What could an employment tribunal award you?

It works out what an employment tribunal could award you if your claim succeeded. That is the basic award, which is formulaic, and the compensatory award, which is your actual financial loss. It then applies the reductions a tribunal would apply, in the order the statute requires.

Because they answer different questions. The first is what the claim is worth if every argument lands and nothing is knocked off. The second is what it is worth once you allow for the reductions a tribunal realistically applies. Most calculators show one number, and one number is either optimistic enough to mislead or cautious enough to be useless. What an employer might pay to settle is a third question again, with different variables. That is worked out on the settlement calculator.

No, and the difference matters. A Schedule of Loss is a formal document. It goes to your employer, it goes into the tribunal bundle, and you are cross examined on it. It is built from documents rather than from estimates: payslips, your P45, a job search log, pension statements, and evidence of what you have earned since. This tool runs the same arithmetic on what you have typed. Treat it as orientation. If you need the document itself, that is prepared work.

A tribunal will order one, usually at the case management stage, and it has to be exchanged before the hearing. Many people also produce one earlier, because it is the most effective document available in ACAS Early Conciliation. It converts an argument about fairness into a number the other side has to price.

By a fixed formula. For each complete year of service you get half a week's pay if you were under 22 in that year, one week from 22 to 40, and a week and a half at 41 or over. It counts up to 20 years. The weekly figure used is capped by statute, currently at £751, so anyone earning more than about £39,000 is calculated on the capped figure rather than their actual pay.

Actual financial loss. Lost net earnings from the day you left up to the hearing, projected loss after it, employer pension contributions you no longer receive, and the value of benefits you have lost. There is also a conventional sum for loss of statutory rights, reflecting the qualifying period you have to serve again with a new employer.

Yes, on the compensatory award. It is capped at the lower of £123,543 or 52 weeks of your actual gross pay. For most people the 52 week figure bites first, which means the practical ceiling is a year's salary rather than the headline number that gets reported. That cap is removed entirely from 1 January 2027.

Where you were dismissed for making a protected disclosure, which most people would call whistleblowing, or for raising certain health and safety matters. In those cases there is no cap on the compensatory award. This is the single most valuable point on this page and it is regularly missed, including by people who should know better.

A tribunal can find that a dismissal was unfair because of how it was done, and still find that you would probably have been dismissed anyway had the employer done it properly. If so, it reduces your compensation by the percentage chance of that happening. A finding that you would have gone anyway with a 75 per cent likelihood removes three quarters of the compensatory award. It is the largest single variable in most cases and it is why two people with identical dismissals can end up with very different awards.

Yes, by up to 25 per cent, where the failure to follow the Code was unreasonable. It applies to the compensatory award only, never to the basic award.

Because of where it sits in the sequence. The statute applies it after the Polkey reduction and before the reduction for contributory fault, so it is 25 per cent of an already reduced figure rather than 25 per cent of the headline. On a case with a heavy Polkey reduction it is a modest lever, not a decisive one. Move the sliders above and watch what happens.

Because they compound rather than add. A 50 per cent Polkey reduction followed by a 25 per cent contributory fault finding does not leave 25 per cent of your loss. It leaves 37.5 per cent. People consistently expect the arithmetic to be kinder than it is, in both directions.

Payslips from before the dismissal and your P45 fix the pay figures. Bank statements evidence anything earned since. A pension statement fixes the contribution rate. And a job search log, recording the date, the role, the employer and the outcome of every application, is what protects the future loss figure. The job search log is the one people do not keep and the one that decides the argument about mitigation. Start it today rather than reconstructing it later.

That is a counter-schedule and it is normal. Compare it line by line rather than reacting to the total. The errors that recur are the ACAS uplift applied in the wrong place, Polkey and contribution combined into one percentage when they should compound separately, and pension loss left out altogether.

Six months from the dismissal for most claims where the effective date of termination falls on or after 1 October 2026, and three months less one day where it falls before that. An internal appeal does not stop the clock. Notifying ACAS is what pauses it, and this is the rule that catches people every week.