When claimants are ordered to pay respondent costs
A data-backed look at respondent costs orders in employment tribunal judgments, including how rare they are and the largest amounts currently indexed.
Pattern count
88
respondent-successful judgments with respondent-costs wording in the current public dataset
Share of respondent wins
6.6%
based on 1,329 respondent-successful cases
Largest visible order
£20,000
highest explicit respondent-costs amount currently surfaced
Avg of top visible set
£4,852.49
average across the top 10 visible respondent-costs cases
What the data shows
Costs orders against claimants appear in a small minority of published respondent-successful judgments. In the currently indexed public dataset, Tribunal Intel identifies 88 such cases from judgment wording.
That equates to roughly 6.6% of the 1,329 respondent-successful cases currently visible through the app.
The largest explicit respondent-costs order currently surfaced on Tribunal Intel is £20,000. The top visible set is skewed by a handful of materially larger orders, so the headline risk is real but unevenly distributed.
Why these orders appear
What they are
Employment tribunals do not usually make the losing side pay the other side's legal costs. A respondent-costs order is the exception: the claimant is ordered to pay some of the employer's costs.
Why they happen
They usually appear where the tribunal says a claim, application, or conduct was unreasonable, vexatious, abusive, or had no reasonable prospect of success. Some are made only after a separate costs judgment.
Why they seem rare
Many respondent wins do not lead to a costs order at all. Even where one is made, it may be recorded in a later judgment or described in wording that is harder to capture automatically.
Largest visible respondent-costs orders
£20,000
£17,727.86
£2,000
£1,750
£1,500
£1,500
£1,397
£1,358
£1,250
£42