Start My Claim

The whole employment tribunal process in one free article — ACAS Early Conciliation, deadlines, the ET1, the hearing, and what you could be owed. No sign-up required to read it.

Notify ACAS and go through Early Conciliation

Free, confidential, and mandatory before almost any claim. A conciliator explores whether the dispute can be settled without a tribunal at all — often through a binding settlement called a COT3. ACAS has up to one calendar month to conciliate, extendable by 14 days if both sides agree, then issues an Early Conciliation certificate either way.

Submitted online at gov.uk. Your Early Conciliation certificate reference number is required — the tribunal rejects an ET1 without it. It is difficult to change after submission, so accuracy matters more than speed.

Your employer files an ET3

Their formal written response, setting out which parts of your claim they accept, dispute, and why. Silence beyond 28 days can mean the tribunal decides the case without their side being heard.

The tribunal sets a timetable for both sides — when to exchange documents, when witness statements are due, and when any preliminary hearing or the final hearing will take place.

Evidence and preparation

Once you can see what your employer actually disputes, you know exactly what your evidence bundle and witness statement need to prove.

Both sides present evidence, witnesses are questioned, and the panel reaches a judgment — either on the day or in a written decision later.

The tribunal decides what you are owed — sometimes at the same hearing, sometimes at a separate remedy hearing.

Do I need a solicitor for an employment tribunal claim?

No. 59% of UK employment tribunal claimants represent themselves at the hearing — without a solicitor. The tribunal's own procedure rules place the judge under a duty to help a litigant in person, and the process is designed to be followed without legal training.

How much does it cost to bring a claim?

Nothing to submit it. Employment tribunal fees were abolished in 2017, after the Supreme Court ruled in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 that charging claimants to enforce their statutory rights was unlawful. There is no issue fee and no hearing fee.

If I lose, do I have to pay my employer's legal costs?

Almost never. Unlike a civil court, each side at an employment tribunal normally pays its own costs, win or lose. The tribunal only orders one side to pay the other's costs in narrow circumstances — a vexatious or hopeless claim, or unreasonably refusing a sensible settlement offer.

How long do I have to bring a claim?

Three months minus one day from the effective date of termination, or the act you are complaining about, for most claim types — six months for redundancy pay disputes. Starting ACAS Early Conciliation pauses that clock while it runs, so start it as early as you can.

What happens if my employer does not respond to my ET1?

They have 28 days to file an ET3. If they miss the deadline without an extension, the tribunal can decide the case without their side being heard.

Can I bring more than one type of claim at once?

Yes. A single dismissal can be unfair dismissal, whistleblowing detriment and unpaid wages all at the same time, if the facts support each one — you are not limited to picking just one.

Will my case actually reach a hearing?

Probably not. Roughly 60% of claims are settled, withdrawn or conciliated before a final hearing. Of the claims that do reach one, around 14% of unfair dismissal claims succeed for the claimant, and 3–5% of discrimination claims.

Is Start My Claim legal advice?

No. Start My Claim is self-service software from Vindivo Limited — not a law firm, not solicitors, and not a claims management company. It does not act on your behalf or negotiate with your employer. Build costs £299 one-off; Full Case, with complete hearing preparation, costs £399 one-off.

Do you actually have a claim?

"Employment tribunal claim" actually covers five quite different types of complaint, each with its own test. Most people arrive here thinking of one — it is worth checking the others too, because a single dismissal can trigger more than one at the same time.

You were dismissed, and the reason or the process was not fair. Usually needs two years' continuous employment (continuity of service) — falling to six months for dismissals on or after 1 January 2027, under the Employment Rights Act 2025.

You were treated worse because of a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 — age, disability, race, sex, religion and others. No length-of-service requirement, not even day one.

Unpaid wages and deductions

Money you are owed — wages, holiday pay, minimum wage shortfalls — was withheld without lawful authority. No service requirement.

Redundancy pay disputes

You were made redundant, and your employer disputes, or has not paid, your statutory redundancy pay. Needs two years' continuous employment.

