Whiplash compensation claim: tariff, OIC portal and payouts

What whiplash actually is and why it matters

Whiplash is a soft-tissue injury to the neck, shoulders, upper back or jaw caused by a sudden acceleration-deceleration force, classically a rear-end shunt where the head is jerked first backwards and then forwards as the car is struck and brakes. The medical term is whiplash-associated disorder, graded WAD I through WAD IV depending on severity. Most road-traffic whiplash is WAD I (subjective neck complaints, no objective signs) or WAD II (musculoskeletal signs without neurological deficit). WAD III adds neurological signs such as reduced reflexes; WAD IV indicates a fracture or dislocation and is no longer ‘whiplash’ for tariff purposes - it is valued conventionally as a serious orthopaedic injury.

The statutory definition of a ‘whiplash injury’ for tariff purposes is given in section 1 of the Civil Liability Act 2018: a soft tissue injury to the neck, back or shoulder caused by the relevant motor vehicle accident. The statute deliberately uses the same medical envelope as WAD I and WAD II while leaving fracture, dislocation and head injury outside it. If the medical expert finds a fracture, a herniated disc, a torn ligament beyond ordinary soft-tissue strain or a concussion, the injury is no longer ‘whiplash’ within the tariff and is valued on the ordinary scale. This is the single most important reading of a MedCo report on a borderline file - the expert’s framing determines whether your claim is tariff-capped or fully judicially valued.

Duration of symptoms is the other determinant. The tariff bands run from ‘not more than 3 months’ at the bottom to ‘more than 18 but not more than 24 months’ at the top. Where whiplash persists beyond 24 months it falls outside the tariff, and the claim is valued conventionally, which usually means a substantially higher figure aligned with the Judicial College Guidelines for moderate or severe neck injury. The 24-month cliff matters: a claim that resolves at 23 months sits inside the £4,345 (or £4,830 with minor psych) ceiling, while a claim resolving at 25 months is uncapped and routinely settles at £8,000-£12,000 or more depending on age and ongoing limitation.

The whiplash tariff under SI 2021/642 and SI 2025/615

The original whiplash tariff regulations are the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/642), made under section 3 of the Civil Liability Act 2018 and in force from 31 May 2021. Those regulations specified the original duration-band figures that applied to accidents from 31 May 2021 onwards. After approximately four years of inflation those figures were uplifted by the Whiplash Injury (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/615), which insert a parallel Table 2 of amounts applying to accidents on or after 31 May 2025. The 2025 uplift is approximately 15% across the bands and is expected to remain in force until the next statutory review, which the government has indicated will be in 2027.

The post-31 May 2025 figures (Table 2) are: up to 3 months - £275 whiplash only, £300 with minor psych; up to 6 months - £565 / £595; up to 9 months - £965 / £1,025; up to 12 months - £1,510 / £1,595; up to 15 months - £2,335 / £2,435; up to 18 months - £3,445 / £3,550; and 18 to 24 months - £4,345 / £4,830. The two columns reflect the regulation’s split between pure whiplash (Regulation 2(1)(a) as amended) and whiplash with minor psychological injury suffered on the same occasion (Regulation 2(1)(b)). The ‘minor psych’ uplift covers travel anxiety, mild adjustment disorder and similar self-limiting conditions documented in the medical report.

Accidents before 31 May 2025 continue to be valued on the original SI 2021/642 figures (Table 1). The relevant date is the accident date, not the date the claim is opened, the date the medical report is produced or the date of settlement. This is occasionally a planning point: an accident in May 2025 needs careful attention to whether it falls before or after the cut-off, because a single day either side changes the band by roughly 15%. The Limitation Act three-year period means the older tariff continues to surface on claims for years after the new tariff has been published.

The OIC portal, the £5,000 PSLA ceiling and the small claims track

The Civil Liability Act 2018 did two things in tandem. It introduced the whiplash tariff, and it raised the small-claims-track limit for road traffic accident personal injury claims from £1,000 PSLA to £5,000 PSLA. The combined effect is that the vast majority of whiplash claims now sit on the small claims track, where legal costs are not recoverable inter partes - a claimant who instructs a solicitor pays them out of the compensation. To make that workable for litigants in person, the Ministry of Justice built the Official Injury Claim portal at officialinjuryclaim.org.uk, a self-service workflow that walks an injured person through the claim from notification to settlement.

The portal’s scope is RTA personal injury where the PSLA element is worth £5,000 or less. Above that, the claim leaves the portal and joins the ordinary pre-action protocol track. The non-PSLA heads of loss - property damage, loss of earnings, treatment costs, care and assistance - are not part of the £5,000 limit. So a claim with £4,000 PSLA, £6,000 lost earnings and £3,000 property damage stays on the small claims track and runs through the portal, even though the total exposure to the at-fault insurer is £13,000.

