it depends on the outcome. The work does not have to wait even though the filing does.

The corollary applies to families. If you are the person on the outside, the useful thing you can do during a pending appeal is collect the record — transcripts, the judgment, the docket sheet, the plea agreement, the PSR — so that whoever handles the collateral attack starts with a file rather than a search. That is a real head start and it costs nothing but time you already have.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: When we evaluate a case for post-conviction work, the first thing we calculate is the deadline, before we form any view of the merits — because the answer determines what kind of engagement is even possible. A case with eight months left is a case that can be investigated. A case with five weeks left is a triage problem, where the question becomes what can be preserved rather than what can be built. Both are worth doing. They are not the same piece of work, and pretending otherwise does the client no favors.

Why work with Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. is a boutique federal criminal defense and appellate firm founded in 2019, running a national federal practice on an intentionally small caseload. Elizabeth Franklin-Best has more than 20 years of federal and appellate criminal defense experience and has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, with sixteen published decisions as counsel of record. She is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and twelve of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals — every regional circuit (1st–11th) plus the D.C. Circuit — and has been admitted pro hac vice in federal courts from Montana to Florida. She is recognized by Best Lawyers in America 2026 for Appellate Practice and by Chambers USA 2026 for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations, and is the author of Reversing Your Criminal Conviction: Develop Your Winning Strategy (2023).

The firm’s offices are in Columbia and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and it serves clients nationwide in federal courts. Whether the next step is a direct appeal, a § 2255 motion, or a decision between the two — a choice the firm addresses on its direct appeal vs. § 2255 page — the deadline analysis comes first.

What to do next once you know your finality date

If you can name the date your conviction became final, write it down, add one year, and work backward from there. If you cannot, get the docket sheet: it carries the entry date of the judgment, the notice of appeal, any rehearing petition and its denial, and the mandate. Every date on this page comes off that one document.

If the year is running and you do not yet have counsel, do not wait for the file to arrive before calling. The calendar does not pause while records are gathered, and the earlier a case is evaluated, the more of the remedy is still available.

Call (843) 620-1100, or schedule a consultation directly.

This page is general legal information, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines in individual cases turn on the specific docket, and no outcome is promised or implied.

Frequently Asked Questions About When a Conviction Becomes Final

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026