How long does a debt raise take, start to finish?
Plan for twelve to sixteen weeks from a signed engagement letter to money in the account. That is the honest band for a £3m to £15m corporate debt raise in the UK, whether the deal is a refinancing, a growth facility or an acquisition line, and it holds because the pace is set by things outside anyone’s office: how quickly your own information can be assembled, how often the lender’s credit committee meets, how fast two sets of solicitors turn documents, and whether the lender being repaid cooperates on releasing its security. A well-prepared borrower with clean numbers closes near the twelve-week end. Thin management information, a complex structure or a slow counterparty pushes the same deal past sixteen. This guide sets out the week-by-week shape, the four things that set the pace, what the fast borrowers do differently, and the cases where a full process is the wrong tool altogether.
Written for the borrower’s side of the table. This is general guidance, not advice on your specific facility. It deepens the shorter answers in our working guide.
Twelve to sixteen weeks, and the band is honest.
The band is measured from a signed engagement letter, because that is the day the work can begin in earnest: the information request goes out, the data room is stood up, and the timetable becomes real. What sits in front of signature (choosing an adviser, agreeing scope and fees, assembling a first pass of the numbers) is real time too, and it is the part wholly inside your control, which is exactly why it is excluded from the quoted band. A raise that needs to complete by a fixed date should treat adviser selection as part of the runway, not a prelude to it.
Twelve weeks is not a stretch target; it is what the process takes when nothing external drags. It assumes clean, current management information, a finance team with capacity to carry a diligence load alongside the day job, a lender whose credit committee meets frequently, and an outgoing lender that cooperates on release. Sixteen weeks is the same process with one or two of those assumptions broken. Both tails exist beyond the band: a well-run, sponsor-backed deal with a pre-packed data room can close in about eight weeks, and a messy one can drag past five months. Most deals in this market land inside the band, which is why we plan to it. The band also assumes one facility and one drawdown; staged structures, delayed draws and multi-lender clubs add their own documentation and their own calendars.
A question inside the question deserves its own answer: how long from a signed term sheet to money? Around four to six weeks is the working answer, and it divides into two gates. First the selected lender takes the deal through its credit committee, which converts the deal team’s offer into the institution’s commitment. A term sheet is an offer with conditions, not committed money, and the distance between the two is the committee’s calendar plus whatever conditions it attaches. Then the documentation runs: the facility agreement, the security, the conditions precedent, the release of the old security and the funds flow. A borrower who hears “we have terms” and books the completion dinner for a fortnight later has misread where in the process a term sheet sits.
Whether advice speeds the process is a fair question to ask an adviser, and the honest answer is that it does not shorten the lender’s work by a day. What it changes is everything around that work: the movements run in parallel rather than in sequence, the pack answers in advance the questions diligence would otherwise ask one at a time, the whole field moves to a single timetable with a single deadline, and the negotiation happens against live alternatives rather than one lender’s patience. The weeks saved are the loops that never happen. What that costs, and when it earns its keep, is set out in our guide to debt advisory fees.
For a refinancing the band nests inside a longer discipline: the convention is to have the mandate live twelve to eighteen months before the facility matures, so the process runs on your timetable rather than the maturity’s. Why that runway exists, and what proximity to maturity costs, is the subject of our guide to when to start a refinancing.
The planning arithmetic is illustrative, not a timetable for your deal, but it is worth doing on day one. If funds must be in the account by 30 June, a sixteen-week process wants the engagement signed in the second week of March; a twelve-week one can start in early April. The month between those two dates is bought entirely in preparation, which is where the rest of this guide spends its time.
Four movements, overlapping at every seam.
The band decomposes into four movements, and the overlaps between them are where a fast process buys its pace. The analysis starts before the last document arrives; the lender materials are drafted while the model is still being footed; the lawyers open their files before the credit committee has formally said yes. A process run strictly in sequence does not fit inside sixteen weeks, which is one reason a raise run off the side of a desk rarely does. Treat the spans as a planning default rather than a promise: every mandate re-cuts them at kickoff around its own committee dates, valuation lead times and board calendar, and the honest timetable is the one that survives that first re-cut.
Preparation · weeks one to four
The information request goes out once, in a single pass, and the data room is stood up around it. Management sits a working session on the story and the numbers. The model is built and footed, the EBITDA is scrubbed add-back by add-back, and the information memorandum and lender materials are drafted and signed off by you, because it is your name on the numbers. This movement sets the pace of everything downstream: a data pack that arrives complete keeps the whole timetable; one that arrives in instalments loses it.
