- SQE1 results usually follow the sitting by roughly two to three months. The exact date for each sitting is published in advance, so check the date for your own sitting.
- Results are released to candidates directly, through the assessment provider's candidate portal and by email, on the published results day.
- No exact clock time is guaranteed. Releases have historically landed during the working day UK time, but treat any specific hour you read online as a rumour.
- You receive a pass or a fail for SQE1, plus a quintile band for each of FLK1 and FLK2. You do not receive a raw mark or a breakdown of which questions you got wrong.
- The wait is long because the difficult work happens after the exam, not before it: standard setting, statistical checks on how each question performed, and quality assurance.
- A fail is not the end of the route. There is an attempt limit, and it is the rule candidates most often get wrong. Checked 9 September 2026.
When are SQE1 results released
SQE1 results are released roughly two to three months after the sitting, on a date published in advance for that specific sitting. A January sitting typically produces results in the spring, and a summer sitting typically produces results in the autumn, but the gap is not identical every time and the published date is the only one that counts.
That pattern is the useful thing to plan around. If you are timing an application, a start date at a firm, or a decision about booking SQE2, work from the published results date for your own sitting rather than from a friend's memory of last year. The date is confirmed by the assessment provider and the SRA before the sitting, so you can know it before you walk into the test centre.
We deliberately do not print a specific 2026 date here, because a wrong date on this page would be worse than no date. Check the results date published for your sitting. Checked 9 September 2026.
- The gap between sitting and results is roughly two to three months
- The results date for each sitting is published in advance, before you sit
- The gap varies slightly between sittings, so do not assume last year's interval
- Results day is a single published date for the whole cohort, not a rolling release
- SQE2 results run on their own separate timetable
What time are results released, and how
There is no officially guaranteed clock time. Results are made available to candidates on the published day through the assessment provider's candidate portal, with an email notifying you that they are there, and in practice releases have landed during the UK working day rather than at midnight.
Any precise hour you see quoted on a forum is a pattern someone noticed at a previous sitting, not a commitment. Times have varied. Refreshing the portal from seven in the morning is a common and entirely wasted ritual.
A few practical points. Make sure the email address on your candidate account is one you can actually access, since notification goes there. Expect the portal to be slow at release, because tens of thousands of people are doing the same thing. And nobody else gets your result before you do, including your employer, unless you have separately agreed to share it.
- Released through the candidate portal, with an email notification
- No guaranteed time of day, though releases land during UK working hours
- Portals slow down at release, so a failed page load is not a bad sign
- Check the email address on your candidate account well before the day
- Your result goes to you, not to your employer, unless you share it
What SQE1 results actually tell you
Less than most candidates expect, and this catches people out badly.
You receive an overall pass or fail for SQE1, and alongside it a quintile band for each of FLK1 and FLK2. The quintile places you in one of five groups relative to the rest of the cohort at that sitting, so you learn roughly whether you were near the top, in the middle or near the bottom.
What you do not receive is a raw score out of 180, a percentage, a subject by subject breakdown, or any list of the questions you got wrong. That is by design, because the questions are reused across sittings and releasing performance detail per question would compromise the bank.
For a candidate who passed, the quintile is mostly curiosity. For a candidate who failed, it is the single most useful piece of information available, because it is the difference between having narrowly missed a standard and being some distance from it. Those two situations call for very different plans.
| What you get | |
|---|---|
| Overall outcome | Pass or fail for SQE1 |
| Per paper | A quintile band for FLK1 and for FLK2 |
| Raw mark | Not provided |
| Subject breakdown | Not provided |
| Questions you got wrong | Not provided, and not available on request |
| Cohort context | Published separately in the SRA's statistical report for the sitting |
Why SQE results take so long
Because almost all of the marking work happens after you sit, not before. This is the honest answer, and it is not an excuse about administration.
The questions are computer marked in short order. What takes months is everything that comes next. The pass mark for that sitting has to be set through a standard setting procedure, where subject experts judge each question's difficulty and those judgements are turned into a required standard. That cannot happen until the questions are written and delivered, and it is deliberately slow and deliberately collective.
Then every question's statistical performance is reviewed. If a question behaved oddly, for example strong candidates got it wrong at a strange rate, it is investigated and may be removed from scoring before results are finalised. That review protects candidates, and it is the reason nobody can be given a provisional mark on the day.
Finally there is quality assurance across the whole dataset, and the results of the two papers have to be combined and checked before anything is released. Add the size of the cohort and you get a gap measured in months. It is genuinely frustrating, and it is also the machinery that stops a badly performing question costing someone their qualification.
- Standard setting decides the pass mark after the sitting, not before it
- Every question's statistical performance is reviewed and poor ones can be removed
- Both papers must be processed and combined before an overall outcome exists
- The cohort is large and every result is quality assured before release
- No provisional or estimated result is available in the meantime, from anyone
The SRA statistical report for each sitting
After each sitting the SRA publishes a statistical report. It is the primary source for that sitting's pass rate, the pass marks applied to FLK1 and FLK2, and breakdowns of performance by candidate group. It is free, and it is the document behind almost every SQE statistic you will see quoted second hand.
It lands after results are released, not at the same time, so on results day itself you will have your own outcome before the national context exists. That gap is normal.
If you are trying to make sense of your quintile, the statistical report for your own sitting is the thing to read. Reports for other sittings describe a different cohort and a different pass mark. This site is independent of the SRA and of Kaplan, and nothing here is legal advice. Checked 9 September 2026.
- Published per sitting, after results are released
- Contains that sitting's pass rate and the pass marks applied
- Includes breakdowns by candidate group
- Always check which sitting a quoted statistic belongs to
What to do if you fail SQE1
First, the boring but important part. A fail is a resit, not an exit from the route. Plenty of qualified solicitors failed a paper. It costs you money and a sitting, and it does not cost you the career.
Second, the rule people get wrong. There is a limit on attempts at SQE1 and it is not unlimited retries: candidates get three attempts, and those attempts must fall within a defined period of time from the first one. That combination is what catches people, because someone who fails, waits a year, fails again and waits again can run out of window rather than out of attempts. Check the current attempt and time limit rules on the SRA's own pages before you plan your resit, because this is the one place where getting it wrong is expensive.
Third, the useful part. Use your quintiles. A candidate who failed with middle quintiles on both papers has a different problem from one who passed FLK1 comfortably and sat in the bottom quintile on FLK2. Broad weakness means the coverage was too thin. A single collapsed paper usually means a set of subjects was neglected, and you can name them.
And change the method, not just the hours. Repeating the same reading for longer is the most common resit plan and the least effective one. If your first attempt was reading led, make your second attempt question led.
- You resit the whole of SQE1, so plan for both papers again
- Attempts are limited and time bound, so check the current rule before booking
- Use your quintiles to work out whether the problem is breadth or a specific paper
- Move from reading to answering questions as the main activity
- Do not book the next available sitting reflexively if it does not give you enough time
- Employers and firms differ in how they treat a resit, so ask rather than assume
