How long does conveyancing actually take in 2026?

For a straightforward freehold purchase, allow 10 to 14 weeks from instructing your conveyancer to picking up the keys. Leasehold is closer to 12 to 18 weeks. Both of those assume the chain holds together and there's nothing weird in the title paperwork. In real life a decent chunk of transactions take longer than this.

Where the time actually goes

Conveyancing isn't one job, it's several jobs queued behind each other, each waiting on someone else:

• Instruction to searches back: 3–6 weeks. The local authority search is the usual bottleneck. Some councils turn them around in a week, others take a month. Your conveyancer cannot hurry the council along, no matter how nicely they ask.
• Enquiries raised and answered: 1–4 weeks. Your conveyancer asks the seller's conveyancer about the title, planning history, building regs, boundaries, anything else dodgy. The seller has to dig out the paperwork. Sellers dragging their feet is one of the most common reasons things stall.
• Mortgage offer: varies wildly. If your lender wants a valuation survey, you're waiting on a surveyor's diary plus the lender's processing time. None of this is in your conveyancer's hands.
• Exchange to completion: 1–4 weeks. Once everyone's ready, you exchange contracts and pick a completion date, usually a week or two later. Sometimes longer by agreement, occasionally same-day for simultaneous exchange and completion.

What actually slows things down

Most delays aren't down to your conveyancer making mistakes. The usual suspects:

• Chains. If anyone in the chain isn't ready, nobody completes.
• Slow local authority searches.
• Mortgage lenders dragging out underwriting, especially for self-employed buyers.
• Sellers who can't find planning consents, FENSA certificates, or building regs sign-offs.
• Leasehold management packs. The freeholder or managing agent has 15 working days to hand them over. Plenty don't.
• Title problems that need indemnity insurance or proper fixing.

What your conveyancer can actually do

A good one raises every enquiry early, chases hard when things stall, and tells you what's going on before you have to ask. A bad one lets weeks slide. The HMLR error-rate data we publish doesn't directly measure speed, but it does measure how often a firm has to go back and fix mistakes — and time spent fixing mistakes is time not spent moving your case forward.

We don't publish completion-time figures for individual firms because we can't source them from public data. HMLR's Price Paid records don't name the conveyancer, so any “average completion time” you see on another site is firms self-reporting. Take it with a pinch of salt.