A small but consequential exclusion: ‘vulnerable road users’ retain the old £1,000 small-claims-track limit and do not use the OIC portal for whiplash claims. Pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, pillion and sidecar passengers, horse riders and users of mobility scooters all fall in this group. A motorbike rider with whiplash from a rear-end shunt at traffic lights therefore valued conventionally on the Judicial College Guidelines, not by tariff. This is the structural concession Parliament made to vulnerable-road-user campaign groups during the 2018 Bill’s passage, and it remains the single largest carve-out from the tariff system.

MedCo, fixed medical reports and how the duration band is set

Every whiplash claim brought through the OIC portal must be supported by a fixed-cost medical report from an accredited MedCo expert. MedCo Registration Solutions is the portal that allocates medical experts to claimants on a randomised, conflict-screened basis. The claimant cannot choose the expert - randomisation is the central anti-cartel feature of the post-2018 system, intended to break the prior practice of claimant solicitors and medical agencies repeatedly briefing the same favourable experts. The fixed cost of the report is recovered from the at-fault insurer.

The MedCo expert examines the claimant, takes a history, considers GP records where available and writes a short report addressing: the mechanism of injury, the symptoms, treatment to date, current condition and a prognosis date for resolution. The prognosis date drives the tariff band. Where symptoms have already resolved the expert states the actual resolution date. Where symptoms persist, the expert estimates the remaining duration based on clinical findings and the response to treatment. The estimate is a forecast: if it later proves wrong by a meaningful margin the file can in principle be re-opened, but in practice settlement on the prognosis date is the norm.

Where the medical evidence reveals a non-whiplash injury - a herniated disc, a partially torn ligament, a TMJ disorder beyond mild soft tissue strain - the tariff does not apply to that injury and the claim is valued conventionally. The expert is asked to address each injury head separately. CityGrip’s practice on referral is to flag any feature of the medical history that may take the injury outside the tariff before the MedCo report is finalised, so that the panel solicitor can frame their valuation correctly.

Special damages: earnings, treatment, care and consequential losses

The tariff caps general damages for the pain, suffering and loss of amenity of the whiplash injury itself. It does not touch special damages - the financial losses caused by the injury. These are claimed separately and are not limited by the tariff. The principal heads are loss of earnings, treatment costs, care and assistance, mileage to medical appointments, consumable purchases (over-the-counter analgesia, supports), and any property damage caused by or during the collision. The principle is the long-standing rule of restitutio in integrum: the claimant is to be put back, so far as money can, into the position they would have been in had the collision not happened.

For an employee the loss-of-earnings evidence is the last 13 weeks of payslips, an HR letter on company letterhead confirming the dates absent and the contractual sick-pay terms (full pay, half pay, SSP only, unpaid), and the deductions actually made for the absence. The recoverable figure is net pay loss - gross pay less PAYE income tax and Class 1 NIC. Statutory Sick Pay paid by the employer is recovered separately by HMRC’s Compensation Recovery Unit from the at-fault insurer; it is not deducted from the claimant’s loss-of-earnings figure. For the self-employed the evidence is the latest SA302 tax calculation, the tax-year overview, six to eight weeks of bank statements, invoices and any platform earnings records.

Treatment costs include private physiotherapy, osteopathy and chiropractic treatment where NHS provision is unavailable or significantly delayed. Where the medical report recommends a course of physiotherapy and a reasonable course is undertaken, the cost is recoverable. Care and assistance covers the value of unpaid help provided by family members during the acute phase, valued conventionally by reference to commercial care rates with a 25% discount to reflect the unpaid family context. Mileage to medical appointments is recovered at the standard 45p per mile (50p in some files) for actual journeys evidenced by appointment letters.

The exceptional-circumstances uplift and why it is rarely deployed

Section 5 of the Civil Liability Act 2018 gives the court a residual power to uplift the tariff by up to 20% where the court considers that the case is one of exceptional circumstances. The provision was a concession to the Bill’s critics, who argued that a rigid tariff would produce unjust results in cases where the impact of even a short-duration whiplash injury was disproportionately severe on the particular claimant’s life - a professional musician unable to perform, a carer unable to lift their charge, an athlete unable to compete during a season.

In practice the uplift is rarely sought and rarely granted. Insurers tend to settle within the tariff to avoid setting an uplift precedent. A contested uplift application on the small claims track carries adverse-costs risk against the unrepresented claimant. The reported case law on what counts as ‘exceptional’ remains thin, and the prevailing approach is to reserve the application for genuinely unusual claimants whose loss of amenity is documented by independent evidence (an audition diary, a competitive fixture list, a professional employment contract). For a typical whiplash file the tariff figure is the figure.

Scotland: prescription, jurisdiction and the tariff’s reach

The Civil Liability Act 2018 reforms - the whiplash tariff, the £5,000 small-claims-track limit, the OIC portal - apply in England and Wales only. Scotland has its own civil procedure (the Sheriff Personal Injury Court at Edinburgh handles most road-traffic personal injury claims) and its own limitation regime under the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973, with a three-year limitation period for personal injury under section 17. The Scottish equivalent of the OIC portal does not exist; claims are pursued through ordinary court procedure with judicial valuation of damages.