In market · weeks four to eight
A curated shortlist is approached in parallel (eight to twelve approaches is usually the right shape), NDAs are turned in days rather than weeks, and the pack goes to each lender that signs. First meetings and management presentations run through this window, and the lender question-and-answer log opens: every material answer given to one lender goes to all of them at the same stage, which keeps the process honest and the offers comparable. Where the existing lender is on the list, its approach is sequenced deliberately, with your consent, rather than folded silently into the first wave.
Terms and selection · weeks eight to twelve
Lenders are given four to five weeks from pack to a written term sheet by a set date. The offers are normalised and compared like for like, the points that carry money are negotiated, and a lender is selected against your objectives rather than a generic ranking. The selected lender then takes the deal to its credit committee, which is the step that converts an offer into an institution’s commitment, on the committee’s own calendar.
Legals and drawdown · weeks twelve to sixteen
The facility agreement and security documents are drafted and negotiated, the conditions-precedent list is worked to green, the outgoing lender’s security is released, and the funds flow is reconciled to the payoff figures. Legals and confirmatory diligence commonly take four to six weeks, and then the conditions are satisfied, the documents sign, and the money moves.
Two features of the shape matter for planning. Most of the value is created early, in framing the ask and choosing whom to invite, and late, in the negotiation and the documents; the middle is largely process discipline, kept honest by deadlines. And the movements are load-bearing at different desks. Preparation falls heaviest on your finance team, the market weeks on management in presentations, the legal weeks on your solicitors, so the burden moves around the business rather than sitting still, and each desk should know in advance which weeks are theirs.
The hub answer on what the process looks like from start to finish gives the same shape in miniature; the movements above are where the weeks inside it are won and lost.
The critical path runs through four external doors.
The drafting and the analysis are rarely the constraint; the waiting is. The first and largest driver is the state of your own information. A finance function that holds current monthly management accounts, a maintained debt schedule and an evidenced add-back file answers a diligence list in days. One that holds annual figures and an outsourced bookkeeper answers it in weeks, because each gap is found by the lender’s diligence rather than before it, and every gap found late adds a loop: a question, a reconstruction, a revised number, a re-check. This is the single most common way a twelve-week plan becomes a sixteen-week one. The branch to resolve on day one is who holds the answers. An internal CFO with a monthly close can carry the load; where the finance function is outsourced, the asks route through a firm with other clients and other deadlines, and the estimates want widening before the timetable is drawn rather than after it slips.
The second is the lender’s credit-committee cadence. Committees commonly meet weekly at some institutions and monthly at others, and the cadence, not the quality of your deal, sets that part of the clock. A deal that misses a monthly committee by two days waits four weeks for the next one, and a committee can attach conditions that must be worked off before documents complete. The practical discipline is to ask the question early, build the committee date into the timetable as a fixed external milestone, and make sure the deal team has pre-socialised the credit rather than promised the world and hoped.
The third is solicitor turnaround, on both sides. The facility agreement, the security documents and the conditions-precedent list pass repeatedly between two firms of lawyers, and each pass has a turnaround time that compounds. The conditions list is where weeks go quietly: board resolutions, insurance evidence, property consents and the like each look small and each waits on someone. The filings themselves are routine (the particulars of a new charge must be delivered to Companies House within 21 days beginning with the day after the charge is created, Companies Act 2006, s.859A), but they sit at the end of a chain that is only as fast as its slowest reply. The counter to all of it is boring and works: a single conditions tracker, owned by one person and walked weekly with both firms of lawyers, so that nothing waits because everyone assumed someone else was chasing it. How charges work, and what the register shows a lender, is in our guide to debentures and charges.
The fourth is the incumbent. On a refinancing, the lender being repaid must release its security, and it has no commercial incentive to hurry: the deeds of release are the last documents anyone chases and the first to slip. The redemption statement carries its own trap, because it is dated, with a good-until date and a daily interest accrual, so a completion that slips even a few days makes the payoff figure in the funds flow wrong. The working practice is to ask for the statement dated to the target completion date, confirm the per-diem, and build the incumbent’s realistic response time into the timetable from the start rather than discovering it in week fourteen.
Fast borrowers buy their weeks before the clock starts.
The pattern among borrowers who close at the twelve-week end is consistent, and none of it is clever. They assemble the core pack before the engagement is signed: three years’ statutory accounts, current-year monthly management accounts, the existing debt schedule and facility documents, an add-back schedule with the evidence behind each line, and a forecast, or the honest statement that none exists so one can be built early rather than discovered missing in week three. They scrub their own EBITDA before a lender’s diligence does, for the reasons set out in our guide to how much your business can borrow: a number that survives diligence intact keeps both the quantum and the timetable. And they prepare the story as well as the numbers, sitting the management session early so the narrative the market hears is management’s own, told once, rather than reverse-engineered from filings.
