How long Universal Credit appeals are taking, January to March 2026
Universal Credit appeals cleared in January to March 2026 took a mean of 28 weeks from the appeal being received to the case being cleared. Half were cleared within 20 weeks, and a quarter took longer than 37 weeks. These figures describe cases that finished in that quarter. They do not predict how long any particular appeal will take, and they say nothing about what a tribunal will decide. The quarter is marked provisional.
How many Universal Credit appeals are in the queue
- Received in January to March 2026
- 9,058
- Open at the end of the quarter
- 21,214
Tables SSCS_1 and SSCS_4. Open caseload is a snapshot taken when the data was extracted, so it is not receipts minus disposals. A data quality issue identified in January 2026 may have over-reported open caseload by around 5,000 cases across the tribunal.
Before the wait even starts
Universal Credit is decided by the Department for Work and Pensions. You normally have to ask for the decision to be looked at again before you can appeal, and there is a deadline on both steps.
How this page is built
Source: Tribunals statistics quarterly: January to March 2026, Ministry of Justice and HM Courts and Tribunals Service, published 11 June 2026, read on 4 September 2026. Timeliness runs from receipt of the appeal to the case being cleared and covers cases cleared in the quarter. Means and bands are copied from the published tables, not recalculated.
Contains public sector information from the Ministry of Justice and HM Courts and Tribunals Service, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The publication and the tables we read.
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