Whistleblowing and protected disclosure

You were dismissed or mistreated after reporting wrongdoing in the public interest — a qualifying disclosure. A day-one right, with no service requirement.

These can overlap. A dismissal shortly after a formal complaint can be unfair dismissal, whistleblowing detriment and unpaid wages all at once — it is worth checking each test rather than settling on the first one that sounds close.

Are you still in time?

Most tribunal time limits run from the effective date of termination — the legal end date of your employment — or the date of the act you are complaining about, and they are unforgiving. Miss them, and the strongest claim can be thrown out before anyone reads the details.

Unfair dismissal & discrimination

3 months minus 1 day

Unpaid wages & whistleblowing

Redundancy pay disputes

One thing changes all of this: starting Early Conciliation with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) pauses the clock. The time limit stops running from the day ACAS receives your notification ("Day A") until the day it issues your certificate ("Day B"). After Day B you get either the remainder of your original time limit, or at least one calendar month from the certificate date — whichever gives you more time. It is automatic; you do not have to apply for it.

Because Early Conciliation is also mandatory before you can file at all (next section), starting it early does double duty — it protects your deadline and it is the required first step.

The road map — the whole process at a glance

However your case ends, most employment tribunal claims move through the same stages. None of them can be skipped — though a claim can settle at any point along the way.

A claim can settle at any point after the ET1 is filed — through further ACAS conciliation, direct negotiation, or judicial mediation. Roughly 60% of claims are settled, withdrawn or conciliated before ever reaching a final hearing.

Every one of these steps strengthens your claim, and none of them commits you to anything.

Contract, written statement of terms, payslips, and the dismissal or grievance letter itself.

Emails, texts, Slack or Teams messages — especially anything about the reason you were treated the way you were.

Colleagues who saw or heard what happened. Write down what each one could confirm, before memories fade.

Three months minus a day from dismissal (six months for redundancy pay). Write the date down somewhere you will see it.

It is free, it is required, and starting it early gives you more room if things run late.

One page, oldest first: what was said, what was done, who was there. This becomes the backbone of your ET1 and your witness statement.

What it actually costs

It costs nothing to bring a claim. Employment tribunal fees were introduced in 2013 and abolished in 2017, after the Supreme Court ruled in

R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor

[2017] UKSC 51 that charging claimants to enforce their statutory rights was unlawful. There is no issue fee and no hearing fee — submitting an ET1 costs £0, whatever help you use to prepare it.

The rule that surprises people coming from a small claims background: unlike a small claims case, each side normally pays its own costs at an employment tribunal, win or lose. Under Rule 76 of the Employment Tribunal Rules of Procedure, the tribunal only orders one side to pay the other's costs in narrow circumstances — if a claim or a defence was vexatious, abusive, or had no reasonable prospect of success, or if a party unreasonably refused a sensible settlement offer. For most claimants, this rule is protective: losing does not usually mean paying your employer's legal bill on top.

If you do want paid help, a solicitor typically charges £200–£450 an hour, and a straightforward unfair dismissal claim taken from start to finish can run to £3,000–£8,000 or more by the time it reaches a hearing. Conditional fee agreements — pay only if you win — exist, but the success fee is usually 25–50% of whatever you are awarded. Legal aid was removed for almost all employment tribunal cases in April 2013, under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, so it is not available to most claimants regardless of the merits of the case.

Why paying for a solicitor rarely makes sense for most tribunal claims

Because each side usually bears its own costs regardless of outcome (see above), a solicitor's bill almost never comes back from your employer — win or lose, you pay it yourself. That is genuinely different economics to a civil court claim, where the losing side often pays the winner's costs. At an employment tribunal, that "loser pays" default does not apply. Hire a solicitor for a straightforward claim, win, and the fees still come out of your award.

It is also not how the system was designed to be used. The tribunal's own procedure rules place the judge under a duty to help a litigant in person — the formal term for someone representing themselves — and keep the process fair. If your employer brings a barrister, that barrister operates under real constraints too: they are not allowed to take advantage of your lack of legal training, and the judge will step in if they try. That is most of why 59% of UK employment tribunal claimants represent themselves at the hearing — without a solicitor.

