The figure most people are quoted is eight to twelve weeks from accepted offer to keys. That was roughly true before the pandemic and it is no longer the number to plan around. Transactions have been getting steadily longer, and the gap between what buyers expect and what actually happens is where most of the stress in a move comes from.
Before the legal stage, finding a property takes as long as it takes, and after completion the move itself is a single day. So the honest answer is that the legal middle section dominates, and almost none of it is within your control.
Quick answer: Plan for around four months, not two. Research published by Connells Group in May 2026 put the average time from offer agreed to exchange of contracts in Great Britain at 104 days, up from 76 days in 2019, with leasehold running to 155 days. Completion usually follows exchange by one to two weeks. Renting is far faster at two to four weeks. Nothing is certain until exchange.
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Typical timelines by situation
| Situation | Offer to completion | Main variable |
|---|---|---|
| Cash buyer, freehold, no chain | 6 to 10 weeks | Search turnaround and how hard both sides push |
| Mortgage, freehold, no chain | 12 to 16 weeks | Mortgage offer, searches and enquiries |
| Mortgage, leasehold | 16 to 24 weeks | Management pack from the freeholder |
| Chain of three or more | 20 weeks and up | The slowest party, whoever that is |
| New build, completed | 6 to 10 weeks | Developer deadlines, often tight |
| New build, off plan | Months to years | Construction schedule |
| Renting | 2 to 4 weeks | Referencing and the tenancy start date |
Those are working ranges rather than official statistics, and they sit deliberately above the figures most guides still quote. The one hard data point worth holding on to is the 104-day average to exchange, because it comes from actual transaction records rather than an estimate, and because 17 percent of homes now take more than six months to reach exchange at all.
Renting is dramatically faster because there is no mortgage, no searches, no chain and no legal transfer of ownership. Referencing takes a few days to a couple of weeks, and the constraint is usually when the property becomes available rather than any process.
Cash purchases are faster than mortgaged ones by several weeks, because the lender’s valuation and offer sit outside the critical path entirely. That is a large part of why cash buyers are attractive to sellers.
Where the weeks actually go
Searches are less of a bottleneck than they were, at least in part. The GOV.UK Local Land Charges Programme is moving registers from 300-odd local authorities to a single digital register, and in migrated areas those results come back instantly online rather than in days or weeks. The catch is that the separate CON29 enquiries still go to the council, so only half the local search has been fixed.
That is worth a question at the outset. Ask your conveyancer whether the council you are buying in has migrated, because it changes the picture materially: an instant result on one half of the search against a wait of days or weeks on the other. Migration is well under way but far from complete, so the answer genuinely varies by area.
Enquiries are the other consumer of time, and they are open-ended by nature. A clean title on a modern house generates few. A property with an unregistered extension, a shared driveway, a missing building regulations certificate or an unclear boundary generates several rounds, and each round trip between two solicitors takes a week or more. This is not your solicitor being slow, and it cannot be hurried by chasing you.
Leasehold adds the management pack, which comes from the freeholder or managing agent and is the single most common cause of a stalled leasehold purchase. Nobody in the transaction can compel it. That one document is most of why leasehold averaged 155 days to exchange against freehold’s 97, a difference of nearly two months.
The mortgage runs in parallel rather than in sequence, which helps, but a down-valuation reopens the whole negotiation and can add weeks. Our guides to what conveyancing involves and moving house with a mortgage cover both tracks.
What you can genuinely influence
You control three things: how fast you instruct, how quickly you return paperwork, and how complete your seller’s information is if you are also selling. Together these are worth two to three weeks, which is meaningful without being transformative.
- Instruct a conveyancer the day the offer is accepted. A week lost at the start is a week lost at the end, and it is the cheapest week to save.
- Have identification and proof of funds ready. Passport, proof of address, and bank statements showing where the deposit came from.
- Sort a gifted deposit early. It needs a letter and identification from the donor, and families are routinely surprised by this.
- Get a mortgage agreement in principle before viewing. It shortens the application and makes your offer stronger.
- Book the survey as soon as the offer is accepted. Inspections run one to two weeks out and reports several working days after.
- If selling, complete the property forms fully. Vague answers generate enquiries, and every enquiry is a round trip.
- Chase weekly by asking what is outstanding and with whom. More useful than asking for an update.
The seller-side paperwork point is underrated. If you are selling as well as buying, digging out guarantees, building regulations certificates and planning permissions before they are requested removes a whole category of delay from your own chain.
