The 2025 whiplash tariff rise does not apply in Scotland

The English whiplash tariff amounts went up in 2025, and most of the compensation calculators and news coverage online were updated to match. If you were injured in a collision in Scotland, none of that changes what happens to your claim. The tariff never applied here, and a bigger tariff is still not your tariff.

The Whiplash Injury (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/615) raised the tariff amounts by roughly 15%. The higher figures apply to accidents on or after 31 May 2025; accidents before that date stay on the older amounts.

The tariff is a fixed government table. For a whiplash injury lasting a given number of months, it sets the compensation figure, and that figure is the figure. It is deliberately mechanical, and it is the system England and Wales run for whiplash injuries from road accidents.

Regulation 1(2) of the 2025 Regulations says, in full:

These Regulations extend to England and Wales.

That is the whole answer. Scotland sits outside the tariff, so there is no Scottish version of the table, no Scottish tariff amount, and nothing here for a 15% uplift to be applied to.

The same border runs through the procedure. The £5,000 small claims track that road traffic injury claims go through in England and Wales does not exist in Scotland either. Our post on personal injury claims in Scotland vs England sets out how the two systems part company on time limits, courts and who prosecutes.

One thing to check before you read any of this as applying to you: which law applies usually turns on where the accident happened rather than where you live. The other post covers that too.

Compensation for the injury itself is called solatium in Scotland. There is no statutory table to read it off. The value is worked out the way the Scottish courts work it out: on the medical evidence in your particular case, measured against what has been awarded in comparable decided cases. Most claims settle long before anyone stands up in front of a Sheriff, but that is still the yardstick both sides are negotiating against.

That is a different exercise from looking up a number of months in a table, and it is why two people who both had three months of neck pain can end up in very different places. Our guide to whiplash claims and how much they are worth goes through what actually moves the figure in Scotland.

One piece of English material does cross the border in practice. The Judicial College Guidelines are published for England and Wales and have no binding force in Scotland, but Scottish solicitors and courts routinely use them as a cross-check when valuing solatium. They are a sense-check on a figure, not a rule that decides it.

Practitioners have reported that the 18th edition was published on 9 April 2026 and raised its general damages figures by around 8%. That figure comes from law firms writing about the new edition rather than from an official government page, because the Guidelines are published commercially rather than by the state.

The distinction matters more than the percentage. An updated edition changes a reference point that Scottish practitioners consult. It does not change the law that applies to your claim, and it is not a tariff arriving in Scotland by the back door.

Any tariff figure you find online is an English figure. That was true before 31 May 2025 and it is true after it. A calculator that asks how long your symptoms lasted and returns one number is almost certainly running the English tariff, and it is answering a question about a different legal system.

Headlines about whiplash compensation going up are reporting on England and Wales unless they say otherwise.

Your medical evidence does the work that the table does in England. Seeing a GP and getting your symptoms on record early is not paperwork for its own sake; in Scotland it is the material the valuation is built from. If you have not started a claim yet, you can do that here.

Scottish Accident is a claims management company in Glasgow, not a law firm. We cannot tell you what your claim is worth, and neither can a table that stops at the border. What we can do is make sure your claim is handled by people working in the right legal system. We deal with car accident claims across Scotland, injury included.

If you were hurt in a road accident in Scotland, you can start your claim here or call us on 0141 258 2030.

• The Whiplash Injury (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/615)