Employment tribunal delays hit 70,000 open cases: what that can't tell you

The Employment Tribunals closed June 2026 with 70,000 open individual cases, the highest level in the Ministry of Justice’s statistical series and up 51% on a year earlier. The ministry published the figures on 10 September 2026, and they describe the position at the end of June. If your business has an individual claim open, employment tribunal delays are a cash-planning risk worth naming. The honest part is what the count cannot do: it cannot tell you how long your own case will take, so budget for a wait and leave the date open.

If a possible payment already shapes your hiring and apprentices plans, make the timing assumption visible when you review them, and do not turn a growing queue into a fixed delay of your own invention.

Treat employment tribunal delays as a cash-planning risk

The Ministry of Justice says incoming claims have outrun the cases the tribunals finish. For April to June 2026, it reports single claim receipts up 28% on the same quarter a year earlier, while cases finished fell 6%. In that quarter the tribunals received 14,000 individual claims and finished 6,100. More work is landing than is being cleared, which is why the open caseload keeps climbing.

The published figure also carries a warning. The ministry is running a data quality review and estimates the open caseload may still include an overcount of about 3% for individual and lead multiple cases. That is a flag about possible error, not a correction already made, so do not subtract it to build a tidier total.

Budget for the wait, not a date

The 70,000 counts individual cases only. At the end of June the tribunals held 537,000 open claims in total, covering single and multiple claims, and the 467,000 multiple claims are recorded apart from the individual ones. The ministry explains that multiple claims can cover many individual cases linked to a single employer, so the headline describes one slice of the open workload rather than every outstanding claim. The statistics do not single out trades businesses or employers by workforce size, and they do not publish an average waiting time. This is a statistical bulletin, so the timetable for your own case will come from somewhere else.

At your next cash review, check the basis for any payment date you have pencilled in. A fair question for whoever keeps the forecast is: “Does this date come from anything about our case, or is it just the date we assumed?” If a tribunal payment sits anywhere in the forecast, keep the amount and leave its date open.