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Washington's ninety-day clock needs BOTH triggers — filing AND service

No decree can enter until ninety days have elapsed since the petition was filed AND since the summons was served (or first published) — the LATER event controls. Filing alone runs half a clock; so does service alone. The fourth pattern on this platform, and the exact inverse of California's whichever-first rule: file and serve promptly, then the floor passes on its own while the paperwork proceeds.

The honesty note

The floor is the earliest legal possibility — the rest of the case controls the real date, and with the paperwork right, an agreed case's decree entry is mandatory once the floor passes (the shall-enter rule).

Authority locked — retrieved from the hash-pinned corpus

RCW 26.09.030 · #da532635Wash. CR 4 · #1d4daaa2

Legal information, not legal advice. Statements about county practice defer to your superior court's clerk-maintained local rules (GR 7(d)) and the courthouse facilitator — where this platform has no verified county data, it says so instead of guessing.