A WA Agent's Cheat-Sheet to NWMLS Forms 21, 22A, 35 & 22T

Form 21 is the contract — and the starting gun

Form 21 is the Residential Purchase and Sale Agreement. It is the deal itself: price, parties, financing terms, included items, and the contingencies that the 22-series addenda then govern. Everything else clips onto it.

Because Form 21 is the contract rather than a contingency, it has no standalone countdown of its own. What it does set is mutual acceptance — the moment the last party signs and the other side is notified. Mutual acceptance, or MA, is the start of every clock that follows. Get the MA date wrong and every downstream deadline is wrong with it, which is exactly why it is worth confirming in writing before you calendar anything else.

Think of Form 21 as the trunk and Forms 22A, 35, and 22T as the branches. The trunk does not expire; the branches do.

Form 22A — Financing, default 21 calendar days

Form 22A is the Financing Addendum. It gives the buyer a defined window to secure the loan described in the contract. The default contingency period is 21 calendar days from mutual acceptance, though competitive markets often see shorter custom windows negotiated on the face of the form.

Inside that window, the financing contingency protects the buyer: if the loan is denied for a reason within the contingency's terms, the buyer may terminate per the form's language rather than forfeit earnest money. Once the window closes without action, that protection generally lapses. Read the specific termination and notice mechanics on the form in front of you before you advise either side — the addendum spells out who must do what, and by when.

Form 35 — Inspection, default 10 calendar days

Form 35 is the Inspection Addendum. The default inspection period is 10 calendar days from mutual acceptance, and within it the buyer has real optionality: approve the property as-is, disapprove and walk, or request repairs or a price or credit adjustment that the seller can accept, counter, or decline.

This is one of the most negotiated stretches of the deal, so the inspection clock tends to drive the early calendar. Note that at 10 days it runs on calendar days, not business days — the business-day exclusion in Washington only applies to periods of five days or fewer. More on that distinction in the next section, because it is where Form 22T behaves differently.

Form 22T — Title, default 5 business days (watch the math)

Form 22T is the Title Contingency. It gives the buyer and the buyer's lender a window to review the preliminary commitment, the exceptions, and the title condition. The default is 5 business days — and that five-day length is the detail that trips people up.

Under RCW 1.16.050, a contractual period of five days or fewer excludes Saturdays, Sundays, and Washington state legal holidays; periods longer than five days are counted as calendar days unless the form says otherwise. So Form 22T's five-day window stretches across the calendar whenever a weekend or holiday lands inside it, while Form 35's ten-day window does not. Two contingencies, two different counting rules — and the only safe way to land both is to count it deliberately rather than from memory. SENTINEL's deadline tooling applies the business-day rule for you and re-counts when a date moves, which is the kind of thing that is easy to get wrong by hand at 9 PM.

How the four interlock — and why dependent dates move together

In a live transaction these are not four separate timers; they are one cascade off a single anchor. Mutual acceptance on Form 21 starts the clock, then earnest money posts (typically a couple of business days after MA per the standard language), Form 35's inspection window runs, Form 22T's title window runs, and Form 22A's financing window runs toward closing. Form 17, the Seller Disclosure Statement, sits alongside them with its own rules — delivered within 5 business days and rescindable by the buyer within 3 business days of receipt.

The trap is treating any one date as fixed. Amend the closing date, push mutual acceptance after a counter, or negotiate a custom contingency length, and the dependent deadlines shift with it. Re-run the whole set every single time one input changes — do not patch a single date and assume the rest still hold. A 30-second recount is cheaper than a blown contingency.

For a deeper walk through the day-counting and the full deadline cascade, see the NWMLS deadlines guide. For the Form 17 disclosure-and-rescission specifics, see the Form 17 seller disclosure guide.

Trust the contract in front of you, not the shorthand

Form numbers are a useful shorthand among agents, but they are shorthand. Defaults get edited, addenda get stacked, and a hand-written deadline on the face of a form overrides whatever the default 'should' be. The document that governs your deal is the one your parties actually signed — read it, not your memory of what that form usually says.

Use a cheat-sheet like this to orient fast, then verify against the executed paperwork before you calendar a date or counsel a client. When you want the dates computed against Washington's business-day rule automatically, run them through the NWMLS deadline calculator, and see the methodology page for how SENTINEL counts. The tool gives you the math; the signed contract gives you the truth.