Car accident claim: the official portal or a solicitor?

The short answer

Were you the driver or a passenger in a car? If the accident happened in England or Wales, it wasn't your fault, and your injury is worth £5,000 or less, the route the system expects you to use is the Official Injury Claim portal. It's a free government-backed service, and you can use it without a solicitor.

A solicitor starts to earn their keep once the claim stops being straightforward. Liability gets denied. The injury turns out to be more serious, or its long-term outlook is uncertain. Your losses (lost earnings, treatment, care) push the claim past the portal's limits.

The trade-off is money. Because these are small claims, the other side's insurer generally won't pay your legal bill even if you win. A solicitor is normally paid out of your compensation instead.

None of this is legal advice. It sets out how the process works and what tends to make people seek a solicitor, alongside our wider coverage of running a car and what happens when things go wrong. For anything about your own claim, Citizens Advice or a solicitor is the right port of call.

What the Official Injury Claim portal is

Official Injury Claim (OIC) is an online service. It lets you make and settle a road-traffic injury claim yourself, without a lawyer. It was developed by the Motor Insurers' Bureau on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and went live on 31 May 2021.

It exists because of the government's whiplash reform programme, brought in through the Civil Liability Act 2018 and the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021. Gov.uk sets out what that package did. It fixed a tariff of compensation for whiplash injuries lasting up to two years, and banned settling a whiplash claim without medical evidence. It also raised the small claims track limit for road-traffic injury claims from £1,000 to £5,000.

That last change reshaped everything. Claims worth up to £5,000 for the injury now sit in the small claims track. There, as Civil Procedure Rule 27.14 sets out, the court cannot generally order the losing side to pay the winner's legal representative's costs. The portal was built to give unrepresented claimants somewhere to go once the insurer stopped picking up the solicitor's bill.

Who can use it

The portal's own eligibility criteria are short. You must be aged 18 or over, you must have been inside a vehicle as driver or passenger, and the accident must have happened in England or Wales on or after 31 May 2021. You have to believe it wasn't your fault, and your injury has to be worth under £5,000.

The underlying rules, in the RTA Small Claims Protocol, add more. The claim can't proceed under the protocol if the defendant's vehicle is registered outside the United Kingdom, if you were under 18 when the claim was started, or in a handful of other listed situations.

If your claim sits right on the line, a small wording difference is worth knowing about. The portal describes the injury threshold as "under £5,000". The protocol behind it puts the same test as no more than £5,000. Either way, don't eyeball it: a claim valued at or near £5,000 is one to take advice on rather than guess at.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are outside all of this. The reforms and the portal apply to accidents in England and Wales only.

The two limits that decide your route

Two thresholds apply here, not one. They do different jobs, and mixing them up is the easiest mistake to make with the portal.

The protocol applies where "the claimant values the overall claim at no more than £10,000 and the claim for damages for injury at no more than £5,000". Both conditions have to hold.

• £5,000 caps the damages for injury alone. That means compensation for the pain, suffering and loss of amenity (the everyday things the injury stops you doing) the accident caused you. Nothing else counts toward it.
• £10,000 caps the whole claim. It has to absorb the injury figure plus everything else: loss of earnings from time off work, treatment and prescription costs, travel to appointments, clothing damaged in the crash, personal property in the car, and the vehicle costs you're bearing yourself (more on those below).

So the ceiling on your non-injury losses is whatever's left of £10,000 after the injury element. The portal's own guidance frames it as £5,000 for your injuries and £5,000 for your losses. The rule underneath is simpler: the total mustn't exceed £10,000.

What happens if the numbers move

Your first estimate doesn't lock you in. Under the protocol, either party can use the portal to tell the other that the claim has been revalued, and that they reasonably believe the overall claim is now more than £10,000, or the injury claim more than £5,000. At that point the protocol stops applying.

A claim can also leave if the compensator says there are complex issues of fact or law, or alleges fraud or fundamental dishonesty. "Compensator" is the protocol's word for whoever is handling the claim on the other side, usually the defendant's insurer.

