Date and time

Consumer deadlines: rejecting faulty goods, the burden of proof and claim time limits.

Consumer Rights Act time limits checkerEnter the day your goods were delivered and the checker returns every statutory deadline that follows from it. That means the short-term right to reject, the 6 month rule, the window for rejecting without a deduction and the limitation period. Add a repair and it pauses the 30 days as the Act requires. The rules are those of the United Kingdom, checked on 27 September 2026.

Deadlines worked out from a date

The Date and time tools answer questions whose answer is a day in the calendar rather than an amount. The first is the one most shoppers meet sooner or later: something bought has gone wrong, and how long is there to do something about it? The Consumer Rights Act checker takes the delivery date and returns every deadline that follows from it under UK law.

The short-term right to reject, 30 days from the day after delivery, paused while a repair or replacement is under way.
The 6 months in which a fault is presumed to have been there from the start.
The limitation period for a court claim: 6 years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 5 years in Scotland.

How the deadlines are counted

Laws word their periods in different ways, and a day either way can decide a claim. A period of days that begins the day after an event ends on a different date from one that begins with the event itself, and a period of months that starts on the 31st has to end somewhere in a shorter month. Each tool here follows the wording of the statute it cites and says which convention it uses.

None of the tools uses today's date. Every result depends only on the dates you enter, so the same inputs give the same answer on any day, and a shared link shows exactly what you saw. How each rule was checked is set out in the methodology.

Reading a deadline

A date from these tools is the day a period ends under the rule as written. Courts and traders can still argue about when a period began, whether a pause applied or whether goods were faulty at all, and the tool cannot settle those questions. The result marks the last day under the rule as written, not a target. Receipts, delivery notes and emails are what show when things happened.

The pages explain the rules; they do not tell anyone what to do with a particular claim. Citizens Advice, Advice Direct Scotland and Trading Standards give free help with real disputes.