None of this means paid help is never worth it — the next section is about exactly that trade-off — but for most single-claim, single-claimant cases, the maths rarely favours an hourly-rate solicitor over doing it yourself, with or without software built for the job.

Is self-representation right for you?

The previous two sections are about cost. This one is about fit — four honest questions worth asking before you decide how to go about this.

Can you set aside a few hours a week while your claim is live — especially around Early Conciliation and in the run-up to any hearing?

Paperwork and deadlines

Are you comfortable following a timetable and hitting tribunal deadlines, even when the rest of life gets busy?

Facing your employer

Can you stay factual and calm answering questions from your employer's side, in a preliminary hearing or at the final hearing, even if it feels adversarial?

Are you willing to look up a word you do not recognise rather than guess what it means? The glossary further down this page is built for exactly that.

None of this is pass or fail. Most people who read this far manage all four just fine — the majority of claimants do exactly this. Three honest paths, depending on how it felt reading the list above:

• Free, and thousands do it well. The risk is procedural traps, not the law itself — see the five mistakes further down.
• Alone, with software.
• You stay in control of every decision; the tool builds documents in the format the tribunal expects, and is built to help catch deadlines and mistakes before they cost you anything.
• Worth genuinely considering if you are bringing multiple overlapping claims, your schedule of loss is likely to exceed the compensatory award cap, or your employer is bringing an experienced barrister to a multi-day hearing. That is a real cost-benefit call, not a failure to cope on your own.

If cost is the only thing stopping you and you would rather have someone stand up in the room, a small number of charities offer free representation to claimants who meet their criteria: the Free Representation Unit represents people refused funding elsewhere, using supervised volunteer law students; Advocate connects litigants in person with barristers offering free representation or advice; and Citizens Advice and local Law Centres offer practical help, sometimes representation. All three are competitive and can take weeks to respond, so apply early in your case, not the week before your hearing.

Anatomy of the ET1 claim form

The ET1 — the tribunal claim form — is submitted online at gov.uk once you have your Early Conciliation certificate number. It is difficult to change after submission, so accuracy at this stage matters more than speed.

Your details and your employer's (the respondent's) full legal name and address.

Early Conciliation certificate number

Your reference from ACAS — the tribunal rejects an ET1 without it.

Start date, job title, pay, and how and when it ended.

Which claim type(s) you are bringing, and a clear narrative of what happened and why it was unlawful.

What you want — compensation, reinstatement, or another outcome — even as an estimate at this stage.

The narrative section is often where claims are won or lost on paper, before anyone reaches a hearing room. Specific dates and named facts read very differently to a tribunal than a general sense of unfair treatment.

What happens after you file

Once your ET1 is accepted, the tribunal serves a copy on your employer along with a response pack. From that date they have 28 days to file an ET3 — their formal written answer, setting out which parts of your claim they accept, dispute, and why. Silence beyond 28 days can mean the tribunal decides the case without their side being heard.

The tribunal then issues case management orders — a timetable for both sides covering when to exchange documents, when witness statements are due, and when any preliminary hearing or the final hearing will take place. Most claims involve at least one preliminary hearing before the final one, usually a short phone or video hearing to agree the timetable and list the issues in dispute — though some settle a specific legal question first, for example whether you were an employee at all, or whether your claim was brought in time. If the tribunal thinks part of a claim has little reasonable prospect of success, it can order a deposit, up to £1,000, as a condition of continuing to pursue that part.

None of this is the final hearing. It is administrative groundwork — but missing a case management order, or turning up unprepared for a preliminary hearing, can end a claim before the facts are properly heard. A claim can also settle at any point from here, through further ACAS conciliation, direct negotiation, or judicial mediation. Roughly 60% of claims are settled, withdrawn or conciliated before ever reaching a final hearing.

Hearing day and remedy

Most people imagine a tribunal like a televised courtroom. The reality is closer to a meeting around a table in an ordinary room. Usually an Employment Judge sits with up to two lay members — one with an employer background, one with an employee or trade union background — though some hearings are heard by a judge alone. There is no jury, and the judge speaks in plain English.

