Qualitative Research Timeline: How Many Days from Brief to Report

• For 12 one-hour interviews with consumers in a large city, our model gives 24 to 41 working days (about 5 to 8 weeks) from brief to report, before transcription is added.
• Recruitment moves the date most: 8 to 12 working days in a large metro, 10 to 15 in a Tier-2 city (a mid-sized city outside the largest metros), and 13 to 20 for rural or specialist audiences in our defaults.
• Transcribing one hour of interview can take a full working day, so 12 hours of audio can mean up to 12 working days if one person types it all.
• Put a findings date, not "soon", in the brief, and ask for stage-by-stage dates in writing.

You work it out by adding five stages in working days: planning, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis and reporting. Enter the figures below. The defaults are our recommendation for planning as of November 2026, not a measured average from a set of completed studies, not a quote and not a promise of any provider's turnaround. Replace them with the dates in your recruiter's written plan.

The formulas are our model, built from the inputs above:

• Booked sessions = C ÷ (1 − N), rounded up.
• Fieldwork days = (booked sessions ÷ S, rounded up) × (1 + U), rounded up.
• Analysis days = C × L × R ÷ H.
• Total = planning + recruitment + fieldwork + analysis + reporting.

The no-show input follows our own standard practice: we plan for a 15 to 25% no-show rate even with confirmed participants. By our arithmetic, 1 ÷ (1 − no-show rate), that means recruiting roughly 18 to 33% more people than you need (25% more at the 20% default used here). The analysis ratio sits on published coding times, covered in the transcription section below. For focus groups, enter each group as one session and the group length as L.

For 12 completed one-hour interviews with consumers in a large metro, a single moderator and a single analyst, the total is 24 to 41 working days, or about 5 to 8 weeks. Here is the working.

The model runs the stages in order and leaves out public holidays, translation and transcription. Real teams overlap them: the guide is written while recruiting starts, and analysis starts while interviews continue. How many days that saves depends on the team, so use the sequential total as your safe date.

Recruitment changes the date most between audiences, because it depends on who you need and where they are: our metro default is 8 to 12 working days against 13 to 20 for rural or specialist audiences. Fieldwork and analysis scale with the number of interviews. These are our planning recommendations for recruitment working days, including the replacement buffer, not a measured average, and the totals they give for the same 12 interviews.

Each extra screening criterion narrows the pool, and quotas (the target number of participants in each group, such as age or city) that look reasonable alone become hard together. The maths is people to screen = booked sessions ÷ incidence rate. If one in ten screened people qualifies, 15 booked sessions need 150 people screened. Our incidence rate guide shows how to estimate that rate before you brief.

Our advice: decide before fieldwork which quota you would loosen first. It is quicker to relax one criterion than to wait for a perfect match.

They catch teams out because both scale with audio hours, and transcription is easy to leave out. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that a single hour of taped individual interview can take a full day to transcribe, with extra time for translation, and that group interviews can take even longer. Twelve hours of audio typed by hand is therefore up to 12 working days. Those days are not in our table.

If transcription starts as interviews finish, much of it overlaps with fieldwork. If one person does it after fieldwork ends, add the remainder to your total. A set of transcripts from a professional service took 2 to 3 weeks to come back in the CDC journal workflow we draw on, which was a health-research setting and may be slower than commercial work.

The same workflow puts memoing (short notes on each transcript) at 1 to 2 hours per transcript and full coding (tagging passages of each transcript with labels) at 1 to 3 hours per transcript of about one hour of audio. Together that is 2 to 5 hours per interview hour. We plan on 3 to 5, because a first pass is slower than a practised one.

The CDC workflow also lists a codebook (the list of those labels and their meanings) taking 1 to 4 weeks, theme development 2 to 4 weeks and write-up 1 to 3 weeks. The CDC workflow assumes about 20 hours of effort a week, so its weeks are part-time weeks. The CDC manual notes that most of the time a study takes comes after fieldwork is complete. Our inference: a commercial brief needs fewer weeks only because it asks for themes and quotes, not a research-grade codebook.

Read the low figure as everything going right and the high figure as the date to commit to. Then work backwards from the date you need findings, and put that date in the brief.

If the result is later than you need:

• Cut the sample. Our guide to sample size shows when fewer interviews are enough.
• Add a second moderator. This roughly halves fieldwork days, though it adds moderator variation.
• Add a second analyst. This shortens analysis days, but needs time for a shared synthesis.
• Loosen the least important quota.

Our one-page market research brief has a row for the date you need findings and the fieldwork window, and asks for a date rather than "soon". Ask any recruiter for dates for recruitment complete, fieldwork complete, transcripts delivered and report delivered.

We agree the dates with you before recruitment starts. You send your research brief and we review it for feasibility: objective, method, audience, geography, sample size and timelines. We then send a tailored proposal and quote. Once scope, commercials and timelines are agreed, we commission the project and begin recruitment.

We manage recruitment and participant engagement: screening, coordination and scheduling. Participants are identity-checked before invitation. Invitations depend on each study's requirements and the participant's profile. Sessions can run in languages other than English, and we can supply moderators. Depending on scope, deliverables can include recordings, transcripts, structured data exports and research reports, all agreed before the study begins.

If you want to judge participant quality first, we offer a free pilot before you commit to a full project.

Email your brief, with the date you need findings, to support@qualfacto.io. We aim to reply within one business day (Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00 Indian Standard Time); detailed briefs may take longer. For quick queries you can also message us on WhatsApp.