They answer once. A well-run process asks for everything in a single pass, and the discipline on the borrower’s side is to answer it the same way, because data delivered in instalments reopens questions that were closed and invites a second look at answers that had been accepted. Where an item has a long lead time (a property valuation, an audit sign-off, a pension figure), the fast borrowers flag it on day one so the timetable is planned around it, rather than broken by it in week nine. The calendar helps as well: a raise that opens on a fresh set of year-end accounts reads stronger, and re-cuts less often, than one that opens on stale mid-year figures.
They resource the live weeks and settle governance early. Expect the finance function to give the process two to three days a week while it runs, more around management presentations and the diligence push before close, and free that capacity in advance. A single named point of contact, a board resolution approving the transaction obtained early rather than chased at completion, and a deliberate decision about whether and when the existing lender is approached all remove the small delays that compound into a slipped week.
None of this shortens the lender’s work. It removes the loops between the lender’s work and yours, which is where the difference between twelve weeks and sixteen lives. Preparation does not compress diligence; it stops diligence bouncing.
The stretch past sixteen weeks has predictable causes.
The first cause is thin information, met above as the pace driver and met here as the stretch case: where the management information has to be reconstructed before it can be presented, the preparation movement doubles, and everything downstream shifts with it. Its close cousin is numbers that move mid-flight. A soft trading month, an audit adjustment or a restated comparative lands mid-process, the model is re-cut, and lenders who had formed a view are asked to form it again, sometimes back through their committees.
The second is structure. An acquisition interlocks the debt timetable with a purchase agreement, a seller’s patience and a second diligence workstream, which is why an acquisition facility sits toward the sixteen-week end before anything has gone wrong; the mechanics are in our guide to financing a management buyout. An asset-based structure adds field audits and asset valuations before the borrowing base can be agreed, work that is diarised in weeks rather than days; how that survey-led process runs is in our guide to asset-based lending.
The third is counterparties. A monthly credit committee, a committee condition that reopens a diligence item, an incumbent slow on its deeds of release, or a compliance re-screen forced by the process itself: on a raise that runs across several months, the lender’s day-one client checks commonly go stale and are re-run before completion. The calendar takes its own share, because August and December thin out credit committees, valuers and signing calendars alike, and a timetable that pretends otherwise is planning to slip. None of these is exotic. A borrower who can see three of them coming at the outset is not looking at a sixteen-week deal, and the honest response is to plan for that from day one rather than announce it in week twelve.
One stretch case deserves naming because it looks like a delay and is not: the incumbent’s sharpened offer commonly lands last, days after the deadline, once it is clear the process is real. Held to the same comparison as every other sheet, it is useful tension arriving late. Allowed to reopen a concluded selection, it costs a fortnight and tells every other lender the deadline was soft. A well-run process plans for the late sheet, compares it on the same grid, and keeps the clock running.
Sometimes the right answer is the faster, narrower route.
A full competitive process is the tool for a material raise where the terms are worth competing for. It is not the only tool. An extend-and-amend with the existing lender pushes the maturity out and adjusts a handful of terms in weeks rather than months, and it suits a borrower who is broadly happy with the relationship and simply needs runway. The honest caveat is that it is negotiated with one lender, so it prices sharpest when a credible alternative is visible behind it; the full treatment of that trade-off is in our guide to when to start a refinancing.
A clean renewal of a modest facility with a lender that knows you well is another case where twelve weeks of auction can cost more than it recovers, in fees, in diligence and in management time; there, a well-prepared renewal conversation does the work of a process at a fraction of its weight. And genuine urgency changes the tool rather than the speed setting. A maturity or a completion inside three months is not solved by compressing a sixteen-week process into ten; it is solved by taking the fastest sound bridge available (an extension, a short facility, the incumbent’s paper) and then running the real raise afterwards from strength rather than against a clock.
The band also excludes the stressed cases, deliberately. A raise run alongside a covenant breach, an overdue audit or a lender’s reservation of rights moves at the pace of that conversation, not the market’s, and a timetable that pretends otherwise loses credibility with every party at the table. What that situation needs first is stabilising, which is its own discipline; our guide to handling a covenant breach covers the sequence.
The trade-off deserves naming plainly: speed is bought by giving up competitive tension, and tension is what moves margin, fees, leverage and covenants in your favour. Paying for speed knowingly, once, is sound judgment. Paying for it by habit, at every renewal, is how a facility drifts to the expensive side of market without anyone ever having decided that it should.
We will put dates against your timetable.
If you are working toward a maturity, a completion or a funding need with a date on it, a first conversation is confidential and costs nothing. We will tell you plainly where your deal sits in the band, which of the four pace drivers applies to you, and whether the full process or the narrower route serves you better. See how a mandate runs in how we work, or the full range of what we advise on in our services.