Surrogacy Wait Times

KEY POINTS:

• More marketing = lower wait times to match with a highly qualified surrogate.
• Highly qualified pre-screened surrogates are more prepared to start the medical process, saving you significant time.
• The best agencies maintain a balanced list and can offer lower wait times because they aren’t overloaded with families.

Surrogacy gives you the chance to finally become a parent. However, it’s important to understand why some professionals can offer low wait times and when others can’t.

Before you continue, you can speak to one of our surrogacy specialists to learn more about the surrogacy process and locate a trusted professional.

Speak with a specialist today!

In the meantime, here’s what you need to know about wait times.

Calculating Wait Times

As you compare surrogacy agencies, you’ll often find a wide range of quoted wait times.

The reason for this has to do with 3 key factors:

Marketing

Here is how marketing and outreach directly impact your wait time.

• The more marketing an agency does, the better your chance of quickly matching with a surrogate.
• The best national agencies prioritize marketing to locate more potential surrogates and screen to identify the more highly qualified candidates.
• Smaller, local surrogacy agencies typically offer low marketing that’s specific to the area, limiting your chances of finding a qualified surrogate quickly.

High marketing does require a more significant portion of the overall surrogacy budget, but for good reason. So, when comparing costs, if an agency doesn’t appear to emphasize resources for marketing, it can signal inconsistent or even lengthy wait times.

The three agencies we’ve found provide the most marketing and outreach to more surrogate candidates for quick matching include:

• American Surrogacy: Average wait time for connecting with a surrogate is 30-90 days.
• Circle Surrogacy: Average wait time for matching is 4 months.
• Growing Generations: Average wait time to find a surrogate is 12–18 months.

List of Current Clients

You don’t want to compete with a long list of families for too few surrogates. Agencies that balance their list of clients can save you significant time.

In many cases, professionals accept any family that contacts them. This creates a situation where they may have hundreds of hopeful parents but far fewer surrogates.

Agencies like American Surrogacy offer 30 – 90 day match times because:

• They keep a 1:1 ratio of hopeful parents and surrogates.
• They don’t accept every family.
• They prioritize completing journeys over building a lengthy list of clients.

That means your timeline to become a parent is typically less than 18 months.

When speaking with a potential agency, it’s important to ask how many families and surrogates they’re working with so that you can get a more accurate assessment of your wait time.

Surrogate Screening

The surrogate screening process factors into your wait time for two reasons:

• Surrogates must pass a specific screening process to become qualified.
• Some agencies are better at pre-screening surrogates and getting them fully qualified before matching, while some take longer to complete that process.

Until your surrogate is fully screened and qualified, she cannot proceed to the medical process. That impacts the time you have to wait to become a parent.

Choosing an agency that only works with highly qualified surrogates and offers an efficient pre-screening process means a much shorter wait time for you.

The reason they can do this, in part, is because they reach more potential surrogates through marketing and can screen out those who aren’t qualified. Ultimately, you don’t deserve to wait longer than you have to.

We can help you connect with a surrogacy professional that offers everything you need to quickly match with a qualified surrogate and get you moving toward your dream of becoming a parent faster.