The two halves of every injury claim
Compensation in England and Wales comes in two parts, and confusing them is why people are so often disappointed by what they actually receive.
General damages are for the injury itself — the pain, the suffering and what lawyers call loss of amenity, meaning the things you can no longer do. This is the part people mean when they ask what a claim is worth.
Special damages are for money. Everything the accident has cost you or will cost you: earnings you lost, treatment you paid for, care you needed, travel to hospital, clothing destroyed, adaptations to your home. Every one of these has to be evidenced, and every one of them is claimable.
In a serious case special damages dwarf general damages. Someone off work for eight months on an average wage has lost more in earnings than most injury awards are worth. Yet almost nobody arrives at a first appointment with a record of it, because no calculator ever asked them for one.
Why road traffic whiplash is different, and lower than you think
If you were injured in a road traffic accident, the injury was to your neck, back or shoulder, and the symptoms lasted two years or less, your general damages are not assessed at all. They are set by a table in the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021, made under the Civil Liability Act 2018.
The figures are lower than most people expect. An injury lasting up to three months is worth a few hundred pounds. Even at the top of the table — symptoms lasting between eighteen and twenty-four months — the tariff is under £5,000. A court may add up to 20% where the injury is exceptionally severe, but that is not automatic and it is not common.
There is a second point almost no calculator handles. The tariff was raised by roughly 15% in 2025, and the higher figures apply only where the accident happened on or after 31 May 2025. An accident the day before is still valued on the old table. Because you have three years to bring a claim, both tables will be in use until well into 2028. The calculator on this page asks for your accident date and uses the correct one rather than quietly showing you the better figures.
None of this applies if you were a pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist or horse rider. Vulnerable road users were deliberately left outside the tariff, and a claim of yours is valued the ordinary way — which usually means it is worth considerably more than the same injury to a driver. This is missed constantly.
The small claims limit, and why we will sometimes tell you not to bother
This is the part of a claim nobody explains, and it decides whether bringing one makes financial sense.
If the injury part of your claim is worth more than the small claims limit, your legal costs are generally recoverable from the other side, which is what makes No Win, No Fee work. If it is below the limit, they generally are not — meaning any solicitor acting for you would have to take their fee out of your compensation, if they took the case at all.
For road traffic claims the limit is £5,000. For accidents at work, in public places and everywhere else it is £1,000. Vulnerable road users stay at £1,000 too.
Put those two facts together and something uncomfortable follows: a large proportion of road traffic whiplash claims are worth less than the limit that applies to them. Those claims are designed to be brought by the injured person directly, through the Official Injury Claim portal, without a solicitor and without paying anyone a percentage.
If that is your position, the calculator will say so and we will say so on the phone. We would rather lose the enquiry than take a fee out of a £600 award for work you could have done yourself in an afternoon.
Care you were given for free is still worth money
This is the single most commonly missed head of loss, and it is often worth thousands.
If someone helped you while you were injured — a partner who took over the cooking, a parent who drove you to appointments, a friend who did your shopping, anyone who helped you wash or dress — that assistance is claimable, even though nobody was paid and nobody expected to be. Lawyers call it gratuitous care, and the law has recognised it for decades.
It is claimed at an hourly rate, discounted from what a commercial carer would charge, because no tax or agency fee was involved. Your solicitor will apply the right rate; the calculator uses a conservative default so you can see the shape of it.
What matters is the record. Nobody remembers eighteen months later how many hours a week their partner spent helping them. Write it down as you go, roughly, week by week. A diary kept at the time is evidence. A number reconstructed from memory at the end is an argument.
What decides where you fall inside a bracket
For any injury outside the tariff, general damages come from the Judicial College Guidelines — the 18th edition, published 9 April 2026, which raised the previous figures by 8.26% in line with RPI to August 2025. Anything you read online still quoting the older edition is now materially low.
The Guidelines are brackets, not prices. A moderate ankle injury spans a range wide enough that the top is nearly double the bottom, and where a particular case falls inside it comes down to medical evidence rather than anything you can enter into a form.
What moves a case up its bracket: a longer recovery; surgery, particularly more than once; a permanent restriction on movement; visible scarring; a psychological reaction that persists; and above all whether it stops you doing your job. The same ankle fracture is worth materially more to a scaffolder than to someone who works at a desk, because the loss of amenity is greater and the risk to future earnings is real.
What moves it down: a full recovery, no surgery, and no lasting effect on work or daily life.
This is why the calculator refuses to give a single figure for these injuries. It is not caution for its own sake — it is that the honest answer genuinely depends on a document that does not exist yet.
The three-year limit, and the exceptions people miss
You normally have 3 years from the date of the accident to issue court proceedings. Not to notify a claim, not to instruct a solicitor — to issue proceedings at court. Miss it and the claim is generally lost however strong it was.
The exceptions matter and are regularly missed. If you were under 18 when it happened, the clock does not start until your eighteenth birthday, so you have until you are 21. If the injured person lacks mental capacity, time does not run at all while that continues. And where an illness or condition was caused years before it was identified — industrial deafness and asbestos disease being the obvious examples — time runs from the date of knowledge rather than the date of exposure.
If you are close to the limit, treat it as urgent rather than as a deadline to work towards. Evidence takes time to gather and a medical appointment cannot always be arranged at short notice.