Solicitors' guideline hourly rates

The guideline hourly rates are what a judge starts from when assessing costs summarily, usually at the end of a hearing that lasted a day or less. The receiving party's statement of costs is checked hour by hour against the rate for each fee earner's grade and band.

They are guidance, not a cap. A firm that charges its client £450 an hour for a Grade A National 1 solicitor can still bill that, but on assessment it should expect to recover about £295 unless it can show why the case justified more.

London 2 is the City and central London postcodes (EC1 to EC4, W1, WC1, WC2 and SW1), and London 3 the rest of London plus Dartford and Gravesend. National 1 is a list of counties and cities, mostly in the South East, plus Bristol, Liverpool, central Manchester, inner Birmingham, Cardiff and Leeds, Cambridge, Norwich, Nottingham and Watford. Everywhere else is National 2.

London 1 is not a place. It is for very heavy commercial and corporate work by centrally based London firms, so a central London firm on an ordinary claim is London 2. Search any town in the band list above.

Grade A is solicitors and legal executives with more than eight years' experience, Grade B more than four, Grade C the rest and fee earners of equivalent experience, and Grade D trainees, paralegals and other fee earners.

The grade follows the person, but the court also looks at who should have done the work. Twenty hours of document review claimed at Grade A will often be allowed at Grade C or D. Note that National 1 and National 2 share the same Grade B and Grade D rates, so the band only changes the figure for Grades A and C there.

The rates were reset after a Civil Justice Council review in 2021 and have since been uplifted for inflation using the services producer price index: by 6.66% in January 2024, again in January 2025, and by 2.28% from 1 January 2026.

Rates multiply recorded time, so a statement of costs is only as good as the time records behind it. To turn minutes into the tenths of an hour a costs schedule uses, see the billing increment chart.