exitagreementHow we check what is on this site
Every number on this site comes from one of four places, and each page says which. This page explains the rules, including the one place where we estimate and exactly how.
The four sources, in order of preference
- Primary legislation. Read from legislation.gov.uk and quoted, not paraphrased. Where the territorial extent matters — and in this subject it often does — we state the extent printed on the source.
- Statutory codes of practice and the government body that issues them. Chiefly the Acas Code of Practice on settlement agreements. A Code is not a statute and we never describe one as though it were.
- Published government figures. GOV.UK for the statutory limits; the Office for National Statistics for earnings; HM Courts & Tribunals Service for tribunal venues.
- Nothing else. We do not cite other law firms’ blogs, and we do not carry a figure forward from one because it appears on several of them.
Rule one: every statutory figure carries its tax year
The statutory limits in this area are uprated on 6 April. A figure without a year attached is a figure that will be wrong at some point and will not announce it. So £751 is written on this site as the 2026/27 cap, never as “the cap”.
This is not a hypothetical failure. One of the sites we studied before building this one shows a weekly pay cap of one amount in its page copy and a different amount in the structured data on the same page. Both figures were correct in their year. Neither is labelled.
Rule two: if we cannot read it, we do not print it
The maximum compensatory award for unfair dismissal is the worked example. On the day this site was built, the current statutory maximum could not be read out of a primary source: the GOV.UK compensation page returned an overview without the limits table, and the relevant Acas limits page returned a 404. No page on this site therefore states a maximum compensatory award. The pages describe how the award is structured and stop there.
That is the whole rule. A missing number is visible and fixable. A remembered number is neither.
Rule three: exact and estimated are labelled differently
The calculator produces both kinds of number and never blurs them.
| Element | Kind | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Statutory notice pay | Exact | ERA 1996 s.86(1) |
| Statutory redundancy pay | Exact | ERA 1996 s.162, the GOV.UK age bands, and the 2026/27 weekly cap of £751 |
| Holiday pay | Exact | Days entered × a day’s pay |
| Tax threshold | Exact | ITEPA 2003 s.403(1) |
| Compensation for loss of employment | Estimated | The scoring rule below |
| Injury to feelings | Not estimated | Set by published guidance bands on the facts, not by a formula. We output no figure. |
The scoring rule, in full
There is no statutory formula for the negotiated part of a settlement. Anyone who presents one as though there were is inventing it. What we can do is publish ours so that you can disagree with it specifically.
- Base. Months of gross pay by length of service: under 2 years → 0; 2 years to 5 years → 1; 5 to 10 years → 2; 10 years or more → 3.
- Factors. Add 1.0 month each for discrimination, registered disability or whistleblowing; 0.75 for a tribunal claim already started; 0.5 each for a grievance raised, a performance improvement plan, or a live disciplinary process.
- Day-one rights override the base. Discrimination and whistleblowing claims do not need 2 years’ service, so a short-service worker with one of those factors is not forced to zero.
- Employer size. ×0.9 for 1–10 staff, ×1.0 for 11–50, ×1.05 for 51–500, ×1.15 for 501 or more.
- Your position. ×1.0 if still employed, ×0.95 if you have already left, ×0.8 if you have already found another job.
- Range. The result is multiplied by 0.7 and 1.3 to give a band. We publish the band, never the midpoint alone.
It is not a valuation of your claim, it is not advice, and it has not been calibrated against settlement outcomes, because that data is confidential by definition — settlement agreements are private documents. It is a structured way of saying “these are the factors that move a number, and this is roughly how far”. Treat the output as a conversation opener with a solicitor, not as a target.
The city pages
City pages carry two pieces of data that are true of that city and of nowhere else: the tribunal venue that hears its claims, taken from the HM Courts & Tribunals Service court and tribunal finder, and the median full-time gross weekly pay for jobs located there, taken from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings via Nomis. The second is on the page for a specific reason: statutory redundancy pay is calculated on a week’s pay capped at £751, so whether the typical local job sits above or below that cap decides how badly the statutory formula understates a local worker’s loss.
HMCTS also publishes telephone numbers for each venue. We do not reproduce them. This site runs a single contact channel by design, and a court’s number printed beside our own call to action would be misread as ours.
Dates on every page
Three of them: published, last reviewed, and the date the cited law was checked. They are currently the same date, because the site is new. When they diverge, the reviewed date is the one that tells you whether anyone has looked at the page since the last April uprating.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, tell us and we will change it and say when. Write to contact@exitagreement.co.uk.
Questions about this page
Why do you tag every figure with a tax year?
Because the statutory limits are uprated on 6 April each year, and an untagged figure is a figure that goes silently wrong twelve months later. One of the reference sites we studied publishes a weekly pay cap of one amount in its page text and a different amount in its structured data on the same page. Neither number is a typo: they are two different tax years, and nothing on the page says which is which.
Where does the calculator's estimate come from?
The statutory parts are calculated from the legislation and are exact. The negotiated element is produced by the fixed scoring rule published on this page. It is a rule, not a prediction, and it outputs a range rather than a point because anything narrower would be false precision.
What do you do when you cannot verify a number?
We leave it out and say so. The maximum compensatory award for unfair dismissal is a worked example: we could not read the current statutory maximum out of a primary source on the day this site was written, so no page on this site states one. The pages describe the structure of the award instead.
Do you use AI to write this?
The site is drafted with AI assistance and every figure in it is read out of a named primary source and linked, rather than recalled. That is the distinction that matters. A competitor in an adjacent market describes its figures as 'estimates synthesised from public market data using AI research', with no sample and no sources. We would rather be checkable.