How long SQE1 preparation takes
There is no official figure, and the honest answer depends on what you are starting from. The ranges people actually report cluster like this:
| Situation | Typical runway | Hours a week |
|---|---|---|
| Full-time preparation, law degree or LPC behind you | 3–4 months | 30–40 |
| Working full-time, law background | 6–9 months | 10–15 |
| Non-law background, or returning after years away | 9–12 months | 12–20 |
Whatever the total, the distribution matters more than the number. Three hundred hours of reading produces a worse result than two hundred hours built around answering questions — which is not an opinion about learning styles but a consequence of the exam being closed book and recall-based.
The three phases
Nearly every plan that works has the same three phases, in the same order.
1. Coverage (roughly half the time)
Get through the specification once, subject by subject. The goal here is not mastery — it is that nothing on the specification is unfamiliar when you meet it in a question. End each topic with questions on it the same day, before moving on. A topic you have read but never answered a question on has not been revised; it has been introduced.
2. Practice and repair (roughly a third)
The centre of gravity moves to answering questions across everything covered so far, with the mistakes coming back to you rather than being filed away. This is the phase where scores move, and it is the phase people cut short because it feels less productive than reading something new.
3. Mocks and sharpening (the last few weeks)
Full timed sessions, in the shape of the real thing, with a proper review after each. By now new material should be rare: what you are buying is stamina, pacing and a final list of weak spots to close.
What a working week looks like
A structure that survives a job, roughly 12 hours a week — with more on the constraints in preparing while working full-time:
- Weekday mornings or evenings, 45–60 minutes: one set of questions on the current topic, plus whatever review is due — mistakes and flashcards. Short, daily, non-negotiable.
- Two weekday sessions of 90 minutes: new material, ending in questions on what you just covered.
- One longer weekend block of three hours:the week’s consolidation — a mixed set across everything covered so far, and the review that follows it.
The daily set is the load-bearing element. It is what keeps three months of material alive while you learn the fourth month’s, and it is why our dashboard puts one in front of you each day rather than leaving you to decide what to do.
What order to take the subjects in
Two principles, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why ordering feels hard:
- Start with what is hardest for you — it needs the most time and the most revisiting, and starting it late means learning it once.
- Start with what carries the most questions — Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Property Practice and the wills group are worth more of your attention than the Legal System.
In practice, start where those two overlap, and sequence related subjects together: Land Law immediately before Property Practice, Criminal Liability immediately before Criminal Practice, Trusts near Wills. From the January 2027 sitting the session groupings give you a ready-made ordering — revise the subjects that share a session together, because that is how you will meet them. The groupings are set out in FLK1 subjects and FLK2 subjects.
Where mocks belong
A mock is a diagnostic, not a rehearsal trophy. Sat too early it tells you what you already know — that you have not covered everything. Sat too late it leaves no time to act on what it found.
- One early mock, a third of the way in, purely to calibrate: what the clock feels like, what a session of that length does to your concentration.
- Then one every two or three weeks through the practice phase, each followed by a review long enough to turn its mistakes into a list of topics.
- Two or three full-length mocks in the final month, sat in the real session shape and at the time of day you will sit the real one.
The review is the part that pays. A mock you sat and never reviewed cost you three hours and taught you a number.
Planning for the week that goes wrong
Every SQE1 plan meets illness, a deadline at work, or a fortnight where nothing happens. Plans that assume otherwise do not bend, they break — and the failure mode is not losing a week, it is abandoning the plan because it is now “behind”.
- Build in one empty week per two months. If you do not need it, you get a free consolidation week.
- Set weekly targets, not daily ones. A daily target turns a bad Tuesday into a failure; a weekly one absorbs it.
- When you slip, cut coverage, not practice. Skipping the daily set to catch up on reading is precisely backwards.
The last fortnight
The final two weeks are for consolidation, not acquisition. Stop opening new topics. Work your list of mistakes, run mixed sets across each session’s subjects, and re-read your own notes on the three subjects your analytics say are weakest.
Two practical points people forget: check what the test centre requires and how long the journey takes, and sleep. The marginal question learnt at midnight is worth less than the four questions you will lose to fatigue on the day.
If you want the plan built for you — sitting date in, daily list out, adjusted as your results come in — that is what our dashboard does. Create a free account and it starts from a short diagnostic.