Employment and settlement agreement solicitors in Bath

Bath claims are heard in Bristol, eleven miles away — and the median Bath job pays a few pounds under the statutory weekly cap while the median Bath resident earns well over it.

Where a Bath claim is heard

The Bath numbers

How busy the tribunal is

Heard in Bristol, eleven miles away

Bath has no employment venue of its own. The nearest the HMCTS court finder returns is the Bristol Civil and Family Justice Centre on Redcliff Street, about eleven miles from central Bath; the next is Swindon Magistrates’ Court at nearly twenty-eight. So a Bath claim that went to a hearing would most likely be heard in the same building as a Bristol one.

HMCTS lists that building as a County Court and a Family Court rather than a tribunal, and employment is one of thirteen areas of law there. The employment tribunal keeps its own telephone hours, 9am to 4pm, and the building closes at 4pm. The Bristol page has the venue in full.

The pay figures on this page are for Bath and North East Somerset, the unitary authority ONS publishes; there is no separate figure for the city alone. Where a Bath case is actually listed will be on the notice of hearing.

The cap runs between Bath’s two medians

The median full-time job located in Bath and North East Somerset pays £748 a week, a few pounds under the statutory weekly cap of £751. The median full-time resident earns £790, comfortably over it. Only a few other places on this site split that way, residents above the line and local jobs below it.

Bristol, next door, runs the other way. Its jobs pay £838, well above what Bristol residents earn (£780). The median Bath resident out-earns the median Bristol resident even though Bath jobs pay less than Bristol jobs — consistent with some Bath residents working in Bristol or further afield, though the figures do not say where anyone works.

For a settlement, that makes the choice of number matter more than usual. Describe your loss with the pay of the job you are actually leaving, whichever side of the county line it was on.

What the cap does to the difference

Run the statutory redundancy formula for a 45-year-old with ten complete years on each Bath median. On the job median the week is used in full: £8,970. On the resident median the week is cut back to the cap first: £9,012. Two medians about £43 a week apart produce statutory sums only £42 apart, because almost all of the difference sits above the line.

Notice pay is not capped. Ten weeks’ statutory notice under section 86 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 is about £7,475 on the job median and £7,903 on the resident median, and it is taxed as earnings either way. For a better-paid resident, notice and any ex gratia sum are where the real difference has to be made up. How notice pay is treated.

The £30,000 tax threshold covers a little over nine months of Bath job-median pay, and fifty-two weeks of it is about £38,870 — the practical ceiling on an unfair dismissal compensatory award for a typical Bath earner until 1 January 2027. How the limits work.

Which side of the cap you are on depends on your own pay, and in Bath the two local medians fall either side of it. The Bristol venue · the time limit.

Common questions about Bath