Employment Tribunal Success Rate: What the 2025/26 Data Shows

Employment tribunal claim volumes are at a record high, waiting times are long, and the gap between claims lodged and claims resolved is widening. If you are trying to understand what those headline numbers mean for your own situation, the picture is more nuanced - and more encouraging for claimants - than the raw statistics suggest.

The figures below are drawn from the Ministry of Justice's Tribunals statistics quarterly: October to December 2025, published 11 March 2026, and the Acas annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025, published July 2025.

How many employment tribunal claims are there?

In October to December 2025, HMCTS recorded 23,000 Employment Tribunal receipts: 13,000 single claims and 9,500 multiple-claim receipts. Single-claim receipts rose 54% year on year compared with the same quarter in 2024.

Over the same period, single-claim disposals fell by 34% and the single-claim open caseload increased by 49%, reaching its highest level in the recorded timeseries.

Across all tribunal types combined, the MoJ reports overall receipts rose 14% year on year, while overall disposals fell 4%, pushing the open caseload to 831,000. The direction of travel is clear: more claims are coming in than are being resolved, and the backlog is growing.

What happens to most claims?

This is where the headline "3% success rate" figure needs careful handling.

In 2024/25, the breakdown of single-claim disposals looked like this:

• 40% settled through Acas conciliation
• 19% withdrawn
• 3% succeeded at a final hearing

The 3% is real, but it describes the outcome share across all disposals - the vast majority of which never reached a hearing at all. Settlement was the single most common outcome, by a considerable margin.

The correct way to read this data: most employment tribunal disputes end in a negotiated resolution, not a final hearing. The 3% figure does not mean that a claimant who pushes a well-founded case to a hearing has a 3% chance of winning. It means that most disputes are resolved before that point.

For 2023/24, the breakdown was 30% Acas conciliated settlements, 26% withdrawn, and 5% successful at hearing - showing that settlement as the primary outcome is a consistent pattern, not a one-year anomaly.

The Acas layer: most disputes end before a claim is lodged

Before any tribunal claim is registered, the law requires a claimant to contact Acas and go through Early Conciliation. This is a free, confidential process that pauses the tribunal deadline clock while Acas tries to help both sides reach an agreement. Our guide to ACAS Early Conciliation covers the process in full.

The scale of what Acas handles is significant. In 2024/25, Acas received 124,000 early conciliation notifications and positively resolved 38% of them - against a target of 36%. That means roughly one in three disputes notified to Acas never becomes a formal tribunal claim at all.

Acas also reports an individual employment tribunal conciliation settlement rate of above 70% - meaning that where a claim has been lodged and Acas is conciliating, the large majority still settle without a final hearing.

Taken together, the tribunal system is much larger than the registered-claim figures suggest. Acas is the first and most active pressure-release valve in the system.

Why the open caseload matters to you

The open caseload reaching a record high has a practical consequence: waiting times. The MoJ publishes mean time-to-clearance figures in its quarterly tables. Those figures vary significantly by claim type and region, and complex cases - discrimination, whistleblowing, multi-jurisdictional claims - typically take longer than straightforward unfair dismissal matters.

The current trajectory - receipts rising, disposals falling - means average waiting times are unlikely to improve in the near term. If you are planning to bring a claim, building your case as thoroughly as possible before the hearing date matters more, not less, when that date may be 12 to 18 months away. The guide to how long an employment tribunal takes sets out where that time goes, stage by stage.

What this means if you are considering a claim

Three things stand out from the data for anyone deciding whether to proceed:

Settlement is the most likely outcome, not a hearing. Roughly 60% of claims that do not succeed at hearing are resolved by settlement or withdrawal. The question is not just "will I win at tribunal?" but "what is my claim worth in a negotiation, and when is the right point to settle?". Understanding your likely compensation range matters at every stage, and the guide on whether it is worth going to an employment tribunal weighs that range against the time and cost of a claim.

The 3% "success rate" is the wrong number to focus on. The more useful question is: of claims that go to a hearing, how many succeed? That figure is not published as a simple percentage in the quarterly bulletins, but it is considerably higher than 3%. Claims that survive to hearing are, by definition, the ones that were not settled or withdrawn - they tend to be the more contested and often the more complex cases.

Starting the clock early gives you the most options. The deadline to contact Acas is 6 months less 1 day from the date of dismissal or the act complained of (3 months less 1 day if it happened before 1 October 2026) - and missing that deadline almost always bars the claim entirely. A claim can always be settled before hearing; it cannot be pursued at all if the deadline is missed.

For figures by claim type, see the guides to unfair dismissal claim data, disability discrimination claim data and redundancy claim data, or browse the tribunal award data.

Key takeaway

Employment tribunal statistics show a system under pressure: record volumes, a widening backlog, and long waiting times. But the same data shows that the most common outcome is a negotiated resolution, and that Acas resolves a substantial share of disputes before they ever become formal claims. The raw "success rate" figure, quoted widely and often out of context, understates claimant prospects at the hearing stage. What it actually captures is that most claims do not reach a hearing - which is a feature of the conciliation system, not a verdict on the strength of individual claims.

_This article is legal information, not legal advice. Figures are from official MoJ and Acas publications; check the sources linked above for the most current data, which is updated quarterly._