The State of UK Employment 2026
Three interactive tools, one picture of the year UK employment law changed for good. Calculate your tribunal exposure, track every Employment Rights Act 2025 change, and see where insecure work is concentrated. Built from official data. Free to use, cite and embed.
£53,403
Average sex discrimination award
93,220
Tribunal claims in 2023/24
76%
Cases never reaching a hearing
1.23m
Workers on zero hours contracts
Why this matters now
2026 is the year the cost of getting employment wrong stepped up. Tribunal claims are rising, discrimination awards are uncapped and far higher than most employers assume, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 is rolling out the biggest set of changes in a generation between now and 2027.
We pulled the official numbers from the Ministry of Justice, the ONS and ACAS and turned them into tools you can actually use. Pick a tab and start with your own sector.
The figure most sites get wrong
The average successful sex discrimination award is £53,403, nearly three times the ~£18,000 most guides quote.
Discrimination awards are uncapped. The single largest tribunal award in 2023/24 reached £995,000. Across the year there were 93,220 employment tribunal claims (+11.3% year on year), and 76% of cases never reached a hearing.
Estimate your exposure
Three inputs. Results update live.
Optional. Planning assumption: each 10 points of casual or zero hours mix adds 6% to expected claims. This uplift is not a published statistic.
Your estimated annual tribunal exposure
Estimate, not a published statistic
£0
Based on an estimated 2.25 tribunal claims per 1,000 employee jobs a year in health and social work, 50 staff and a 10% casual mix. Roughly 0.12 expected claims a year at an assumed £9,380 blended cost per claim. The cost per claim and the casual-mix uplift are EmployerKit planning assumptions, not published figures.
How your sector compares to the UK average (estimate)
1.4x the UK average (index 144)How the health and social work estimate is built
- 19% of single tribunal claims in the 2018 government survey (SETA) were against employers in this industry.
- 13.2% of UK employee jobs were in it (ONS, July to September 2017).
- Ratio 1.44 (index 144, where 100 is the UK average) times the national rate of 1.57 claims per 1,000 employee jobs gives about 2.25(calculated before rounding).
Includes the NHS, as SETA classifies employers by industry and does not separate the NHS.
Estimate, not a published statistic: how the sector rates are estimated
The Ministry of Justice and Acas publish no employment tribunal claims by sector. These sector rates are an EmployerKit estimate: the sector mix of single claims in the government's SETA 2018 survey (single claims, Great Britain, disposed of October 2016 to October 2017, which includes the NHS within health), applied to current Ministry of Justice single claim volumes.
Formula: Sector claims per 1,000 employee jobs = national rate x (sector share of single claims / sector share of employee jobs). Index: 100 = UK average. An index of 150 means the sector's estimated claim rate is 50% above the UK average.
- National rate: 50,704 single claims received in 2025/26 financial year (revised figure), divided by 32,352,000 UK employee jobs (April to June 2026 (provisional)), is 1.57 claims per 1,000 employee jobs. Sources: Ministry of Justice Tribunal Statistics Quarterly, April to June 2026 and ONS JOBS02.
- Sector share of claims: Single claims disposed of in Great Britain between 3 October 2016 and 4 October 2017. Multiple claims are excluded. From SETA 2018 (BEIS Research Paper 2020/007), Table 8.7.
- Sector share of jobs: ONS JOBS02 employee jobs by industry, July to September 2017, to match the period SETA covers.
- SETA reports whole-number percentages from a survey of 1,257 employers (unweighted), so small differences between sectors are within the margin of error and sectors with a small share of claims are the least precise.
- The sector mix is from claims disposed of in 2016/17, a period when tribunal fees were in force (fees were abolished in July 2017). The mix may have shifted since.
- Claims are Great Britain only and exclude multiple claims. ONS employee jobs are UK-wide, so the national rate is slightly understated.
- Sectors are matched on SIC 2007 section. Agriculture, mining, electricity, households and a few other sections are not shown separately and fall into 'Other / mixed sector'.
Average and maximum award by claim type
Mean successful award, 2023/24 Ministry of Justice data. Discrimination awards are uncapped.
Orange bars are uncapped discrimination claims. Teal bars are capped or statutory claims. Median awards are lower: the mean is pulled up by a long tail of very large awards.
Cite or embed this research
Journalists, HR teams and advisers are welcome to use this data. Copy a citation or drop the dashboard straight into your article.
Cite this research
EmployerKit (2026) The State of UK Employment 2026. Available at: https://employerkit.com/state-of-uk-employment-2026 (Accessed: 19 October 2026).Embed this dashboard
<iframe src="https://employerkit.com/state-of-uk-employment-2026/embed" width="100%" height="900" style="border:0;border-radius:12px" title="The State of UK Employment 2026 by EmployerKit" loading="lazy"></iframe>Related EmployerKit guides
Zero Hours Contracts in the UK
Full sector breakdown and what changes under the right to guaranteed hours.
UK Employment Tribunal Data
Claims by type, five-year trend and average awards from MoJ data.
Tribunal Cost Calculator
Model the basic and compensatory award for a specific claim against your business.
Methodology and sources
Published figures are drawn from official UK sources and shown with their dataset and year. The tribunal risk calculator is an estimate, not a published statistic. The Ministry of Justice and Acas publish no tribunal claims by sector, so the sector rates are built from the sector mix of single claims in the government's SETA 2018 survey (single claims in Great Britain, 2016/17, with the NHS counted in health), divided by each sector's share of ONS employee jobs and applied to current Ministry of Justice single claim volumes. The calculator then scales that rate to your headcount. The blended cost per claim and the casual-mix uplift are EmployerKit planning assumptions, not published figures. It is a planning aid, not legal advice.
- Tribunal claims and awards: Ministry of Justice Tribunals Statistics (2023/24 and Q1 2024/25 bulletin). 93,220 claims; average sex discrimination award £53,403; maximum award ~£995,000.
- Cases not reaching a hearing: ACAS Early Conciliation Statistics 2023/24. 76% of cases did not progress to a hearing. Acas settled around 70% of those and the rest were withdrawn, so this is not a settlement rate.
- Sector tribunal estimate: EmployerKit estimate from SETA 2018 (BEIS Research Paper 2020/007), Table 8.7, Ministry of Justice Tribunal Statistics Quarterly, April to June 2026 (50,704 single claims in 2025/26) and ONS JOBS02. National rate: 1.57 single claims per 1,000 employee jobs. Full method and caveats sit under the calculator.
- Zero hours contracts: ONS EMP17 (February 2026 release). 1.23 million workers, record high Oct to Dec 2025.
- Employment Rights Act 2025: GOV.UK implementation roadmap and ACAS guidance.
The zero hours sector table uses the ONS EMP17 August 2026 release (Table 6, April to June 2026). The percentage of each industry's workforce on zero hours is our calculation from EMP17 and ONS EMP13 employment by industry; the share of all zero hours workers is as published by ONS. ONS does not publish a clean comparable percentage of workforce on zero hours by region, so we show the sector measure. Last updated 2026-10-13.
Find the gaps before a claim does
An EmployerKit audit checks your contracts and policies against the changes above and flags where you are exposed.
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