Conveyancing complaints to the Legal Ombudsman rose 41% in the year to 31 March 2026. More than 3,000 home buyers complained about their conveyancer. Conveyancing now makes up 36% of all new complaints, and almost three quarters of the growth in demand. The Ombudsman found poor service in 78% of those files.
Why are conveyancing complaints rising?
Delay leads. Poor communication comes next, then trouble with post-completion registration. None of the three is a technical slip in the conveyancing itself.
The Ombudsman reads that as a pattern of service breakdown rather than a run of one-off errors. The strongest theme was clients who felt uninformed. They did not know what was happening to their sale, or why.
Volume plays a part. Conveyancing runs on huge transaction numbers, and the Ombudsman says so plainly. It does not explain a 41% jump in a single year.
What the figures show across all practice areas
The annual overview came out on 23 July. It records 14,529 new complaints between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, a rise of 37%. Of those, 8,412 were taken on for resolution, up 16%.
Wills and probate came next, then personal injury. Each made up 14% of accepted complaints.
Communication and delay drove 46% of everything that came in. Poor service showed up in 72% of cases with an investigative outcome. The Ombudsman awarded £3.7m in remedies.
One figure deserves its own line. A quarter of consumers said they never got a final response from their own law firm.
Complaint handling is the second failure
Across all areas of law, 46% of investigated cases showed poor complaint handling by the firm. In conveyancing the figure was 53%.
That is the more damaging number. It describes a failure that lands after the client has already been let down once. A late registration is a service problem. An unanswered complaint about a late registration is a regulatory one, and it is what turns a fixable gripe into an Ombudsman file.
The Ombudsman has answered with a Model Complaints Resolution Procedure. It was built and piloted during 2025/26, then launched days after the annual data. Firms without a working first-tier process now have a template rather than an excuse.
What is the SRA consulting on?
New rules to keep clients informed when they need to complain. The consultation opened on 3 July 2026 and closes on 1 September. Final proposals then go to the Legal Services Board, covering this consultation and an earlier one.
The timing is neat. Firms are asked to shape the rules in the same month the data shows why the rules are coming. A response filed by 1 September will carry more weight than a grumble in 2027.
Conveyancing is now the single largest source of complaints to the Legal Ombudsman, and in 53% of those cases the firm’s own complaint handling was found unreasonable. With the SRA consulting on additional first-tier complaints rules until 1 September, firms that fix client updates and expectation-setting now will be ahead of both the data and the rules.
What should conveyancing teams change?
The Ombudsman’s own framing points at three things. Tell clients what is happening. Tell them when it will happen. Answer them when they say it has not.
Updates at fixed points cost less than updates on demand. Setting expectations about registration timescales at the outset kills off a whole class of complaint, given how long Land Registry applications can sit. And a first-tier complaint that gets a written answer inside the firm’s own published timescale rarely travels any further.
None of that is new advice. What is new is the weight of evidence behind it, and a regulator drafting rules while that evidence sits on its desk.
Firms already reviewing their processes for the home buying reforms can fold complaint handling into the same job. Data protection complaints turned out to need a written route rather than an ad hoc one, and this is the same lesson in a different coat.