Three-quarters of tribunal claims never reach a hearing, so the awards that do get made stay invisible to the people pricing the risk. Rees Calder of EmployerKit looks at what the published data actually says, and what changes on 1 January 2027
Ask an HR director what a sex discrimination claim costs and you will usually get an answer somewhere around 16,000.
That is not a bad guess. It is almost exactly the median award for sex discrimination in the most recent Ministry of Justice figures: 16,161.
The mean is 53,403.
That gap, a factor of more than three, is the whole problem in one line.
In 2023/24, 76% of employment tribunal cases did not progress to a hearing, according to Acas. Of those, Acas conciliated a settlement in around 70%. The rest were withdrawn.
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So the overwhelming majority of what employers know about tribunal risk is settlement experience. And settlements are a poor teacher. They are confidential, so nothing accumulates across the market. They get negotiated against legal costs and nuisance value rather than the merits. And they cluster low, because a claimant taking 12,000 today is making a rational choice about eighteen months of their life.
What does get published is the award data from the minority of cases that run all...
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