PTSD & Psychological Injury Claims

How PTSD Compensation Is Valued

Direct Answer: Under the 18th edition of the Judicial College Guidelines (published 9 April 2026), psychiatric and psychological injury including PTSD ranges from around £4,820, where a virtually full recovery is made within one to two years, up to around £122,850 for the most severe, permanent cases. Where a specific claim falls in that range depends on the severity of symptoms, the effect on work, relationships and day-to-day life, the prognosis, and how well the person responds to treatment.

This is a genuinely wide range, and deliberately so — PTSD and psychiatric injury cover everything from a relatively short-lived reaction that resolves with treatment to a permanent, life-altering condition. Getting the right bracket depends on properly documented psychiatric or psychological expert evidence describing the specific severity and prognosis in your case, not a general assumption about what "PTSD" typically involves.

A claim doesn't need to involve a physical injury at all. Frightening accidents, violent assaults, and traumatic events a person witnessed can all support a standalone psychiatric injury claim. Where the psychiatric claim arises from witnessing an event that happened to someone else, rather than being directly involved, the legal test for whether the claim succeeds can be more demanding — this is a genuinely fact-specific area worth discussing with a solicitor rather than assuming it works the same way as a direct-involvement claim.

Why Prognosis Matters So Much

Unlike many physical injuries, where the injury itself is relatively fixed once it's happened, psychiatric injury brackets are explicitly built around how the condition is expected to develop — whether symptoms are expected to substantially resolve with treatment, or persist long-term. This means ongoing medical evidence about your progress and response to treatment matters throughout the life of the claim, not just at the point of the initial diagnosis.