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Why exchange is the only date that means anything
Before exchange of contracts, either side can withdraw for any reason and at any time. The completion date discussed in weeks four and eight is an intention, not a commitment. Exchange typically happens one to two weeks before completion, sometimes only days.
This is the single most important thing to understand about the timeline, and the lengthening figures make it more important rather than less. You are being asked to plan a life event around a date nobody is obliged to honour, over a period that now commonly runs past three months, during which mortgage offers can expire and circumstances change.
The practical consequences are specific. Do not book removals on a non-refundable basis before exchange. Do not give notice on a rental before exchange. Do not book time off that cannot be moved, arrange school transfers around an unconfirmed date, or take delivery of furniture to the new address.
What you can do is provisionally book. Most reputable removals companies will hold a date and firm it up at exchange, which is exactly the arrangement to ask for. Our guide to exchange of contracts covers what happens at that point and what becomes binding.
Simultaneous exchange and completion happens occasionally, usually where a chain is collapsing and speed matters more than certainty. It removes the planning window entirely and is stressful, but it is sometimes the only way a transaction survives.
Before the offer, and after the keys
The conveyancing period is the measurable part, but a move starts earlier and finishes later than that. Finding a property has no timescale at all, and settling into one takes several weeks after completion.
The search phase varies from a fortnight to well over a year depending on the market, your requirements and how flexible you can be. It is worth being honest with yourself about this when planning around a fixed deadline such as a school year or a tenancy ending, because it is the stage with the least predictability of all.
Selling adds its own front section. Preparing a property, marketing it and finding a buyer typically takes several weeks to a few months before the conveyancing clock starts, and a purchase cannot progress far ahead of it if you are in a chain. Notably, most deals now take longer to get from agreed sale to exchange than they took to find a buyer in the first place.
Afterwards, allow a fortnight for the admin and considerably longer for unpacking. Registration at HM Land Registry can take months at their end without affecting your ownership or your ability to live there, so a delay in the title appearing is normal rather than a problem.
Planned end to end, a purchase from starting to look to being settled is realistically a six-month project, and on current timelines the legal stage alone accounts for around half of it.
What makes a purchase run long
Knowing the factors that reliably extend a timeline at the offer stage lets you set expectations rather than being surprised in week ten.
| Factor | Typical delay added | Can you avoid it? |
|---|---|---|
| Leasehold management pack | Around two months on average | No, but chase early |
| Each additional link in the chain | 2 to 4 weeks | Only by choosing a chain-free property |
| Council still to migrate its land charges | Days to weeks on the search | No, but you can find out in advance |
| Missing consents or certificates | 2 to 6 weeks | Partly, via indemnity insurance |
| Down-valuation by the lender | 2 to 4 weeks | No, it reopens negotiation |
| Probate or divorce in the chain | Weeks to months | No |
| Buyer or seller changing solicitor | 3 to 6 weeks | Yes, by choosing well first time |
Chain length is the dominant variable and the one people weigh least when choosing between properties. A chain-free purchase at a slightly higher price frequently completes months earlier than a cheaper one behind three other transactions, and for anyone with a fixed deadline that is worth paying for.
Changing conveyancer mid-transaction almost always costs more time than it saves. The new firm starts from the beginning on identity checks and file review, and the searches may not transfer. Choose carefully at the start on responsiveness rather than price, because that decision is difficult to reverse.
These timelines are for England and Wales. Scotland operates a different system, with commitment at conclusion of missives, which usually produces a faster and more certain process.
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One structural point about chains. Every additional link multiplies the risk rather than adding to it, because any one party withdrawing collapses everything behind them. A chain of four has four times the opportunity for something to go wrong, and the probability of at least one problem approaches certainty as the chain lengthens. Late collapses are getting worse too: nearly a quarter of fall-throughs now happen after three months, against 18 percent in 2019, so a deal surviving twelve weeks is no longer the reassurance it once was.
That is worth weighing at the offer stage. Asking the agent how long the chain is, and whether anyone in it has yet to find a property, tells you more about your likely completion date than any average timeline. A buyer at the bottom of a chain with nothing to sell is the strongest position in the market and worth acknowledging if that is you.
When speed is the wrong priority
Pressure to complete quickly is where corners get cut, and the corners that get cut are the survey, the enquiries and the lease review. A purchase that completes three weeks earlier because nobody read the lease properly is not a good outcome.
Estate agents chase completion dates because that is when they are paid, and the pressure is real and constant. It is worth remembering that their deadline and your interests are related but not identical.
