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How often claimants actually win in published tribunal judgments

How claimant outcomes break down in published employment tribunal judgments, including merits wins, partial wins, strike-outs, and withdrawals.

Claimant wins

31.1%

6,953 claimant or partial wins out of 22,325 visible cases

Respondent wins

28.6%

6,378 published judgments are tagged as respondent-successful

Non-merits exits

33.6%

7,497 cases end as strike-outs, withdrawals, or settlements

Unclear / other

6.7%

1,497 visible cases are outside the main outcome buckets shown below

What the current published data says

Tribunal Intel currently indexes 22,325 visible employment tribunal decisions in this dataset view. Of those, 6,953 are tagged as either fully claimant-successful or partially successful.

That works out to roughly 31.1%. In other words, published judgments in this dataset are not dominated by claimant wins. Respondent-successful outcomes on their own currently account for 6,378 cases, which is about 28.6% of the visible set.

A large block of cases also never reach a clean claimant-versus-respondent merits win at all. Strike-outs, withdrawals, and published settlements together account for 7,497 cases, or 33.6%.

That matters because users often ask “how often do claimants win?” as if every published case ends in a straight merits judgment. The published record is messier than that: many cases exit on procedural grounds, are withdrawn, or are recorded in forms that do not map neatly onto a simple claimant win rate.

Outcome mix in the current visible dataset

Claimant successful4,855 cases · 21.7%
Partially successful2,098 cases · 9.4%
Respondent successful6,378 cases · 28.6%
Struck out6,027 cases · 27.0%
Withdrawn1,241 cases · 5.6%
Settled229 cases · 1.0%

How to interpret the headline number

Published cases are selective

The published judgments skew toward cases that reached a tribunal decision point. That is not the same thing as all claims issued, negotiated, or resolved.

Procedure matters

Strike-outs and withdrawals are a large enough share of the visible record that a simple claimant-vs-respondent framing leaves out a meaningful part of the dataset.

Partial success still counts

A claimant can win something important without winning every issue. That is why partial-success cases are worth separating out rather than folding them into a crude pass/fail headline.

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