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Methodology — United Kingdom

Civil Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1053) + Family Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1054) · consolidated through SI 2024/476 and SI 2025/1126

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This page explains how Tarifo's United Kingdom calculator turns a case description into a fee estimate. The United Kingdom is Tarifo's first state-fee-only jurisdiction: England & Wales has no statutory lawyer tariff — solicitors' and barristers' fees are agreed privately — so the calculator runs a single engine and reports the mandatory court fee payable to HM Courts & Tribunals Service under SI 2008/1053 and SI 2008/1054. Every figure is in pounds sterling and traces back to a statutory instrument.

01 — Statute and effective date

One engine: the mandatory court fee.

The United Kingdom calculator encodes the Civil Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1053) and the Family Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1054), in their current consolidated form. The civil order is tracked through the Court & Tribunal Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2024 (SI 2024/476, in force 1 May 2024 — the most recent across-the-board uplift) and the Court & Public Guardian Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2025 (SI 2025/1126, in force 31 December 2025). Scope is England & Wales only; Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate court fees.

Unlike every other Tarifo country, there is no bar-council lawyer tariff to encode — in England & Wales, solicitors’ and barristers’ fees are a matter of private contract. The calculator’s single output is the court fee a litigant must pay to HM Courts & Tribunals Service to issue or progress a case. Because these are exact, government-set amounts, the lawyer-tariff “reference values, not floors / CJEU C-438/22” framing used elsewhere on Tarifo is not applicable here.

02 — Fee structure

Court fees fall into three shapes.

Banded → percentage → cap: The headline money-claim fee (civil_claim_money, civil_small_claims) under SI 2008/1053 fee 1.1. Fixed bands run £35 / £50 / £70 / £80 / £115 / £205 / £455 up to £10,000; from £10,000 to £200,000 the fee is 5 % of the claim value; above £200,000 (or for an unquantified claim) it is the flat £10,000 cap. Continuous at £200,000 (5 % × 200,000 = 10,000).
Flat statutory amounts: Most cases. Divorce / dissolution £612 (fee 1.2), declaration of parentage £415 (fee 1.3), child arrangements (Children Act 1989 s. 8) £263, adoption £207, non-money claim £377 (County Court), judicial-review permission £174 (fee 1.9), warrant of control £94 (fee 8).
No fee (£0): A positive statutory or case-law exemption, shown as £0 with the governing authority rather than hidden. Family protective orders (non-molestation, occupation, DAPO) carry no fee; employment-tribunal claims carry no fee following R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51.

Appeal fees are flat ROUTE-fee replacements, not multipliers. England & Wales sets appeal fees as flat amounts by route (SI 2008/1053 fee 13: £147 / £171 / £294 / £646 / £1,466) — it does not halve the issue fee the way Bulgaria and Romania do. Version 1 computes the first-instance / issue fee only; appeal-route selection is deferred.

03 — VAT treatment

Court fees are outside the scope of VAT.

Court fees in England & Wales are not subject to VAT. The calculator shows them at face value with no VAT line and no VAT toggle. Because there is no lawyer tariff, there is no lawyer-fee VAT setting either. Figures are shown in GBP and are not converted to euros in the engine — the cross-country Comparisons section normalises to EUR separately at build time. A litigant on a low income or certain benefits may pay a reduced fee, or nothing, under Help with Fees (form EX160).

04 — Worked example

A money claim, first instance.

Take a money claim with a claim value of £50,000 (civil_claim_money, first instance):

Step	Source	Result
Claim value	`input`	£50,000.00
5 % band, £10,000–£200,000 (fee 1.1)	`0.05 × 50,000`	£2,500.00

The same case at exactly £10,000 yields £455 — the fixed band, not £500 — because the £10,000 band is “does not exceed £10,000” (inclusive) and the 5 % rule starts strictly above £10,000. At £200,000 the fee is £10,000, and any larger or unquantified claim is capped at £10,000. These boundaries are pinned in the engine’s unit tests.

05 — Known divergences

Three places the numbers surprise you.

£10,000 boundary · civil_claim_money

At exactly £10,000 the fee is £455, not £500. The fee 1.1 bands use “does not exceed” = inclusive upper bound, so the 5 % rule engages only above £10,000. This is the load-bearing regression in the GB suite (a naive “5 % of everything over the bands” reading gets it wrong).

Charged family cases · family_child_arrangements / family_adoption

A s. 8 Children Act application (£263) and an adoption application (£207) are charged in England & Wales. Romania treats the equivalent cases as fee-free (scutit); that exemption was deliberately not carried across — the figures are re-derived from SI 2008/1054.

Appeal stage · appeal

Bulgaria and Romania halve the first-instance fee on appeal. England & Wales instead replaces it with a flat route fee (fee 13). The engine therefore never applies a 0.5 appeal multiplier — the single most likely cross-country copy-paste bug, named as a regression test.

A separate, categorical divergence: probate_grant and insolvency_petition are handled as out-of-scope — they are governed by different statutory instruments (SI 2004/3120 / SI 2016/692) and depend on inputs outside the shared taxonomy. The calculator returns no figure for those and points to the governing order.

At a glance

Statute: Civil Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1053) + Family Proceedings Fees Order 2008 (SI 2008/1054) (consolidated through SI 2024/476 and SI 2025/1126)
Currency: GBP
VAT treatment: Court fees are outside the scope of VAT — no VAT line. There is no statutory lawyer tariff in England & Wales.
Last verified: 2026-06-03

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