No-fault divorce was meant to make the whole thing simpler. When the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act came into force in April 2022, it swept away the need to blame a spouse, allowed couples to apply together for the first time, and promised a calmer, more modern way to end a marriage. The blame was gone. The wait, it turns out, was not.
The most recent Ministry of Justice figures tell a story almost nobody predicted. The average divorce in England and Wales now takes longer to complete than at any point on record. Measured from the date of application to the final order that legally ends the marriage, the mean time reached 68.6 weeks in 2025. That is just over sixteen months, and it is the longest the ministry has recorded in more than two decades of data.
The rise has been steady rather than sudden. In 2022 the average stood at around 60 weeks. It climbed to 64 in 2023, then 66 in 2024, and now sits above 68. Each year of the no-fault era has been slower than the one before it.
There is an important qualification worth making early, because the headline figure can mislead. The mean is pulled upward by a tail of older, complicated cases still working through the system. The median, the midpoint that better reflects a typical case, is much lower, at around 30 weeks. But even that midpoint has risen every year since the reform, and the direction of travel is the same whichever measure you use. Divorce is getting slower, not faster.
Part of the reason was designed in on purpose. The new law introduced a mandatory twenty-week reflection period between the application and the first order, a pause that did not exist before. Add the further six-week wait built into the later stage, and the law itself sets a floor of about twenty-six weeks before any divorce, however amicable, can complete.
“Most people file expecting the divorce to be the slow part, and are surprised to learn it is usually the fastest,” according to Osbourne Pinner, a firm of solicitors specialising in family law. “The reflection period runs in the background while the real work, sorting the money and the children, is what takes the time.”
That points to the second reason, which was not designed at all. The reflection period was meant to be used, not merely waited out. Couples are supposed to spend those twenty weeks resolving their finances and making arrangements for any children, so the paperwork and the settlement move in step. In practice, many treat the divorce application as the whole job and leave the finances untouched, only to find the hard negotiations still ahead of them once the clock has run.
There is a further trap in that gap. A divorce can be finalised without a financial order ever being made, which leaves the money side legally open long after the marriage has formally ended. For couples who rush the paperwork to be done with it, the speed can be a false economy, because an unresolved financial claim can resurface years later. The couples who come out of the process cleanly tend to be the ones who resist the urge to hurry the wrong part.
Behind both sits a third factor that has nothing to do with divorce law and everything to do with the courts. The family justice system is under strain that predates no-fault and has deepened since. Case volumes are high, hearings are hard to list quickly, and anything that has to go before a judge, a contested financial order, a dispute over children, now joins a queue.
The scale of that pressure has drawn warnings from across the profession. Reducing delay, the Bar Council has argued, will take “comprehensive investment in family justice,” a point its chair Barbara Mills KC made in response to a parliamentary report on court waiting times. The report itself found thousands of children caught in cases unresolved after more than a hundred weeks, a reminder that the averages hide far longer individual ordeals at the extreme end.
The funding question runs underneath all of it. When early legal advice is out of reach, more people arrive at court without representation, and cases move more slowly as a result. Law Society president Richard Atkinson has warned that cuts have left many parents to represent themselves in “stressful and complex legal proceedings,” which helps neither the families nor the system trying to process them.
What the numbers ask of anyone considering it
The practical lesson in the figures is not that divorce has become harder. Legally, the opposite is true. It is that the timetable has shifted, and the part that takes the longest is the part people tend to postpone.
The couples who move through the process most cleanly are usually the ones who treat the twenty-week reflection period as working time. They gather the financial disclosure, take advice on how assets and pensions might be divided, and reach the conditional order stage with the settlement already in view rather than still to be started. The couples who struggle are the ones who assume the wait is simply dead time, then discover the negotiation only begins once the formal steps are done.
None of this means the reform failed. Removing blame from divorce was a genuine change for the better, and the fall in openly hostile proceedings is real. But simpler was never the same as quicker. The law took the fight out of ending a marriage. It could do nothing about the time it takes to divide a life, and on the current evidence that time is only growing.
The record now stands at sixteen months and rising. For anyone watching the trend, the sensible response is not alarm but preparation, because the wait is no longer the exception. It is the system working as designed.