Employment Tribunal Compensation Statistics UK: Average Awards by Claim Type
How much do employment tribunals actually award? It is one of the most searched questions in UK employment law, and reliable statistics are genuinely hard to come by. ACAS publishes annual headline numbers. The MOJ publishes its tables. But neither gives you a clean breakdown by claim type that you can use to advise a client or set a reserve.
TribDB was built to fill that gap. Our database contains 145,317 employment tribunal decisions sourced from GOV.UK and the National Archives. Of those, 7,897 include structured compensation data extracted from the decision text. Here is what those numbers show.
The headline figures
| Metric | Value | |---|---| | Total decisions in database | 145,317 | | Decisions with compensation data | 7,897 | | Average compensation | £15,271 | | Median compensation | £2,440 | | Maximum single award | £23,790,000 |
Why the average and median are so far apart
The gap between £15,271 and £2,440 is the first thing any practitioner should clock. The median is the midpoint: half of all awards fall below £2,440. That is the realistic expectation for a typical claimant.
The average gets pulled hard by a small number of very large awards. The highest single award in our database is £23,790,000, a combined race discrimination and whistleblowing claim. A handful of seven-figure awards will do that to a mean.
For client advice and reserve-setting, use the median. The average is useful for understanding tail risk in uncapped jurisdictions, but quoting it to a claimant whose facts are unremarkable does them a disservice.
Compensation by jurisdiction
| Jurisdiction | Average Compensation | |---|---| | Health and safety | £171,800 | | Public interest disclosure (whistleblowing) | £134,320 | | Race discrimination | £98,090 | | Disability discrimination | £31,743 | | Maternity | £28,417 | | Pregnancy rights | £27,639 | | Breach of contract | £24,323 |
The uncapped jurisdictions
The three highest-paying jurisdictions, health and safety, public interest disclosure, and race discrimination, are all uncapped. No statutory ceiling, which means awards can include future loss of earnings, injury to feelings, and aggravated damages in full.
Health and safety claims average £171,800, though the sample is smaller than other categories, so treat that figure with some caution. Whistleblowing averages £134,320. That makes sense: whistleblowers tend to be in senior roles, and the career consequences are often severe and long-lasting. The compensatory award has to reflect that.
Race discrimination at £98,090 is driven by the combination of uncapped awards, injury to feelings (Vento bands), and the typically prolonged nature of the conduct.
The other discrimination heads
Disability discrimination (£31,743), maternity (£28,417), and pregnancy rights (£27,639) all produce five-figure averages. Also uncapped, but the financial losses tend to be shorter in duration than whistleblowing cases, which keeps the averages lower.
Breach of contract
Breach of contract claims average £24,323. The tribunal's jurisdictional cap on breach of contract is £25,000. The average sitting that close to the ceiling tells you something: a lot of these claims involve claimants whose actual losses exceed what the tribunal can award. The county court or High Court would be the right venue for higher-value breach of contract claims, and some practitioners are clearly not routing them there.
What drives the largest awards
Looking at the top of the distribution, a few patterns are consistent.
Multiple claim types. The biggest awards almost always combine jurisdictions. Unfair dismissal alone is capped at £115,115 for the compensatory award. Add discrimination or whistleblowing and the cap comes off entirely.
Whistleblowing. Public interest disclosure claims appear disproportionately in the high-value tail. Senior positions, career-ending consequences, and uncapped compensation is a combination that produces large schedules of loss.
Respondent non-attendance. Several of the largest awards were made in default judgment, where the respondent did not participate. When there is nobody contesting the schedule of loss, tribunals tend to accept the claimant's figures. Respondents who ignore proceedings sometimes face a very expensive lesson.
Legal representation. Represented claimants achieve higher awards on average. The gap is partly about ensuring all heads of loss are properly quantified and evidenced. Unrepresented claimants often leave money on the table.
What the data actually means for most cases
The median of £2,440 is a reality check. A large proportion of tribunal claims, unfair dismissal within the cap, small unlawful deduction claims, cases where the claimant found new work quickly, modest-value settlements, produce outcomes that are not life-changing.
But claim type matters a lot. If the facts support a discrimination or whistleblowing claim alongside unfair dismissal, the potential award changes by an order of magnitude. Getting the jurisdiction right at the pleading stage is not just a technicality.
Search the full database
These figures come from TribDB's database of 145,317 employment tribunal decisions. Every decision is searchable by keyword, jurisdiction, date, compensation amount, and outcome. Many include full decision text.
Whether you are advising a client, assessing litigation risk, or benchmarking a settlement, the underlying decisions are available to read.
Search 145,000+ employment tribunal decisions at tribdb.uk/tribunal
Data sourced from GOV.UK and the National Archives. Compensation amounts extracted from decision text. Averages calculated from 7,897 decisions with structured compensation data. All decisions are public records. Last updated April 2026.