The survey is the most common casualty. Skipping it, or downgrading to the cheapest option, saves a week against a purchase where a missed defect costs a great deal more than the survey did. Our guide to house survey costs covers which level suits which property.
Unresolved enquiries are the other. If your conveyancer says a question has not been answered satisfactorily, that is not bureaucracy, it is the process working. Exchanging with an open enquiry means accepting an unknown risk permanently, and there is no route back after exchange.
Equally, do not let a purchase drift indefinitely out of politeness. If the other side has been unresponsive for a month with no explanation, ask your conveyancer directly whether the transaction is genuinely progressing, and be prepared to walk away. Sunk cost keeps people in dead transactions far longer than it should.
Completion day itself
Keys are released only once funds have cleared, which means an early start loading and an uncertain wait at the other end. It goes wrong often enough to be worth planning for: HomeOwners Alliance research found around 115,000 home moves delayed each year because funds do not arrive on time and sellers take longer to vacate, with more than 20,000 moves cancelled outright for that reason.
The legal transfer usually happens late morning to early afternoon. Building that wait into your plan rather than assuming a nine o’clock handover is what keeps the day calm, and it is why a crew that will wait rather than leave matters more than an early start does.
For what the day involves from the doorstep rather than the solicitor’s desk, see our guide to completion day.
How EcoGreen Movers handles moving dates
Because the date is only certain at exchange and often only a week or two ahead of completion, removals bookings are made under time pressure. EcoGreen Movers will hold a provisional date and confirm it at exchange, quoting on a fixed basis so a date change does not become a price change.
The long timeline has a practical upside worth using. Three or four months is plenty of time to sort what is going and what is not, which is the work that actually reduces a quote, since pricing follows volume. We supply packing boxes on their own if you want to start early without booking anything, and we also handle disposal and clearance for whatever does not make the cut. If you would rather not do any of it, our Premium service covers professional packing to your specification alongside dismantling and reassembly, and Standard Plus covers the dismantling on its own.
We run residential moves across the UK, including London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Get in touch for a quote.
If a deadline is genuinely immovable, say so early and often. A conveyancer who knows you must be out by a fixed date will prioritise differently from one who assumes flexibility, and an estate agent who knows it will manage the chain around it. Nobody can conjure a completion date, but a known constraint gets factored in where an unspoken one does not.
Have a fallback for the gap. Short-term storage plus a few weeks with family is unglamorous and far cheaper than the alternatives when a chain slips at the last moment, and knowing the fallback exists takes most of the anxiety out of the final fortnight.
Frequently asked questions
How long after an offer is accepted do you move in?
Longer than the eight to twelve weeks usually quoted. Research published in May 2026 put the average from offer agreed to exchange at 104 days in Great Britain, up from 76 days in 2019, with completion typically a week or two after that. Leasehold averaged 155 days. Plan for around four months and be pleased if it is quicker.
Why does it take so long?
Mostly enquiries, where solicitors exchange questions and answers with a week or more between rounds, and searches. Leasehold adds the management pack from the freeholder, which nobody in the transaction can compel, and which is most of why leasehold runs nearly two months longer than freehold.
Are local authority searches still slow?
It depends on your council and on which part of the search you mean. HM Land Registry is migrating local land charges registers to a central digital register, and in migrated areas those results come back instantly online. The separate CON29 enquiries still go to the local authority, so that half can still take weeks. Ask your conveyancer whether your council has migrated.
Can I speed it up?
By two to three weeks, mainly through instructing immediately, having identification and proof of funds ready, sorting any gifted deposit early, and returning paperwork the day it arrives. The larger delays sit with councils, freeholders and other parties in the chain.
When can I book removals?
Provisionally as soon as a date is discussed, and firmly only at exchange of contracts. Before exchange nothing is binding and dates move regularly. Ask a removals company to hold a provisional date and confirm at exchange, which most will do.
How long does renting take?
Two to four weeks from a successful application, since there is no mortgage, no searches and no chain. Referencing takes a few days to a fortnight, and the main constraint is usually when the property becomes available rather than any part of the process.
In summary: four months, and no certainty until exchange
Plan for around four months on a freehold purchase and longer for leasehold or a chain, rather than the two to three months still widely quoted. Instruct immediately, get your paperwork ready before it is asked for, and chase by asking what is outstanding and with whom.
Then treat every date before exchange as provisional, because that is what it is. Book removals to hold rather than to commit, and do not give notice on anything until contracts are exchanged.
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