DELE results: two months, or three if you sat in May or November

Read the DELE FAQ and you will find results described as un plazo aproximado de tres meses. Scroll down the same page, to the table comparing the DELE with the SIELE, and the DELE's results line reads Aproximadamente dos meses. Two answers, one page. It is the single most confusing thing the Instituto Cervantes publishes about its own timetable, and we said so on our exam-timelines comparison before we had read far enough.

The Calificaciones page resolves it. In the body's words: El candidato dispondrá de los resultados del examen DELE en un plazo aproximado de dos meses desde la celebración de las pruebas escritas en el caso de todas las convocatorias excepto las de mayo y noviembre, en las que el plazo aproximado es de tres meses.

So the wait depends on which sitting you took, and both of the FAQ's figures are true: two months is the normal case and three months is May and November. The clock runs from the written papers, not from your oral, which may fall on a different day.

Both figures keep the word aproximado. The Instituto Cervantes does not promise a date, and it will not tell you early: No es posible facilitar las calificaciones a los candidatos con anterioridad a la fecha de su publicación. If something in your life depends on holding the result by a particular day, plan on the longer number and add margin.

Five convocatorias in 2026, with registration closing between six and ten weeks ahead. Two of them — May and November — are the three-month ones.

February: registration closed 7 January, exam 13 February. April: closed 25 February, exam 17 April. May: closed 8 April, exam 22 May — a three-month wait. October: closed 2 September, exam 16 October. November: registration closes 30 September, exam 13 November — also a three-month wait.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is decided before you book and not after. Sit in October and the result is due around the middle of December. Sit in November, three and a half weeks later, and it is due around the middle of February. Three weeks of difference in the exam date becomes two months of difference in the result, for the same exam at the same level.

If a deadline is driving you — a university application, a nationality file, an employer — that is the comparison to make, and it is not the fee. Our exam-timelines page does the same arithmetic for fourteen bodies.

When grades are published, the Instituto Cervantes emails the address you registered with and posts the result to your private area of the exams portal. Every candidate can then download an official certificación de calificaciones, which carries certificative validity in its own right.

Candidates graded APTO also receive the diploma itself en formato digital, by email, together with the score certificate, and can download it from their personal area afterwards. This is worth knowing because the older folklore — that the diploma is a paper document which appears at your exam centre months later — sends people to chase something that has already arrived in their inbox.

The paper route still exists around the edges, and the body's own instruction is easy to miss: Es responsabilidad de los candidatos mantener actualizados sus datos postales con su Centro de Examen respectivo hasta cerciorarse de la recepción de toda la documentación relativa a las pruebas. If you move house between the exam and the result, tell your centre.

For a nationality file, the digital certificate is designed to be printed. It is signed electronically and carries a Código Seguro de Verificación, which lets the institution you hand the paper copy to check it against the Instituto Cervantes. Alternatively you can authorise the Ministry of Justice to consult your DELE results directly. Which level a nationality file needs is a separate question, covered in the DELE levels guide and across eighteen countries in the citizenship comparison.

This is the section to read before results day rather than after, because the window is short and the decision is not obvious.

You have one month from publication to file one request for a review, through a form in your private area of the portal. The Instituto Cervantes then has up to three months to give you its final answer, which is the period the law allows it; the page says it tries to be quicker.

It is not free. A review costs 60% of the exam price before any discount, paid in euros at the start of the process. That money comes back only if the review changes NO APTO to APTO, or raises you to the higher level on the double-exit exams (A2/B1 and B2/C1 for schools). A review that moves your marks without crossing either of those lines costs you the full 60% and returns nothing.

What actually happens is more thorough than a re-read. The body checks the administration of your exam against the incident report from your centre, re-verifies the automatically scored reading and listening papers, and sends your written and spoken papers to a third independent marker, working centrally — for the oral, from the recording, or failing that from the original markers' report.

Which is why the warning at the end of that page matters: un candidato puede obtener una calificación inferior a la original. Because the whole paper is marked again rather than argued over, the grade can come back lower than the one you appealed — either because the automatic scoring is corrected, or because the third marker simply judges your writing or speaking differently.

Norway's norskprøven publishes the same warning about its written appeal: an appeal there can raise the result, leave it, or lower it, and the outcome is final. Two bodies, two languages, one thing candidates are rarely told in advance — an appeal is a re-marking, not a second opinion you can decline if you dislike it.

One more limit, stated flatly: No se atenderán solicitudes de acceso, devolución ni de reproducción de la documentación de las pruebas de examen. You cannot ask to see your own exam paper.

A surprising number of reviews are filed by candidates who misread the pass rule rather than the marking, so it is worth stating. Sixty points out of a hundred is not on its own a pass.

To be graded APTO you must sit every paper and reach the required score in each group of papers for A1 to C1, or in each paper for the C2. A strong total that hides one weak group is a NO APTO, and a review will not change that, because nothing was marked wrongly.

Nor do partial passes carry over: a group you passed at a previous convocatoria does not exempt you next time. And missing the exam is expensive — the terms you accept when you pay state that the fee buys one opportunity on one date, with no refund and no transfer to another convocatoria except in duly justified cases of special gravity.

The compensation for all of this is that the diploma never expires. Once you have it, it is permanent, internationally recognised, and diplomas issued before the 2008 revision remain valid without re-sitting anything.