If you’re buying a home, the HomeOwners Alliance puts the average at around five months from making your offer to completion. The biggest single stage is the legal work before contracts are exchanged; once you exchange, completion is usually only days or a few weeks away, on a date you agree with the seller. Once you have a date, see whether you can move on a weekend.
Where the time goes
As of October 2026, the HomeOwners Alliance guide breaks a purchase down like this:
| Stage | Typical time |
|---|---|
| Making an offer | up to 1 week |
| Arranging your mortgage | 2 to 4 weeks |
| Conveyancing (the legal work) | around 12 weeks |
| House survey | up to 1 week |
| Exchange to completion | 1 to 28 days, 7 on average |
If you count working out your budget and finding a home as well, the same guide says the whole process typically takes 6 to 12 months.
What slows a move down
The common causes are being in a chain, a survey that turns up problems, missing information in the paperwork, and local authority searches, which should take 10 days but which many councils take longer to return. A good conveyancer, and chasing for regular updates, helps keep things moving. A cash buyer can sometimes complete in a matter of weeks.
If you rent
If you rent privately in England on a rolling tenancy, your tenancy agreement says how much notice to give your landlord, and the most a landlord can ask for is two months. If the agreement doesn’t say, you give at least two months. You pay rent during the notice period, so it helps to line your notice up with the date you can move into your next home.
When your dates don’t line up
Completion dates can move, and the day you leave one home isn’t always the day you can move into the next. A storage unit lets you hand over the keys on time without your furniture having nowhere to go. With us, the shortest stay is two weeks, you can get to your unit seven days a week, and when you’re ready to leave you give notice (normally 14 days) and we refund any days you’ve paid for but don’t use.
To see what a gap would cost, get a price online or call us on 0800 2545585.
Related questions
- Can I rent a storage unit for just a week?
- How do I give notice to leave my storage unit?
- What actually happens between exchange and completion?
Further reading