Children's DLA: how long a claim took to be decided, month by month
Parents waiting on a Disability Living Allowance decision for a child are rarely told how long it should take. The Department for Work and Pensions measures itself against 45 working days and publishes how often it met that. This orders the months it published, best first, so you can see what the wait has actually looked like.
Period: 1 August 2025 to 31 March 2026, published 2026-05-07 and read on 2026-09-11. Across the whole period, 185,900 new claims were cleared and 68.3 per cent were cleared within 45 working days.
| # | Month cleared | New claims cleared | Cleared within 45 working days | Share within 45 working days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | March 2026 | 22,400 | 20,300 | 90.7 per cent |
| 2 | February 2026 | 17,200 | 15,400 | 89.4 per cent |
| 3 | January 2026 | 19,000 | 16,500 | 87 per cent |
| 4 | November 2025 | 22,000 | 19,100 | 86.8 per cent |
| 5 | December 2025 | 15,900 | 13,700 | 86.1 per cent |
| 6 | October 2025 | 29,400 | 24,800 | 84.1 per cent |
| 7 | September 2025 | 32,200 | 15,900 | 49.5 per cent |
| 8 | August 2025 | 27,900 | 1,300 | 4.7 per cent |
What this data is, and what it is not
- These figures are DWP management information from the DLA computer system, collated for internal departmental use and not quality assured to the same extent as official statistics.
- Claim counts are rounded by DWP to the nearest 100, so rows may not sum to the totals.
- The series starts in August 2025 because that is when the current 45 working day timeliness standard was introduced.
- A cleared claim means a decision was made. DWP does not publish how many of these claims were awarded, so nothing here is an award rate.
- DWP publishes condition categories for children's DLA only as a caseload of live awards through Stat-Xplore, and publishes no award rate by condition for children. This page does not attempt one.
- Scotland: Child Disability Payment has replaced DLA for children there and is administered by the Scottish Government, so it is not in these figures.
How this list is built
One row per month in the DWP release, ordered by the published percentage of new children's DLA claims cleared within 45 working days, highest first. Clearance totals and the within 45 working day counts are DWP's own figures, rounded by DWP to the nearest 100, and the percentages are DWP's own. The months are consecutive, and the 45 working day standard was introduced in August 2025, so the order also reads as the sequence in which the figures moved. Nothing is recalculated and nothing is estimated. A clearance is a decision made, of any kind: DWP does not publish how many of these claims were awarded, so this data says nothing about whether a claim succeeded.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Our compilation and ordering are published under CC BY 4.0.
Attribution: Finally Seen, Months ranked by how quickly children's DLA claims were decided, https://finallyseen.org.uk/dla-children/decision-times. Reuse permitted with attribution.
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