You've decided to sit the SQE. Good. Now you need to know when — and almost immediately you hit a wall of contradictory advice. A forum post swears the FLK1 window opens in a particular month. A blog you found via Google quotes a sitting date that turns out to be two years old. Someone on a study group insists booking "always" closes six weeks out. Half of it is stale, the other half is guesswork, and getting it wrong can cost you a whole assessment window.
So let's cut through it. There is exactly one source that actually controls the SQE calendar, and everything else — including this article — is secondary commentary. If you take nothing else away, take that.
The only calendar that counts
The Solicitors Regulation Authority runs the SQE for England and Wales. Sitting dates, booking windows, result-release dates and fees are all published and updated by the SRA on its dedicated SQE site: sqe.sra.org.uk. That is the authoritative source. Full stop.
I know that sounds almost too simple for an article. But the number of candidates who plan around a screenshot someone posted in a chat group — rather than the live page — is genuinely alarming. Dates shift. Windows get added or adjusted. A figure that was correct last cycle may not be correct for yours. Treat any date you read anywhere other than the SRA site as a rumour until you've confirmed it at the source.
Two pages are worth bookmarking today:
- sqe.sra.org.uk — the assessment site, where the sitting calendar, booking instructions and current fees live.
- sra.org.uk — the wider regulator's site, for the rules around qualification: Qualifying Work Experience, the character and suitability requirements, and how the SQE fits into becoming a solicitor.
Why am I refusing to print specific dates here? Because the moment I do, this article starts ageing badly, and some poor candidate two cycles from now plans their annual leave around a number I typed in 2026. Anchoring to "check the live SRA calendar" is the only honest answer. As of today — late June 2026 — that remains the position, and it isn't going to change: the regulator owns the dates, not the commentariat.
How the SQE calendar is actually structured
Once you understand the shape of the assessment, the calendar stops looking like chaos and starts looking like a logistics problem you can solve.
SQE1: FLK1 and FLK2
SQE1 is made up of two assessments — FLK1 and FLK2 — testing your Functioning Legal Knowledge. Each one is 180 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions, delivered in two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes on the same day. So FLK1 is a full day; FLK2 is a separate full day. Don't picture one marathon afternoon — picture two demanding days, scheduled within the same assessment window.
Between them, the two papers cover 13 subjects:
- FLK1 — Business Law and Practice; Dispute Resolution; Contract; Tort; the Legal System of England and Wales; Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law; and Legal Services (ethics and professional conduct).
- FLK2 — Property Practice; Wills and the Administration of Estates; Solicitors Accounts; Land Law; Trusts; and Criminal Law and Practice.
SQE1 typically runs in a small number of windows each year, at Pearson VUE test centres. The exact months, booking open/close dates and result-release timing for your intended sitting are all on sqe.sra.org.uk — check them, because they're the dates that determine when your revision has to peak.
SQE2: the skills assessments
SQE2 is a different animal entirely. No multiple choice. Instead it assesses five practical legal skills — Client Interviewing (with the attendance note and legal analysis that follows), Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting — through a mix of oral and written tasks spread across several practice areas. Because it includes oral components, SQE2 is delivered over multiple days and its calendar sits separately from SQE1. You generally need to have passed SQE1 before you sit SQE2, which makes the gap between the two windows a planning constraint in its own right.
Why the windows matter more than you think
Here's the part candidates underestimate. The windows aren't just "when you take the exam" — they cascade. Your SQE1 result release date determines the earliest SQE2 window you can realistically book. Your SQE2 window, in turn, sits against your two years of Qualifying Work Experience and your character and suitability check. Miss a booking window and you don't just lose a date; you can push your entire qualification back by months.
The SQE calendar isn't a date you turn up to. It's a chain — booking, sitting, results, the next sitting — and a slip in one link drags the whole thing back.
A worked example: planning backwards from the calendar
Let me make this concrete, because abstract advice about "planning ahead" helps nobody.
Meet Priya. She's working full-time in a paralegal role that counts towards her QWE, and she wants to qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales without taking a career break. She opens sqe.sra.org.uk and notes the next SQE1 sitting window, the date booking opens, the date it closes, and the projected results date. Then she works backwards.
- Results date first. She finds when SQE1 results are expected for her chosen window, then checks the earliest SQE2 window she could book on the back of a pass. That gap — often a few months — is fixed by the calendar, not by her.
- Booking deadline next. She diarises the booking close date with a fortnight's buffer. Booking on the last day is how people end up at a test centre two hours from home because the local one filled up.
- Revision runway last. Only now does she count the weeks between today and the sitting, and divide her 13 subjects across them. She discovers she has, say, 16 weeks — which means roughly a subject a week with consolidation time, not the leisurely six months she'd imagined.
The lesson isn't the specific numbers — those are Priya's, and they came off the live SRA calendar, not this page. The lesson is the direction of planning. Start from the fixed dates and work backwards into your revision, never forwards from a vague "I'll be ready when I'm ready."
