Where to Find the Authoritative SQE Assessment Date Calendar

Someone drops a screenshot into the group chat. It's a table of SQE dates, cropped, no URL visible, forwarded from a chat that got it from a chat. Three people immediately start planning their annual leave around it. One of them books flights.

I've watched this happen more than once, and it ends the same way: the screenshot was accurate for a sitting that has already been and gone, and somebody has just booked a non-refundable trip to Lisbon over what turns out to be their assessment week. The frustrating part is that the correct information is free, public and takes about ninety seconds to check.

So let's be blunt about the answer before we get into the detail. As at today — 31 August 2026 — the only authoritative SQE assessment date calendar is the one published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority at sqe.sra.org.uk. Nothing else counts. Not a forwarded PDF, not a prep provider's summary page, not a blog post (including this one). If a date matters enough to plan your life around, it matters enough to read it on the SRA's own site.

Why the SRA site is the only source that counts

The SRA is the body that commissions and administers the SQE for England and Wales. Assessment windows, booking windows, cancellation and amendment deadlines, reasonable adjustments deadlines and results release dates all originate there. Everyone else is copying — and copies decay.

There are three reasons second-hand date lists go wrong, and they're worth understanding because they tell you what to look out for.

• They were right once. A provider publishes an accurate summary for a given cycle. The cycle passes. The page stays up, unversioned and undated, and keeps ranking on Google for two years.
• They conflate different date types. A booking window closing is not the same as an assessment date, which is not the same as a results date. I've seen candidates treat the last day of a booking window as "the exam date" and quietly panic.
• They round. Someone writes "SQE1 sittings are in January and July" as a general rule of thumb. Rules of thumb are not calendars. Windows shift, and a candidate planning a training contract start date on a rule of thumb is planning on sand.

On the SRA site you're looking for the assessment dates and booking information pages under sqe.sra.org.uk, together with the SQE candidate-facing policies at sra.org.uk. Bookmark them properly — not "I'll remember the search term", an actual bookmark in your browser bar, next to the one for your bank.

What "authoritative" actually means here

Authoritative doesn't just mean "correct today". It means the page will be updated when things change, and it means you have somewhere to point if a dispute arises. If you cancel a booking on the strength of a forwarded screenshot and lose your fee, the SRA is not going to be moved by the screenshot. If you act on the published policy and something goes wrong, you at least have a coherent position.

The dates that actually govern your year — there are more than you think

Most candidates think of "the SQE calendar" as a list of exam days. It isn't. There's a cluster of dates around every sitting, and the exam day is often the least dangerous one to miss, because you'll never miss it. It's the quiet administrative deadlines that catch people.

I'm deliberately not putting numbers in that table. Fee amounts, window dates and results dates change, and a wrong number here would be worse than no number. Check the current ones at sqe.sra.org.uk before you commit to anything.

The adjustments deadline deserves its own paragraph

If you're applying for reasonable adjustments — extra time, rest breaks, a separate room, assistive software, adjustments for a temporary injury or for pregnancy — the application process runs on its own timetable and typically needs supporting evidence. Getting a diagnostic report or a GP letter is not a two-day job. Candidates who leave this until the booking window is nearly shut often end up sitting without the adjustment they were entitled to, or deferring entirely.

Start that conversation with the SRA the moment you have a rough idea of which sitting you're aiming for. Not when you book. Before.

How to verify any SQE date claim in sixty seconds

Here's the routine. It's boring, which is why it works.

1. Open sqe.sra.org.uk directly. Type it, don't click a link someone sent you.
2. Find the assessment dates / booking pages for the assessment you're sitting — SQE1 and SQE2 have distinct timetables.
3. Check whether the page shows a "last updated" date or refers to a specific assessment cycle. If the cycle named isn't the one you're planning for, you're on an archive page.
4. Note the date type explicitly. Write "booking closes" or "assessment date", not just the number.
5. Put it in your actual calendar with a reminder two weeks out and a second one three days out.

Then — and this is the bit people skip — check again about a month before you book. Not because the SRA changes things capriciously, but because your memory of what you read in March is less reliable than you think.

The exam date is the one date you'll never forget. It's the booking deadline, the adjustments deadline and the amendment deadline that quietly cost people a year.

Working backwards: turning a confirmed date into a revision plan

Once you have a real, verified assessment date, the calendar stops being an administrative chore and becomes the spine of your preparation. This is where most of the value lies.

Remember the shape of what you're preparing for. SQE1 is two separate assessments. FLK1 carries 180 single-best-answer questions, split across two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes on the same day, covering Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort, Legal System of England and Wales, Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law, and Legal Services. FLK2 is the same format — 180 questions, two sessions — across Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice. Thirteen functioning legal knowledge subjects in total, and roughly five hours in the chair on each assessment day before you count breaks.

That's a lot of syllabus to reverse-engineer. Which is exactly why the date has to come first.

