We investigate the state complexity of the cut and iterated cut operation for determin- istic finite automata (DFAs), answering an open question stated in [M. BERGLUND, et al.: Cuts in regular expressions. In Proc. DLT, LNCS 7907, 2011]. These operations can be seen as an al- ternative to ordinary concatenation and Kleene star modelling leftmost maximal string matching. We show that the cut operation has a matching upper and lower bound of n states, if m = 1, and (n−1)·m+n states, otherwise, on DFAs accepting the cut of two individual languages that are ac- cepted by n- and m-state DFAs, respectively. In the unary case we obtain max(2n − 1, m + n − 2) states as a tight bound—notice that for m ≤ n the bound for unary DFAs only depends on the former automaton and not on the latter. For accepting the iterated cut of a language accepted by an n-state DFA we find a matching bound of 1+(n+1)·F(1,n+2,−n+2;n+1 | −1) states on DFAs, if n ≥ 4 and where F refers to the generalized hypergeometric function. This bound is in the order of magnitude Θ((n − 1)!). Finally, the bound drops to 2n − 1 for unary DFAs accepting the iterated cut of an n-state DFA, if n ≥ 3, and thus is similar to the bound for the cut operation on unary DFAs.