How Long the Entire Arizona DUI Process Takes, Start to Finish

Every post on this site explains one piece of the DUI compliance process — screening, education, treatment — but nobody adds them up into a single answer to the question people actually ask: how long is this going to take? Here’s the realistic timeline, start to finish, plus the parts that are genuinely outside your control.

The Two Timelines Running at Once

Before the hour-by-hour breakdown, it’s worth separating two things that run independently: your criminal case (handled by the court, on the court’s schedule) and your compliance requirements (screening, education or treatment, possibly a revocation evaluation). The compliance side is almost entirely within your control — you decide when to start. The criminal case is not. This post is about the compliance side, since that’s the part you can actually speed up.

Step One: The Screening

Budget about 30 minutes for the appointment itself, done online via Zoom. Scheduling typically happens within days of reaching out, not weeks. Results are reported electronically to the court and MVD the same day you complete it — no mailing, no waiting on paperwork to catch up. This is also the step that determines everything after it, which is why starting here first matters more than anything else on this list.

Step Two: Education or Treatment, Depending on What the Screening Found

This is where the timeline branches, and it depends entirely on your screening result:

16-Hour Education has an eight-week completion window from your start date, but the hours themselves are self-paced with 24-hour access. Many people finish all 16 hours in a single day; others spread it across a few weeks. Either way, you control the pace inside that eight-week ceiling.

36-Hour or 56-Hour Treatment takes longer by nature of the additional hours, and the exact completion window is confirmed when you enroll — it’s longer than the Education course’s eight weeks, scaled to the additional content. Like Education, it’s self-paced and online, so the main variable is how much time you choose to put in each week, not a fixed weekly schedule.

Step Three (If It Applies): The Revocation Evaluation

This one only applies if your license was fully revoked rather than suspended, and it comes at the end of the process, not the beginning — after your revocation period has already ended. The evaluation itself is about 30 minutes, but getting to it requires your extended certified Motor Vehicle Record and, if applicable, proof of prior treatment. Gathering those documents is usually the longest part of this step, not the evaluation itself.

So — Realistically, How Long?

For a straightforward first-time case assigned the 16-hour Education course: screening within days, education completed anywhere from one day to a few weeks after that, results reported the same day you finish. Someone who starts immediately and moves at a steady pace can realistically be done with the compliance side in two to three weeks.

For someone assigned Treatment, or dealing with a revocation evaluation on top of it, the honest answer is longer — not because any single step takes dramatically more time, but because there are more steps and each one depends on the last being finished first.

What Actually Slows People Down

It’s rarely the hours themselves. It’s delay in starting — putting off the screening while waiting to “figure things out,” which pushes every subsequent step back by the same amount. The clock on an eight-week education deadline doesn’t start until you begin, so the fastest lever you have isn’t working faster once you’ve started — it’s starting sooner.

What to Do Next

If you haven’t started yet, the screening is where the entire timeline begins. Everything downstream of it — which course, how long you have, what gets reported where — depends on that first 30-minute conversation.