The practical question for cross-border accidents is which law applies. An accident on a Scottish road is governed by Scots law (Rome II Regulation, retained post-Brexit). An accident on an English road by a Scottish-domiciled claimant against an English-domiciled defendant is governed by English law. The tariff applies if and only if the substantive law governing the claim is English (or Welsh) law. CityGrip flags the jurisdiction point on referral; the panel solicitor confirms the applicable law before opening the OIC portal.

Northern Ireland operates its own scheme as well, broadly aligned with the pre-2018 English position but with separate procedural rules. Claims arising in Northern Ireland are best routed to a solicitor admitted in the Northern Ireland jurisdiction.

CityGrip’s role: accident claim management and panel-solicitor referral

CityGrip is not a solicitor, not an FCA-authorised claims management company and not a regulated personal injury firm. We are a UK accident claim management business. Our work is on the property-damage and operational side of a non-fault file: coordinating recovery from the scene, secure storage of the damaged vehicle, an independent engineer’s inspection, repair management at a PAS 125 / BS 10125 accredited bodyshop, like-for-like replacement vehicle eligibility and direct dialogue with the at-fault driver’s insurer to recover those heads of loss. None of that work is regulated personal injury practice.

For the whiplash and personal injury element of a file, we introduce you to an SRA-regulated panel solicitor - only with your explicit, recorded consent, on disclosed referral terms, after you have been told who the firm is, what the referral arrangement is and what (if anything) is deducted from your compensation. The solicitor takes the file from there: they instruct the MedCo expert, register the claim on the OIC portal (or take it onto the pre-action protocol track for higher-value injuries), negotiate with the at-fault insurer and account to you for the settlement. Their professional indemnity, regulatory oversight and complaints regime apply to the personal injury work.

This separation is deliberate. The accident support work CityGrip does - recovery, storage, repair, engineer inspection, replacement vehicle - does not require FCA authorisation under the regulated claims management activity regime. The legal advice and personal injury claim management work that does require regulation is handled by the panel solicitor under SRA oversight. We do not blur the line between the two and we do not present ourselves as offering services we are not regulated to offer. For more on how the introduction works, see our injury claim referral page.

Typical OIC portal timeline and what each stage produces

The OIC portal is built around defined working-day windows and a predictable sequence of milestones. From the moment the Claim Notification Form (CNF) is submitted, the compensator (the at-fault driver’s insurer) has 30 working days to investigate liability and respond. That response can be: a full liability admission; a partial admission (often raising contributory negligence under Froom v Butcher [1976] QB 286 for unbelted passengers or under the ordinary 25-50% range for failure-to-look junction cases); or a denial. A denial removes the claim from the streamlined portal route and reroutes it via the small claims-track exit, with all the procedural and evidential implications that entails.

Once liability is admitted (or treated as admitted by failure to respond), the claimant uploads supporting evidence: the police accident report number, witness contact details, photographs of vehicle damage and the scene, and proof of any out-of-pocket losses. The portal then triggers the MedCo medical examination. The expert is allocated randomly through MedCo Registration Solutions; the claimant cannot choose. A single fixed-cost medical report is produced within four to six weeks of the booking, addressing the mechanism of injury, the symptoms, the treatment history, the current condition and the prognosis date.

The report sets the duration band, identifies any non-tariff injuries, addresses pre-existing conditions and apportions the symptoms to the collision. Where there is significant pre-existing degeneration of the cervical spine - common in middle-aged claimants - the report distinguishes between acceleration of pre-existing symptoms (which is compensable for the period of acceleration) and the underlying condition (which is not). This is a fine distinction with real financial consequences and is one of the reasons even a tariff whiplash case sometimes warrants a panel solicitor’s involvement rather than a litigant-in-person approach.

Mixed-injury claims and the Rabot v Hassam ruling

A common claim profile is whiplash plus a non-tariff injury sustained in the same collision - a wrist sprain, dental damage from the airbag, bruising from the seat belt, an aggravation of a pre-existing back condition. The Supreme Court addressed how the tariff and the conventional Judicial College Guidelines valuation interact in Rabot v Hassam [2024] UKSC 11. The decision confirmed that the two heads are valued separately: the tariff applies to the whiplash element on the SI 2025/615 schedule; the non-tariff injury is valued conventionally on the JCG; and a modest discount is then applied to avoid double-counting the overlapping general damages.

The practical effect is that mixed-injury claims tend to come in higher than the headline tariff figure would suggest, because the non-tariff component is uncapped. A claimant with three months of whiplash (£275 tariff) and a four-month wrist sprain might net a total of £1,200-£1,800 PSLA before the overlap discount, depending on the JCG band for the wrist injury. The Rabot v Hassam framework is now the default approach on every mixed-injury file and the panel solicitor’s job is to identify the non-tariff component early so the MedCo report addresses both injuries comprehensively.

Related guides on this site

• Personal injury claim after a car accident
• Accident claim time limit (Limitation Act 1980)
• No win no fee accident claim explained
• Accident claim process in the UK
• Our injury claim referral process
• Start an accident evidence form