How long healing takes depends on what kind of wound it is, what caused it, where it is, and the health of the person healing it. There is no single figure that covers all of them.
Studies that have measured healing in real patient groups find the range is wide. A 2022 Italian study of homecare residents with skin ulcers reported that healing times differed substantially depending on the type of ulcer, even among patients in the same group, and that the times reported across other published studies varied widely as well.
Underneath that variation, the biological process follows a recognisable sequence. StatPearls, a clinical reference available through NCBI Bookshelf, describes an inflammatory stage that usually lasts several days; a proliferative phase, when new tissue and new blood vessels form, that can last several weeks; and a maturation or remodelling phase that begins around week three and can continue for up to twelve months. These describe the biology of healing. They are not a prediction of when any particular wound will close.
That last phase is why a wound can look finished before it is. As the European Wound Management Association puts it in its patient Q&A, a wound may be closed on the outside while it takes months before the inside is completely healed. For surgical incisions specifically, StatPearls notes that maximum tensile strength is reached after about eleven to fourteen weeks — that is a measure of how strong the repaired tissue is, not of when the wound closed — and that scar tissue ends up with roughly 80% of the strength of the original skin.
There is also no agreed point at which a slow wound becomes a “chronic” or “non-healing” one. Researchers have noted the absence of consensus on this, and different studies have used different durations. That is a separate question from how long healing normally takes, and it has its own answer.
In practice, “how many weeks has it been?” is a less useful question than “is this wound progressing toward healing?”. Measuring and recording a wound is part of what a wound care team does.