What is the 20-week EHCP timescale?

Twenty weeks is the legal maximum a local authority has to complete an EHC needs assessment and issue a final EHC plan, counted from the request, including deciding whether to assess within the first six weeks. An EHC plan is an Education, Health and Care plan: the legal document that sets out a child or young person's needs and the support a council must secure. The deadline is fixed by regulation 13 of the SEND Regulations 2014, which requires the finalised plan to be sent as soon as practicable and in any event within 20 weeks.

The milestones inside the 20 weeks

The clock is not a single deadline. It has set staging points along the way, and the council has to clear each one to stay lawful overall:

• By week 6: decide whether to carry out an assessment and notify the parent or young person of that decision (regulation 5).
• Weeks 6 to 16: gather advice and decide whether the evidence shows a plan is needed. Advice the council requests must normally be returned within six weeks (SEND Code of Practice, paragraph 9.42).
• By week 20: issue the final EHC plan.

When the clock actually starts

This is the part most pages leave out. The 20 weeks runs from the date the council receives the request for an assessment under section 36 of the Children and Families Act 2014, or the date it becomes responsible for the child or young person. It does not run from the day the assessment is opened, the day the request is acknowledged, or the day a case is allocated to an officer. The 20-week point is also the deadline for the final plan, not the draft, so leaving fifteen days for the parent to comment on a draft has to be built into the window, not added on top of it.

The exceptions are narrow, and backlogs are not one

A council cannot rely on its own capacity to excuse a missed deadline. The timescales can be set aside only in the limited situations listed in regulation 10: where the child, parent or young person is absent from the area for a continuous period of at least four weeks, where exceptional personal circumstances affect them, or where the school or early-years provider is closed for at least four weeks. Staffing shortages, a backlog of cases, or professional advice arriving late are not lawful reasons to go past 20 weeks. If you cannot meet the deadline for one of those statutory reasons, you must tell the parent why. For what follows when the deadline is missed without one, see what happens if a local authority misses the 20-week deadline, and for the related assessment-stage clock, see the statutory timescale for an EHC needs assessment.

Still the law in 2026

The 20-week timescale is current law as of 31 May 2026. The 2026 Schools White Paper proposes Individual Support Plans and a reshaped EHCP model, but, per the GOV.UK Education Hub explainer, no changes to EHCP support begin before September 2030 and reforms complete by 2035. Until then, plan your casework against the existing 20-week clock.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.