Timescales

SI Registration and Publishing Timescales

SIs should be submitted for registration and publication as far in advance of your publication date as possible.  Remember to allow additional time to resolve any registration failures or validation errors. An SI should, at a minimum, be made available in PDF format on the legislation.gov.uk website immediately after being laid (where applicable) and before or on the day it comes into force.

Processing times vary for different document types but in general the registration and publishing process takes 4 working days – 24 hours for registration and 3 working days for print publication – and this is the figure the legislation.gov.uk Publishing system uses to calculate estimated publication dates for a standard SI submission.  

The SI Registration team has a target turn-around time of 24 hours from receipt of the SI for processing and registration of General and Print SIs.  For Local Non-print SIs the target is 3 working days and for stand-alone associated documents it is 48 hours.

SIs which are laid will be published upon confirmation of laying assuming that the SI is valid. All other SIs will normally be published 3 working days after receiving an SI number unless the Department has requested a different publication date again assuming that the SI is valid.  SIs that contain high impact errors will be returned to the Department for correction.  If only low impact errors are present then the SI will not be returned to the Department for correction providing that on submission the user has authorised TSO to make the corrections on the Department's behalf.

Local non-print SIs will be uploaded to legislation.gov.uk in PDF format 3 working days after receiving an SI number unless the Department has requested a different upload date.

If a Department requests expedited publication, then the SI will publish online in PDF format with XML and print publication to follow.

Stand-alone associated documents become available on legislation.gov.uk immediately after passing registration.