Reading the calendar without getting caught out
A few practical traps, learned the hard way by people who came before you.
Booking windows close before sittings — sometimes well before
The date you can sit is not the date you can book until. Booking typically closes weeks ahead of the assessment so test-centre capacity can be allocated. Confirm both dates separately on the SRA site and treat the booking-close date as your real deadline.
Test-centre availability is first-come
Even within an open window, popular centres in big cities fill. If location matters to you — and on a day when you're sitting 2 hours 33 minutes per session, twice, it really does — book early in the window, not late.
Results timing drives your next move
You can't always book the very next SQE2 sitting the instant SQE1 results land; there's a sequence and a lead time. When you look at the calendar, look at the results date and the next-window booking date together, as a pair. That pairing is what tells you your true earliest qualification path.
Fees change — so don't trust an old number
SQE fees are set by the SRA and reviewed periodically. Any fee figure you see floating around a forum may be out of date. For the current cost of FLK1, FLK2 and SQE2, check the latest on sqe.sra.org.uk rather than relying on a number from a blog — including a number you might think you remember from a year or two ago.
Where pass rates and the calendar intersect
People often ask about SQE pass rates in the same breath as dates, and there's a sensible reason for that: your odds of passing first time shape whether you should leave room in the calendar for a resit.
The SRA publishes pass-rate data after each sitting. I'm deliberately not quoting a fixed percentage, because those numbers move between cycles and a stale figure is worse than no figure — see the latest SRA assessment report for the exact rates. But the honest, durable observation is this: a meaningful proportion of candidates do not pass FLK1 or FLK2 on the first attempt, and the candidates who struggle are very often the ones who under-budgeted their revision time against the calendar.
So when you plan backwards from a sitting date, build in the possibility of a resit window. If your qualification timeline has zero slack — no room to retake a paper — you've designed a plan that only works if everything goes perfectly. Things rarely go perfectly.
Fitting QWE and suitability around your exam dates
The exams are only one part of becoming a solicitor in England and Wales. To qualify, you also need a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of Qualifying Work Experience, and a pass on the SRA's character and suitability assessment.
The useful thing about the calendar is that it lets you run these tracks in parallel. QWE doesn't have to wait for your exams, and your exams don't have to wait for QWE — many candidates accrue work experience while preparing for and sitting the SQE. The detail of what counts as QWE, who can confirm it, and how the character and suitability process works is governed by the regulator, and the framework is set out on sra.org.uk. Check the specifics there rather than relying on second-hand summaries, because this is exactly the kind of procedural detail that gets garbled in the retelling.
Two years of QWE is a long runway. The candidates who finish smoothly tend to be the ones who slot their SQE1 and SQE2 windows into that runway deliberately, rather than treating the exams as a separate project bolted on at the end.
Turning the calendar into a revision plan
A date in your diary is not a plan. It's a deadline. The plan is what you do with the weeks before it.
Once you've pulled your real sitting and booking dates off the SRA site, the next job is converting that runway into structured practice across all 13 FLK subjects. This is where a question bank earns its keep. The single best predictor of FLK1 and FLK2 readiness isn't how many lectures you've watched — it's how many single-best-answer MCQs you've worked through under realistic conditions, and how rigorously you've reviewed the ones you got wrong.
The Ant Law SQE Question Bank is built for exactly this stretch of the journey: 14,000+ curated single-best-answer questions tagged by FLK subject and sub-topic, a smart practice engine that pushes your weak topics and previously-wrong answers back at you, and full-length mock sittings that mirror the SRA's 90-question, 180-minute timing ratio so the real day feels familiar rather than brutal. When a question's reasoning won't sink in, the built-in AI tutor will take your follow-up in plain English (or several other languages), which is handy at 11pm when there's no one to ask.
If you'd like a second resource to compare against, CELE SQE (celebar.com) is also worth a look. But whatever tools you use, the workflow is the same: anchor to the SRA calendar, plan backwards, practise relentlessly, and review your mistakes harder than your successes.
A simple sequence to set up this week
- Open sqe.sra.org.uk and note your target SQE1 window, its booking-open and booking-close dates, and the projected results date.
- Diarise the booking-close date with a two-week buffer.
- Count the weeks of revision runway you actually have, and divide your 13 subjects across them honestly.
- Check sra.org.uk for the current QWE and character-and-suitability framework, and slot your exam windows into your two-year runway.
- Start timed MCQ practice now — not after you've "finished revising the content". You revise the content by practising.
The calendar is the one part of this whole process you don't control. So control everything around it. Confirm your dates at the source, plan backwards, and put the weeks in between to work. When you're ready to turn that runway into real FLK1 and FLK2 practice, try the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai — start with a timed mock, see where you actually stand, and build your revision plan from the gaps it exposes.