How long it takes varies: a straightforward unfair dismissal claim is often listed for one to three days; discrimination claims, with more evidence to hear, can run five days or more. The tribunal system is under real strain — the open caseload passed 531,000 in 2026, a record high according to government figures published that June — and hearings in busier regions are being listed a long way out. A remote hearing is often listed sooner than an in-person one, and it is something you can apply for.

If you win an unfair dismissal claim

Compensation comes in two separate parts, assessed differently:

The basic award — a fixed formula

Complete years of service (capped at 20) × an age-based multiplier (0.5 weeks under 22, 1 week aged 22–40, 1.5 weeks aged 41+) × your weekly pay, capped at £751 from 6 April 2026. Maximum possible: £22,530.

The compensatory award — your actual financial loss

Covers lost earnings to date, likely future loss, loss of statutory employment rights, lost pension contributions, and lost benefits like a company car. Capped at whichever is lower: 52 weeks' actual gross pay, or £123,543 from 6 April 2026. For dismissals from 1 January 2027, the £123,543 cap is removed entirely under the Employment Rights Act 2025 — only the 52-weeks'-pay limit will still apply.

What can move the figure

A Polkey reduction (the employer would likely have dismissed you fairly anyway), contributory fault, or failing to look for new work can all cut the final figure. An ACAS uplift of up to 25% can move it the other way if your employer ignored the ACAS Code of Practice. Neither cap applies to whistleblowing dismissal or discrimination claims — there, compensation is uncapped.

If your claim includes discrimination

You can also claim for the distress and humiliation it caused — separate from any financial loss, and separate from a dismissal even happening at all. This is called an injury to feelings award, and tribunals use three reference ranges, called the Vento bands, to decide it.

A one-off incident, or minor in nature.

Serious cases not meriting the upper band.

The most serious cases; exceptional cases can exceed it.

At a final hearing, roughly 14% of unfair dismissal claims succeed for the claimant, and 3–5% of discrimination claims — sobering figures, and the reason most claims with real strength settle beforehand rather than run the full distance.

Five mistakes that sink tribunal claims

Contacting ACAS too late, or not at all

No Early Conciliation certificate means no ET1, whatever else is right about your case.

A vague ET1 narrative

“I was treated unfairly” persuades nobody. Specific dates, names and events do.

No job-search record after dismissal

Without evidence you looked for work, the tribunal can find you failed to mitigate your loss — and cut your compensatory award.

Missing case management deadlines

Ignored directions and late evidence exchange can weaken a strong claim before the hearing even starts.

Turning up to the hearing unprepared

No agreed bundle, no rehearsed answers, no chronology. Preparation is most of what a solicitor would actually do for you.

Is it worth claiming?

Three questions, answered honestly, save a lot of wasted time on a claim that was never going to land.

1. Can you evidence it?

Not “everyone knew” — documents, messages, dates, witnesses. Thin evidence is the single biggest reason claims fail.

2. Is your employer still trading?

A judgment against a dissolved company is a piece of paper. Check Companies House if there is any doubt.

3. Is the likely outcome worth the road?

Around 60% of claims settle before a hearing, often for less than the maximum, sooner than the maximum would take. Weigh a realistic settlement against 12–18 months to a final hearing with a 14% (unfair dismissal) or 3–5% (discrimination) claimant success rate if it goes all the way.

None of this means do not claim — most people who do, do so for good reason. It means going in with your eyes open, which is what the rest of this guide is for.

Employment tribunals, in plain English

What Start My Claim costs, if you want the software

Everything above is free to read and use as a road map on your own. If you would rather the paperwork was built for you, one fixed fee — no hourly clock, no percentage of your award.

Start with Build and need Full Case later? Your £299 is automatically credited — Full Case costs the £100 difference. One-off payments. No subscription. No percentage of your award.

How to make an employment tribunal claim

The employment tribunal time limit, explained

Employment tribunal costs — can you be ordered to pay?

Do you need a solicitor for an employment tribunal?