Late Policies

Last updated on June 5, 2026

Tools: Gradebook

Students missing deadlines is an inescapable part of the classroom experience, whether in-person or virtual. You probably communicate your late work policies clearly in your syllabus, but it’s also important to ensure that those rules are formally implemented in Canvas as well. By correctly using Canvas’ Late Policies, you can have it make the  proper deductions for you so you can focus on grading and other tasks.

Mistakes made in grading late assignments can cause confusion for students. For example, Canvas will not automatically assign a zero to unsubmitted work without having a late policy programmed in Gradebook. This means that the student might have an inflated impression of their grade. It’s always important for students to have an accurate understanding of how their performance is being assessed, and setting late policies is a big part of that.

Best Practices

• Above all, make sure that your late work policies are prominently displayed to students, such as in the Grading Policy Page in the Course Introduction Module or the Syllabus.
• Clearly communicate whether late work will be accepted and the consequences for late or missing work, such as any point reductions.
• Ensure that the settings in the gradebook for late work are accurate before the course begins. This will ensure that students always understand what their grade is and how to improve it.
  • If copying your course from an old course shell to a new course shell, click Don’t Import Policy when the pop-up warning appears. Then, reset the late work policies after adjusting the due date. This prevents students from receiving automatic zeros based on old due dates.
• Any work students do should have accurate due dates and availability windows. If work is too late to be submitted for credit, the availability window should be closed.

Set Due Dates and Availability Windows in Assignments

See our tutorial, Create an Assignment with Limited Availability, for a step-by-step guide on how to set a Due Date and Availability Window.

• Due Date: Any late or missing policies you’ve set in the Gradebook will use an Assignment’s Due Date for its calculations.
  • Missing Submissions: Assignments will only be counted as missing once the Due Date has passed.
  • Late Work: Point deductions for late work will begin once the Due Date has passed depending on the selected interval (Days or Hours). If an assignment is submitted late, Canvas will automatically deduct points based on how many days/hours the assignment was late.
• Available Until: The Available Until Date designates when students can first access the assignment and submit work. This date must be before the Due Date and does not impact late policies.
• Until: The Until Date designates when students can no longer access and submit work for an assignment.
  • If you don’t accept any late work, the Until date should be the same as the Due Date.
  • If students can submit the work for some credit at any point after the Due Date, you can leave this date blank, or select a date that no work can be submitted anymore, such as the last day of the course.
  • If students only have a certain window after the Due Date to submit late work for credit, the Available Until Date should match when it is no longer possible to get credit.
    • For example, if the late policy has students lose 20% every day an assignment is late, the Available Until Date should be five days after the Due Date.

Let’s walk through it together

Set Late Work Policies in Gradebook

1. Log in to your Canvas Account.
2. Select the Course you’d like to work in.
3. Click Grades in the left-hand navigation menu.
4. Click the Gear (Settings) Icon in the top right-hand corner of the page.
5. Click the checkbox next to Automatically apply grade percentage for missing submissions to set a score that is automatically applied for any assignments not submitted by the due date.
   • Without this box checked, missing work will not factor into the students’ grades at all.
6. Enter a Percentage for how much you want missing work to be worth in a student’s grade.
   • The default value is zero percent.
7. Click the checkbox next to Automatically apply deduction to late submissions.
   • This will allow the Gradebook to automatically apply your late policies for you. When a student submits an Assignment, Quiz, or Discussion, you will grade it in SpeedGrader as normal and enter a score. Canvas will automatically deduct points based on how late the assignment was submitted.
8. Enter a Late Submission Deduction Percentage and a Late Submission Deduction Interval.
   • These two settings work together to create a modifier for each submission. For example, a 10% deduction applied every day would mean that an assignment submitted three days after the due date would receive 70% of the points it normally would have.
9. Enter a Lowest Possible Grade Percent.
   • The default value is 0%. Following the previous example of 10% deducted every day, that means that after 10 days, it would be impossible for the student to submit for any credit at all.
   • If you set this higher, that means that there will always be some possible credit the student can earn. Following the previous example, you could set this value to 50% and that would mean that the penalty would grow each day for 5 days, and then there would be no additional penalty.
   • You might use a static penalty, such as a blanket 40% deduction, for any assignment submitted late. In this case, you can set the Deduction Percentage to 40% at either interval (day or hour) and Lowest Possible Grade Percentage to 60%.
10. Click Apply Settings at the bottom right of the settings panel.

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