How often do tribunals reduce legal and professional cost charges?
Across 758 individually challenged legal and professional cost items in First-tier Tribunal service charge decisions from 2019–2026, 52.6% were reduced or disallowed; where the tribunal made a reduction, the median was 41.7% (n=103 reductions with amounts stated). (n=758, as of 4 July 2026)
The figures on this page cover every individually challenged legal and professional cost item in our corpus of published First-tier Tribunal service charge decisions, and are recomputed nightly.
About these figures: Outcomes reflect disputes that reached the First-tier Tribunal, not portfolio-wide quality. Small samples are noisy; every figure links to the underlying decisions.
Outcomes for challenged legal and professional cost items
| Outcome | Items | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Reduced | 130 | 17.2% |
| Disallowed entirely | 269 | 35.5% |
| Allowed in full | 328 | 43.3% |
| Withdrawn | 8 | 1.1% |
Most common grounds when the tribunal cut the charge
- Other grounds — 69 items
- Not payable under the lease — 135 items
- Demand formally invalid — 18 items
- Fee excessive for service delivered — 7 items
- Duplication of charges — 8 items
- Section 20B 18-month time limit — 10 items
- Landlord could not evidence the cost — 97 items
- Costs unreasonably incurred (s19(1)(a)) — 192 items
By tribunal region
| Region | Items (n) | Reduced or disallowed | Median reduction when reduced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midlands | 50 | 58% | 33.3% |
| Eastern | 64 | 57.8% | 50% |
| Southern | 128 | 53.9% | 40.1% |
| Northern | 82 | 45.1% | 35.9% |
| London | 434 | 52.3% | 45.8% |
Methodology
These statistics are computed from the published decisions of the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) in service charge cases (case types LSC, LIS and LDC). Each decision is parsed into a structured record — the sums challenged, the sums allowed, the outcome per cost head, and the orders made — and the aggregates on this page are recomputed nightly in plain arithmetic from those records. No figure on this page is estimated, modelled or hand-typed; each carries its sample size. Current corpus: 2,383 decisions covering 12,898 individually disputed items, last updated 4 July 2026.
Read this before quoting: Outcomes reflect disputes that reached the First-tier Tribunal, not portfolio-wide quality. Small samples are noisy; every figure links to the underlying decisions.