Everybody in compliance has an instinct for how long a consultation runs, and the instinct is usually “about a month”. We can now check it. For every consultation paper in our index that states both a publication date and a closing date, the gap between them is a measurable quantity.
Across 104 such consultations, the median window is 38 days. The instinct is roughly right and the variance is the interesting part. The ones still open are on our deadlines page, with the days remaining on each.
Bodies with at least three dated consultations in the index, as at 17 September 2026.
| Body | Jurisdiction | Consultations | Median days | Shortest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASIC | Australia | 66 | 40 | 10 |
| Productivity Commission | Australia | 5 | 17 | 17 |
| TGA | Australia | 4 | 32 | 31 |
| APRA | Australia | 4 | 29 | 23 |
| Fair Work Commission | Australia | 3 | 14 | 7 |
| PRA | United Kingdom | 3 | 48 | 15 |
The median is not the number that hurts you
A 38-day median is comfortable. A seven-day minimum is not, and the minimum is what determines whether your process works. Two of the bodies above have run a consultation with a window under a fortnight, and a fortnight is shorter than many organisations’ internal approval cycle for an external submission.
The pattern behind the short ones is procedural rather than substantive. The Fair Work Commission’s median of fourteen days reflects the fact that much of what it consults on is directions in a live matter, where the timetable is set by the proceeding rather than by policy convention. ASIC’s short windows are almost all continuity work on instruments that already exist: its briefest, at ten days, proposed extending a design and distribution obligations instrument, and the next four were proposals to remake existing legislative instruments or relief. None was new policy.
That is reassuring in one sense and not in another. The short windows are mostly on things you either already knew about or do not need to respond to. But you cannot know which without reading it, and the cost of finding out late is the same either way.
What this implies for a process
- A weekly review cycle is too slow for the tail. A consultation published on a Monday with a seven-day window is closed before the following Monday’s meeting.
- The decision that matters is triage, not response. Deciding in the first 48 hours whether something applies to you is what buys the remaining time.
- Extensions are common enough to be worth watching for, and they arrive as an edit to the original page rather than as a new publication — which means a tool that only watches for new documents will miss them. We have written about how often regulators edit pages after publishing them.
Measured on 17 September 2026 across consultations fetched directly from the publishing body, where both a publication date and a closing date were stated in the document. Bodies with fewer than three dated consultations are excluded, as are two outliers whose stated windows exceed a year and which we are still verifying.