A worked example: Priya, 18 weeks out

Priya is a paralegal in a Leeds firm doing residential conveyancing. She has accrued about fourteen months of qualifying work experience and wants to sit FLK1 and FLK2 in the same cycle. She checks sqe.sra.org.uk, confirms the assessment dates for the cycle she's targeting, and counts back: eighteen full weeks from today to the first assessment day, with the booking window closing in week four.

Her plan looks like this:

• Weeks 1–2: Diagnostic. She works through a spread of mixed MCQs across all thirteen subjects without revising first, purely to find out where she actually stands. Her Property Practice accuracy is high — no surprise, she does it daily. Her Trusts accuracy is 41%. Her Solicitors Accounts is worse.
• Week 4: She books. Both assessments, in the window, before the deadline. This is non-negotiable and sits in her calendar in capitals.
• Weeks 3–11: Content plus practice, weighted by that diagnostic. Trusts and Solicitors Accounts get roughly double the hours of Property Practice. She doesn't give every subject an equal slice, because equal slices are how people spend forty hours re-reading things they already know.
• Weeks 12–15: Timed blocks. She moves onto 90-question sittings under 180-minute conditions, which mirrors the real timing ratio closely enough to build the pacing instinct — roughly 1.7 minutes per question, which sounds generous until you meet a Business Law question with a seven-line fact pattern.
• Weeks 16–17: Full-length simulations, one for FLK1 and one for FLK2, sat at the same time of day as the real thing. Plus wrong-answer review — the single highest-yield activity in the whole plan.
• Week 18: Consolidation, sleep, logistics. Test centre location confirmed, travel booked, ID checked against the SRA's requirements.

Priya's plan works not because it's clever but because it's anchored. Every decision about how many hours to give Land Law flows from a fixed, verified date. Candidates who revise without a booked sitting tend to drift for months in a fog of "I'll book when I feel ready", and readiness, mysteriously, never arrives.

For the practice volume that plan needs, a structured question bank does the heavy lifting. The Ant Law SQE Question Bank is what I'd point Priya at — 14,000+ single-best-answer MCQs tagged by FLK subject and sub-topic, with a practice engine that pushes unseen questions and previously wrong answers back at you rather than letting you re-do the ones you're already good at. The 90-question, 180-minute mock format is there for exactly the weeks 12–15 phase.

Dates you also need to be watching, beyond the exam itself

The SQE calendar doesn't exist in isolation. Qualification in England and Wales has other moving parts, and they have their own timing logic.

Qualifying work experience

You need two years' full-time equivalent QWE, confirmed by a solicitor or by your organisation's COLP. QWE can be completed before, during or after your SQE assessments, and it can be accrued across up to four organisations. What trips people up is the confirmation, not the accrual — chasing a supervising solicitor who left the firm eighteen months ago is a special kind of misery.

Log your QWE contemporaneously, get it confirmed as you go rather than in one panicked batch at the end, and check the current framework and process on sra.org.uk rather than relying on what a colleague did in 2023.

SQE2 and the character and suitability assessment

SQE2 has its own assessment windows, published separately, and its own shape: five practical legal skills — Client Interviewing with attendance note and legal analysis, Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting — assessed through oral and written tasks across five practice areas. No multiple choice at all. Its calendar and its logistics differ from SQE1's, so check the SQE2 pages specifically rather than assuming the SQE1 rhythm applies.

Character and suitability sits at the end, when you apply for admission. If there is anything in your history you're uncertain about — a caution, a financial issue, an academic misconduct finding — raise it early with the SRA rather than discovering a problem after you've spent two years and a great deal of money. Early disclosure is not a confession; it's project management.

What about pass rates and "which sitting is easier"?

Every cycle, someone asks whether the January sitting is softer than the summer one, or whether a particular window has a better pass rate. Ignore it. The SRA publishes statistical reports after each sitting, and the assessments are equated so that a given standard means the same thing across sittings — you cannot game the calendar for an easier paper.

Do read the published SQE pass rate reports, though, for a different reason: they break results down by attempt number, by prior qualification route, by subject-level performance patterns. That's genuinely useful intelligence about where candidates lose marks. Read them on sra.org.uk, at source, and treat any percentage you see quoted in a forum post with the same suspicion you'd give a forwarded date screenshot.

The short version

One bookmark: sqe.sra.org.uk. Check it directly, check the date type as well as the date, and check again before you book. Put the booking deadline and the adjustments deadline in your calendar with real reminders, not mental ones. Then build the revision plan backwards from a date you've actually verified, rather than forwards from a vague sense of "sometime next year".

Once your date is in the diary, the question stops being when and becomes how many questions have I done, and which ones did I get wrong. That's the part you control. Start with a mixed diagnostic set across all thirteen FLK1 and FLK2 subjects at antlaw.ai — an honest baseline this week is worth more than a perfect plan next month. Questions about anything here: [email protected].