Where it goes next depends on what has already happened. Usually it picks up under the standard Pre-Action Protocol for Personal Injury Claims, which gives the defendant up to three months to investigate. There is an exception. Where liability had already been admitted in full, or the deadline for the liability response hadn't yet passed, and the claim is still within the older low-value RTA protocol's limits, it moves into that protocol instead.

One quirk is worth knowing. Vehicle costs are split in two, and the line isn't drawn where most people assume. The protocol's list of vehicle costs is the car's pre-accident value, repairs, an insurance excess, hire, and recovery and storage charges. Where you are bearing those yourself, they are part of the claim and sit inside the £10,000.

Bearing them yourself covers three things: costs you (or someone on your behalf) have already paid, repair costs you have an estimate for and intend to pay personally, and a pre-accident value you're claiming yourself rather than owing to your own insurer. Vehicle costs you'd instead have to pay a third-party organisation out of your damages are excluded from the valuation altogether and handled outside the protocol's main process. Credit hire is the obvious one.

Whiplash is priced by a tariff, not by argument

If your injury is whiplash lasting up to two years, the amount isn't negotiated case by case. It's fixed by a table in the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021. For accidents on or after 31 May 2025, the tariff runs:

Accidents before 31 May 2025 use the lower original table. Courts can uplift a tariff award in exceptional circumstances, but the starting point is the number in the table. That is a large part of why paying someone a percentage of it is worth thinking about.

Who can't use the portal at all

Value isn't the only gate. The protocol lists categories of claim it doesn't apply to, no matter how small. The biggest is vulnerable road users. The protocol treats you as vulnerable if, at the time of the accident, you were:

• using a motorcycle, or a pillion passenger or sidecar passenger on one
• using a wheelchair, powered wheelchair or mobility scooter
• using a bicycle or other pedal cycle
• riding a horse
• a pedestrian

E-scooter riders aren't named in that list. They fall outside the portal anyway, because its eligibility check requires you to have been inside a vehicle.

The protocol also doesn't apply where:

• you're claiming to the Motor Insurers' Bureau under the Untraced Drivers' Agreement, meaning a hit-and-run where the driver was never identified
• the claimant or defendant is a protected party
• the claimant is bankrupt
• either party is acting as a personal representative of someone who died
• the defendant's vehicle is registered outside the UK

Use the portal anyway when one of these applies and the claim won't be accepted, though you'll be told why. The protocol itself says you should consider seeking advice at that point. In practice, that means a solicitor.

Can you use a solicitor for a portal claim — and what does it cost?

Yes, and most people do. The portal is designed so you can run the claim yourself, but it also has a route for representatives. The Official Injury Claim service says plainly that, as an alternative to making and managing your own claim, you may ask a solicitor or an authorised claims management company to do it for you. It adds that they "might charge you for their help".

The cost side is where this decision is actually made. Because these claims sit in the small claims track, the losing side generally doesn't pay your legal costs. CPR 27.14 lets the court order only a narrow set of costs: court fees, limited travel and loss-of-earnings allowances for attending a hearing, capped expert fees, and costs where a party has behaved unreasonably. A solicitor's fee for running the claim isn't on that list.

Some expenses are still recoverable from the insurer. Practice Direction 27B permits the fixed-cost medical report and other disbursements, and any court fee you've paid is recoverable too. Disbursements are out-of-pocket expenses run up in the course of the claim, such as the cost of a police accident report. And if you're unrepresented, the protocol makes the compensator pay for your first medical report, so the medical evidence itself doesn't come out of your pocket either way.

What isn't recoverable is the solicitor. So a solicitor acting on a portal-value claim is normally paid from your damages, usually under a no-win-no-fee conditional fee agreement.

The 25% cap, and what it actually covers

Two sets of regulations put a ceiling on that deduction:

• Under a conditional fee agreement, article 5 of the Conditional Fee Agreements Order 2013 caps the success fee in personal injury proceedings at first instance at 25%. That is calculated on your general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, plus damages for past pecuniary loss (the financial losses you've already run up), net of any benefits recoverable by the DWP's Compensation Recovery Unit.
• Under a damages-based agreement, regulation 4 of the Damages-Based Agreements Regulations 2013 caps the payment at 25% including VAT, on the same heads of damages.

