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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

31.7%

7,668 claimant or partial wins out of 24,218 visible cases

Respondent wins

27.5%

6,654 published judgments are tagged as respondent-successful

Non-merits exits

32.8%

7,947 cases end as strike-outs, withdrawals, or settlements

Unclear / other

8.0%

1,949 visible cases are outside the main outcome buckets shown below

What the current published data says

Tribunal Intel currently indexes 24,218 visible employment tribunal decisions in this dataset view. Of those, 7,668 are tagged as either fully claimant-successful or partially successful.

That works out to roughly 31.7%. In other words, published judgments in this dataset are not dominated by claimant wins. Respondent-successful outcomes on their own currently account for 6,654 cases, which is about 27.5% 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 7,947 cases, or 32.8%.

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 The published record is messier than that: many cases exit on procedural grounds, are withdrawn, or are recorded in forms that do not map neatly onto a simple claimant win rate.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 successful5,485 cases · 22.6%
Partially successful2,183 cases · 9.0%
Respondent successful6,654 cases · 27.5%
Struck out6,407 cases · 26.5%
Withdrawn1,290 cases · 5.3%
Settled250 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.

Related unfair dismissal examples

See real unfair dismissal cases employees won

The win-rate overview is broad. The unfair dismissal examples page narrows this to successful and partially successful unfair dismissal judgments with controlled reason labels.

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