There isn’t one useful success rate for all employment tribunal claims. Some types succeed much more often than others — and most never reach a final hearing.
There isn’t one useful success rate. Some claim types succeed far more often — and most never reach a final hearing.
Past cases from published decisions and official HMCTS statistics — not a prediction for any individual claim.
There isn’t one employment tribunal success rate. The answer changes with whether a claim reached a final hearing — and with the type of claim.
If you mean “What percentage of filed claims eventually result in a win at a final hearing?”, the number is small because most claims never reach that stage.
If you mean “When a tribunal actually decides a contested claim, how often does the claimant win?”, the answer is roughly 4 in 10 on average.
But even that average can be misleading, because the type of claim makes a huge difference.
There isn’t one success rate. It changes with whether a claim reached a final hearing, and with the type of claim.
In 2025/26, 86.3% of claims ended without a final hearing. They may have settled through Acas, been withdrawn, or ended for another reason.
That does not mean 86.3% lost. It means the tribunal never made a final decision on those claims.
Among claims decided at a final hearing, 42.1% were successful. That was 1,440 of 3,422 decided claims.
Default judgments are excluded because the employer did not defend those claims.
Looking at individual claims in published tribunal decisions, 47.0% of defended claims succeeded. That is 22,801 of 48,548 decided claims in the decisions analysed by Yerty.
This figure is different from the HMCTS figure because it is based on a different dataset and counts individual claims rather than whole cases.
Ending before a final hearing is not the same as losing. HMCTS counts whole cases; Yerty counts individual claims in published decisions.
In published tribunal decisions the spread is enormous — wider than the gap between any of the national averages. A single average conceals almost all of it.
Claim type
Individual claims, not whole cases · types with fewer than 100 decided examples not shown
Claims such as unpaid holiday pay or redundancy pay often depend heavily on documents and relatively straightforward facts: was the money owed, and was it paid?
Claims such as discrimination and whistleblowing can be harder to prove because the tribunal may need to decide why an employer acted as it did, what people knew, and what motivated a decision.
That is one reason the success rates are so different.
Pay claims often turn on documents. Discrimination and whistleblowing claims turn on why the employer acted, which can be harder to prove.
For a claim type you choose, the Outcome Report shows how often that type succeeded in published decisions, how many claims the percentage is based on, how cases ended nationally, and how long similar cases took.
That lets you move from a single average to the pattern that matters for the kind of claim you are dealing with.
Success rate, sample size, national endings and timelines for the claim type you choose.
These figures describe past tribunal cases. They cannot tell you whether an individual claim will succeed.
