Home » Answers Hub » Weekend and bank holiday service
Yes. There is no rule preventing documents being physically served on a Saturday, Sunday or bank holiday, and weekends are often when process servers succeed, because people are home. The subtlety is the deemed service date: for most documents, service effected on a non business day is treated as having happened on the next business day, so papers handed over on Saturday are deemed served on Monday.
An old belief persists that Sunday service is forbidden. It has history behind it, service of process on a Sunday was once void under seventeenth century legislation, but that restriction is long repealed, and the modern Civil Procedure Rules contain no equivalent. Any day is a serving day.
Service depends on finding people, and weekends are when working adults are findable: at home on a Saturday morning, returning from the shops, in the garden. Professional servers deliberately schedule attempts across weekday evenings and weekend daytimes precisely because a Tuesday 2pm visit tests an empty house. For evasive subjects, an unexpected Sunday attempt defeats the pattern they have built around avoiding weekday callers. Tremark's standard instruction spreads its included attempts across varied days and times for exactly this reason.
Physical service and legal service dates can differ. Under the deemed service rules, most documents served by the 4.30pm rule methods, personal service among them, on a non business day are deemed served the next business day: hand documents over at Saturday lunchtime and the law treats service as occurring on Monday (or Tuesday after a bank holiday weekend). Business days exclude Saturdays, Sundays, bank holidays, Good Friday and Christmas Day. For most purposes the difference is trivial; where a limitation period or hearing deadline is being counted in days, it is everything, and it is why urgent instructions are calculated backwards from the deemed date, not the knock on the door.
For those instructing: never rule out weekend attempts, and for genuinely urgent matters, tell your server the legal deadline rather than just asking for speed, so the deemed service arithmetic is done for you. For those expecting service: no day of the week protects an address, and documents accepted on a Sunday are just as real on Monday.
Tremark's nationwide team of process servers completes most instructions at a fixed fee, with a certificate of service included as standard. Get an exact price for your instruction in under a minute.
Get an instant quote or find out more about our process serving servicesPrefer to put your question to a person? Send the team a message and we will come back to you promptly.
This page provides general information about the law and practice in England and Wales and is not legal advice. Rules change and individual circumstances vary; always take advice from a solicitor on your specific situation. Prices shown are indicative, exclusive of VAT and confirmed in writing before any work begins.