What counts as noise-induced hearing loss?
Noise-induced hearing loss is permanent damage to the hair cells of the inner ear caused by exposure to loud sound. It is sensorineural, which means the damage is to the nerve pathway rather than the mechanics of the ear, and it cannot be repaired or reversed. A hearing aid can amplify what is left; it cannot restore what has gone.
It has a distinctive signature. Because the frequencies around 4 kHz are the most vulnerable, an audiogram of a noise-damaged ear usually shows a characteristic dip — the "notch" — at that frequency, with hearing recovering somewhat at higher frequencies. That pattern is what allows a medical expert to distinguish damage caused by noise from the gradual, even decline of age-related hearing loss.
That distinction matters enormously in a claim, and it is why the audiogram does most of the work. Age-related loss is nobody's fault. Noise-induced loss, where an employer failed to control the noise, is.
- Difficulty following conversation in a crowd The classic first symptom. One-to-one is fine; a pub, a restaurant or a family gathering is exhausting.
- Turning the television up Often noticed by everyone else in the house before the person affected notices it.
- Missing consonants High-frequency sounds go first, so speech becomes audible but not intelligible — people seem to mumble.
- Tinnitus Ringing, hissing, buzzing or roaring with no external source. It frequently accompanies noise damage and is compensated in its own right.
- Temporary threshold shift Muffled hearing after a shift that recovers overnight. An early warning that the exposure is damaging, and evidence the noise was excessive.
What the law required your employer to do
The duty to protect workers from noise is not new and it is not vague. The Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 set three thresholds an employer must act on, measured as a daily or weekly average exposure.
At the lower exposure action value of 80 dB(A), the employer must assess the risk, provide information and training, and make hearing protection available on request. At the upper exposure action value of 85 dB(A), they must reduce the noise by means other than protection so far as is reasonably practicable, mark hearing protection zones, and make hearing protection use mandatory. They must also provide health surveillance — regular hearing tests — for anyone regularly exposed above that level. At the exposure limit value of 87 dB(A), measured taking any protection into account, exposure must not occur at all.
Before 2005 the Noise at Work Regulations 1989 imposed materially similar duties at 85 dB and 90 dB. And before those, the common law duty of care had been clear since the 1960s: the Ministry of Labour's 1963 booklet *Noise and the Worker* is routinely treated by the courts as the point from which a reasonable employer ought to have known about the risk and acted on it.
The practical consequence is that exposure going back sixty years can still found a claim. An employer who says "nobody wore ear defenders back then" is describing the breach, not a defence to it.
The three-year time limit, and why it rarely bites
This is the single biggest reason people never make a claim they were entitled to make, and it is almost always based on a misunderstanding.
The Limitation Act 1980 gives you three years to bring a personal injury claim. But for a gradual injury like hearing loss, the clock does not start on the day you were exposed to the noise. Section 14 starts it on your date of knowledge — the date you first knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, that you had a significant injury and that it was attributable to someone's act or omission.
For most people that is the date an audiologist, a GP or a hearing aid provider first told them their hearing loss was noise-related. Not the date they left the job. Someone who worked in a weaving shed in the 1970s and was told in 2025 that they have noise-induced hearing loss is very likely in time.
There is a further safeguard. Section 33 gives the court a discretion to allow a claim outside the three years where it is fair to do so, weighing the reasons for the delay against the effect on the evidence. It is not a formality and it should never be relied on, but it does mean a late claim is worth an assessment rather than an assumption.
The honest advice is simply this: do not decide for yourself that you are out of time. It costs nothing to ask.
What if the company I worked for no longer exists?
This stops more claims than the time limit does, and it should not stop any of them.
Employers' liability insurance has been compulsory since the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969. A claim for an injury caused decades ago is met by the insurer who was on risk at the time, not by the company's present-day bank account. The company can have been dissolved, sold, broken up or wound up and the policy still answers.
Tracing that insurer is a specialist job, and it is one we do as a matter of course. The Employers' Liability Tracing Office maintains a searchable database of policies. Where a company has been dissolved it can be restored to the register so that proceedings can be issued against it, purely as a vehicle for the insurance. Where records are genuinely gone, the Employers' Liability Insurance Bureau may respond to claims for exposure from 2018 onwards.
None of that is your problem to solve. Tell us where you worked and roughly when, and the tracing is on us.
How much is a hearing loss claim worth?
We do not publish a table of figures, and we would gently suggest treating the sites that do with some caution.
Compensation for the injury itself is assessed against the Judicial College Guidelines, which set brackets that a judge uses as a starting point. Those brackets are revised periodically. A number typed into a web page a few years ago is out of date and nobody updates it, which is how a searcher ends up with an expectation no solicitor can meet.
What we can tell you is exactly what determines the figure, because it is the same handful of things every time:
The degree of loss shown on your audiogram, measured in decibels averaged across the key speech frequencies, and how much of that loss is attributable to noise rather than age. Whether the loss is in one ear or both. Whether you have tinnitus, and how severe it is — significant tinnitus can be worth more than mild hearing loss on its own, because of its effect on sleep and concentration. Your age, because a younger claimant lives with the injury for longer. And whether it has affected your ability to do your job or forced you to change work.
On top of that sits your financial loss: lost earnings, the cost of hearing aids and their replacement over your lifetime, batteries, and any adaptations you need.
Send us your audiogram, or let us arrange the audiology, and we will give you a realistic bracket for your case rather than an average for somebody else's.