Both caps deliberately exclude damages for future pecuniary loss and future care. That is the money meant to cover what the injury will cost you going forward.

On a tariff whiplash claim, that arithmetic is stark. A quarter of a £965 award is a little under £250.

Set against that, the portal's own published data shows unrepresented and represented claimants settling at very similar levels. The April–June 2026 release puts average settled tariff amounts at £750 and £748 respectively, and non-tariff injury settlements at £1,079 and £1,073.

Treat those averages carefully. They run cumulatively since the service launched, they exclude fees and additional losses, and they cover very different mixes of claim. So they aren't a like-for-like comparison, and they don't prove representation makes no difference. What they do undercut is the assumption that a solicitor automatically gets you meaningfully more.

When instructing a solicitor genuinely tends to matter

It depends far less on whether you can face the paperwork. The question is whether the claim has something in it that a portal was never built to handle.

Liability is denied. If the insurer denies fault outright and you want to continue, the protocol requires you to start court proceedings. A court then decides whether the accident was the defendant's fault and, if so, whether they're liable in full or in part. That's a genuine litigation step, and the clearest point at which self-representation gets uncomfortable.

Liability is admitted only in part. You can accept a percentage split or challenge it, and each side can make up to three proposals through the portal. Judging whether 50/50 is fair on your facts is the kind of question experience answers better than instinct.

The injury is more serious, or its outlook is uncertain. Anything likely to be worth more than £5,000 sits outside what the tariff was designed for. So does anything lasting beyond two years, or any injury where the prognosis is still open. Settling early on an uncertain prognosis is hard to undo.

The losses are complicated. Self-employed loss of earnings, ongoing treatment, care provided by family: these are the heads of claim most easily undervalued by someone doing it for the first time. They are also the ones most likely to push the total past £10,000.

You're a vulnerable road user. Cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians, horse riders and wheelchair or mobility scooter users are excluded from the protocol entirely. The portal was never your route in the first place.

You've been offered a figure and can't tell if it's fair. A one-off paid advice session, rather than handing over the whole claim, is sometimes the proportionate answer here.

If the crash means replacing the car

The split set out above still applies. Vehicle costs you're bearing yourself count toward the £10,000. Costs you'd have to pay a third-party organisation out of your damages, credit hire above all, are left out of the portal's valuation and dealt with separately. Either way, if the car is written off and you end up buying a replacement, that's a different job with its own risks.

Accident-damaged cars come back onto the used market, sometimes repaired and sold on with an insurance write-off marker against them. Our guides to insurance write-off categories and checking a car's accident history cover what a check can and can't tell you. A check reflects the vehicle at the moment you run it. So run a fresh one on the car you're actually buying, rather than relying on a report the seller shows you.

A free car check on the registration is the sensible first pass. It shows the MOT record plus current and historical tax status. Its running-costs estimator also gives you a sense of what the replacement will cost you to keep on the road.

How a portal claim actually runs

This is what happens once you've entered the claim.

The insurer, or the compensator in the protocol's language, must respond on liability through the portal within 30 working days of the claim being accepted. Where the vehicle search doesn't identify an insurer and the Motor Insurers' Bureau handles it instead, that stretches to 40 working days. Every deadline in the protocol is counted in working days, not calendar days. Plan around that rather than counting off a calendar.

If no response arrives in time, liability is treated as admitted in full and the claim carries on.

Once fault is admitted in whole or in part, you get a fixed-cost medical report through MedCo, the online service that produces a randomised selection of accredited providers. In most cases only one report is obtained, and if you're unrepresented the insurer pays for it. Offers are then exchanged through the portal. Accept one and the insurer has 10 working days to pay, stretching to 30 where it's still waiting on a certificate of recoverable benefits from the DWP.

If you can't agree, the claim goes to court on the small claims track, using the portal's own court forms. Unusually, a claim can go to court on a single issue such as liability and then come back into the portal for the later stages.

Keep the limitation period in view throughout. For a personal injury claim it's three years from the date the cause of action accrued, or from the date of knowledge if that's later. The protocol has specific provisions for claimants who start preparing court papers close to the three-year mark. That deadline creeps up on people.

Common questions