Early conciliation and employment tribunal data for England, Scotland, and Wales: October to December 2025

• Open track group cases made up more than half of group cases at 54% for October to December 2025, increasing from 48% in April to June 2025.
• Open track individual cases also accounted for the largest share of worker‑led individual cases between October and December 2025, making up 41% of all cases. However, this proportion remained unchanged from the previous quarter.
• Standard track cases accounted for 67% of employer‑led cases in October to December 2025, down from 71% in April to June 2025. This is particularly notable because, although the proportion has decreased, the volume of employer-led cases increases, especially within standard track.
• Between July to September 2025 and October to December 2025, total employer‑led case volumes increased by 50%, rising from 1,582 cases to 2,379 cases.
• Cases not conciliated dropped to 19% in October to December 2025 from 20% in July to September 2025 – a steady decline, with a single plateau and a moderate downward trend observed between October 2024 and December 2025. This reflects continued improvement in conciliation participation over the period.
• 64% of early conciliation notifications did not progress to employment tribunal between July and September 2025, which is a 2 percentage point decline from the previous quarter.
• Employment tribunal cases declined by 5% in October to December 2025 from July to September 2025, with fast track cases recording the largest decrease at 13%.

When a worker wants to make a claim against their employer at an employment tribunal, in most cases they must notify Acas first. Acas offers early conciliation to try to reach an agreement between the worker and employer and avoid the worker making a claim to an employment tribunal.

In some circumstances, the employer may approach Acas to help resolve a potential dispute. This can also be handled using early conciliation.

Early conciliation notifications can be made:

• by an individual against their employer
• on behalf of a group against their employer
• by an employer where a dispute concerning staff requires resolution

Worker-led early conciliation notifications

Around 95% of all early conciliation notifications came from workers in October to December 2025. This remains consistent with the 4 previous quarters from October 2024 to December 2025 which have fluctuated between 93% and 95%.

The proportion of the open track group cases rose to 54% in October to December 2025 from 34% in January to March 2025, marking a 20 percentage point increase overall.

Open track individual cases also accounted for the largest share of worker‑led individual cases between October and December 2025, making up 41% of all cases. However, this proportion remained unchanged from the previous quarter.

Employer-led early conciliation notifications

Employer-led early conciliation notifications made up around 6% of early conciliation notifications between October and December 2025. This has increased by 2 percentage points from the previous quarter (July to September 2025).

Standard track cases had the largest number of employer-led notifications in all 5 quarters from October 2024 to December 2025. They accounted for 67% of employer-led cases, which is consistent with the previous quarters. However, the standard track decreased by 4 percentage points from July to September 2025.

Between July to September 2025 and October to December 2025, total employer‑led case volumes increased by 50%, rising from 1,582 cases to 2,379 cases.

Open track cases showed a notably higher growth of 72% between July to September 2025 and October to December 2025.

Some early conciliation notifications are not suitable for conciliation, and the service is not mandatory so some claimants will refuse the offer.

Early conciliation cases that did not progress to conciliation

Between October to December 2025, around 19% of early conciliation cases were closed without parties engaging in early conciliation. There was a 1 percentage point decline in the proportion of closed cases not conciliated compared to the previous quarter. This means that more cases were conciliated before they were closed.

Cases with no track assigned accounted for 84% of all cases that did not conciliate in October to December 2025. This proportion remained broadly unchanged from July to September 2025, fell by 1 percentage point compared with April to June 2025, and was down from 87% in the preceding 2 quarters. These are where Acas has not been able to get in touch with the claimant to gather enough information to assign a track, so this is to be expected.

Fast track cases made up the smallest proportion of cases that did not progress to conciliation, accounting for 3% or less in each of the last 5 quarters. Among cases with an assigned track, open track cases consistently represented the largest share of cases not conciliated across the 5 quarters from October 2024 to December 2025. This proportion was 8% between October and December 2025, rising slightly from around 7% in January to March 2025.

Settlement of early conciliation cases

This data is reported 1 quarter behind the other statistics in this bulletin. This is due to the time lag between issuing an early conciliation certificate and the corresponding ET1 form. Tables 4a to 4e cover early conciliation, worker-led and group cases only, and are based on outcomes of cases received in July to September 2025.

Around 64% of cases did not lead to the submission of an ET1 throughout July to September 2025; this represents a 2 percentage point decrease compared with the previous quarter.

Of those with an assigned track, the fast-track cases were most likely not to progress to ET1 (76% in July to September 2025). The proportion of cases that did not progress to the tribunal increased by 2 percentage points for cases with no track assigned in July to September 2025 compared to the previous quarter (62% to 64%).

If a case is not resolved by early conciliation, the claimant can submit an ET1 form to make a claim to an employment tribunal. Conciliation can also be carried out at this stage to try to resolve the case without progressing to tribunal.

The highest level of ET1 receipts was recorded in open‑track cases, accounting for around 59% of all ET1 receipts in October to December 2025. This is a 1 percentage point increase from 58% observed in the previous quarter.

The lowest proportion of ET1 receipts was received in cases with no track assigned, accounting for less than 1.5% of all ET1 receipts in each of the 5 quarters between October 2024 and December 2025.

This data is based on cases that had an outcome within the quarters covered in this bulletin. It does not correspond to the cases that were received in Table 5.

79% of all employment tribunal cases that had an outcome in October to December 2025 did not progress to a hearing. This remains unchanged from July to September 2025 and is consistent with the pattern observed across October 2024 to December 2025. Among cases with an assigned track, open track cases were the least likely to progress to a hearing, while fast track cases were the most likely to do so.

Acas settled around 73% of cases that did not progress to a tribunal hearing in October to December 2025. This is a 3 percentage point increase from 70% observed in July to September 2025, although a similar figure to the other quarters presented in this bulletin. The remaining cases were withdrawn.

Conciliation or conciliating

The process of negotiation when an Acas conciliator mediates between parties in an employment dispute to try and reach agreement without going to an employment tribunal.

Conciliator

An Acas employee whose role is to mediate or conciliate between parties in an employment dispute.

Early conciliation

Acas service introduced in April 2014. Acas offers early conciliation to try and reach an agreement between parties before a formal employment tribunal claim. The prospective claimant submits an early conciliation notification to Acas, usually online, and Acas will then offer them early conciliation.

Early conciliation notification

Submission to Acas (usually online) required to begin conciliation.

Employment tribunal (ET)

Court of law charged with hearing cases within employment jurisdictions, although cases with monetary value may be heard elsewhere.

ET1

Form used by claimants to make a claim to an employment tribunal. The form is copied to Acas to allow ET1 conciliation to proceed until either the dispute is resolved, or a legal judgement is reached. It's free to submit an ET1.

ET1 avoided

Disputes that, at the time of publication, had led to an early conciliation notification but an ET1 had not been submitted.

Post-ET1 conciliation

Acas has a duty to attempt conciliation between the claimant and their employer once an ET1 has been submitted and passed to Acas. If a settlement can be reached or if the claimant agrees to withdraw their claim, the dispute is considered to be resolved. Otherwise, it will proceed to an employment tribunal hearing.

Group case

Cases which have been grouped together for conciliation because they are against the same employer and relate to the same dispute. 'Claimants in groups' are the number of claimants represented by these group claims.

Jurisdiction

Legal classification of the type of dispute a claim is made about. One case may contain more than one jurisdiction. For example, an unfair dismissal claim may also contain a claim under the Wages Act for unpaid wages. This could be changed in an employment tribunal.

Live case

Early conciliation notifications or ET1s still going through the conciliation process.

Track

How Acas loosely classes the complexity of each case, based on the jurisdictions in the ET1 form, or the suggested jurisdictions assigned to early conciliation notifications.

The 4 tracks are:

• fast track – straightforward cases mostly relating to money, such as unpaid wages
• standard track – cases that are more complicated than fast track and involve unfair dismissal or a related jurisdiction
• open track – the most legally complex cases with at least one type of discrimination or disclosure jurisdiction
• no track assigned – cases where insufficient information is available to assign indicative jurisdictions (for example, where parties cannot be contacted)

You can find more information in the methodology article and background quality reports on: 

• strengths in the data
• limitations of the data
• appropriate uses of the data
• how the data were created
   

• Acas individual conciliation evaluation 2019
• Employment tribunal statistics on GOV.UK