Office Accident Claims
Check if you can claim compensation
If you have been injured in an office accident that was not your fault, you may be able to claim compensation. We handle office accident claims and will explain your options clearly and help you understand the next steps.
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Can you make an office accident claim?
An office accident claim rests on two things. The first is the employer’s duty of care at common law, which covers how the work is organised, the equipment provided, training and supervision, and the state of the parts of the premises the employer controls. The second is the health and safety regulations that governed the hazard, which set the standard a court measures that employer against.
The regulation that comes up first is almost always regulation 3(1) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, under which every employer must make “a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety of his employees to which they are exposed whilst they are at work”. In an office that assessment should deal with floors and walkways, trailing cables, lighting, stairs, storage above head height and workstations. Whether one was ever done, and what it said, is usually the first document we ask for.
What the regulations do, and who pays
What the regulations actually do
This is the part most pages on this subject get wrong. For a breach on or after 1 October 2013, breaking a health and safety regulation does not by itself hand you a civil claim. What the regulation does is set the standard of care, and we prove negligence against it.
For a breach before that date the position is different, and the regulation is still directly actionable, because the change was not retrospective. On a one-off office accident that distinction rarely matters. On a strain injury that built up over many years it can, and it is worth telling us how far back the problem goes rather than only when it got bad.
Who pays an office accident claim
Employers’ liability insurance has been compulsory since 1 January 1972, when the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 was brought into force. A claim against your employer is handled and paid by that insurer.
It does not come out of the business. That is worth knowing before you spend any tme worrying about what a claim will do to the people you work with, because it is the thing that stops most people from ringing at all.
Why office accidents lead to a claim
Of the 59,219 non-fatal injuries employers reported to the Health and Safety Executive in 2024/25, a slip, trip or fall on level ground was the largest single category by a wide margin. Two kinds of accident between them accounted for roughly half of everything reported.
We are not going to dress that up as an office statistic, because it is not one. What it does show is that the thing most likely to injure somebody at work is a floor, and a floor is the one hazard an office has as much of as a warehouse. In our experience the office claims that follow are slips on unmarked wet floors, trips on cables and lifted carpet, falls on stairs, chairs and shelving that gave way, objects coming down from storage above head height, and strain injuries from a desk nobody ever assessed.
The reason these turn into claims rather than accidents is usually documentary. Somebody had already reported the loose carpet tile. The risk assessment did not mention the stairs. The workstation assessment was done once, three years before the desk moved. None of that is bad luck, and all of it is written down somewhere.
Who is liable for an office accident?
Whoever controlled the thing that injured you. In a single-occupancy office that is almost always the employer. In a shared building, a serviced office or a managed block, it very often is not, and a claim aimed only at the employer can fail for that reason alone.
You do not need to work any of this out before you ring us. Tell us where you were standing and what happened, and establishing who controlled it is the first thing we do.
Office accidents you can claim for
Eight situations, and the duty that applies to each. If yours is not here it does not mean you have no claim.
Slips, trips and falls
Wet floors with no warning sign, trailing cables, loose carpet, cluttered walkways and unlit stairs. Regulation 12 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires floors and traffic routes not to be uneven or slippery so as to expose anyone to a risk to their safety, and to be kept free, so far as is reasonably practicable, of obstructions and of anything likely to cause a fall.
Faulty equipment and furniture
A chair that collapses, a shelf that gives way, a cupboard door that comes off, or electrical equipment that should have been maintained or replaced. Where the defect originated with the manufacturer rather than your employer, the 1969 Act above means the claim still goes to your employer’s insurer. You are not expected to litigate against a supplier you have never heard of.
Workstation injuries and RSI
Back, neck, shoulder and wrist pain, and repetitive strain, from a desk nobody ever set up properly. Employers must perform a suitable and sufficient analysis of display screen workstations, reduce the risks it finds to the lowest extent reasonably practicable, plan the work so that screen time is broken up by breaks or changes of activity, and provide eye and eyesight tests on request.
Office car parks
Potholes, ice nobody gritted, unlit bays and vehicles manoeuvring. A private road or yard used as a way in and out of work is part of the workplace in law, which is more than most pages will tell you. Who answers for it depends on who occupies or manages it, and on a business park that is usually the landlord rather than the employer.
Working from home and hybrid
The workstation duties travel with you and the premises duties do not, which is the distinction almost every page on this subject misses. A setup your employer was told about is a very different case from a trip on your own stairs. The section below sets out both halves, because starting one of these claims on the wrong footing wastes months.
Faulty equipment and furniture
Boxes, archive files, monitors and equipment stored above head height in cupboards, on shelves and on top of cabinets. Storage at height in an office is a foreseeable risk and belongs in the risk assessment. When one of these claims is defended, it is usually defended on whether anybody had ever looked at the shelving, and the answer is in writing or it is nowhere.
Kitchens, stairs and communal areas
Scalds from faulty kettles and boiling water taps, slips on kitchen floors, falls on stairs with no handrail or poor lighting. These areas are inside the law, not outside it: a lobby, corridor or staircase used to get to and from your place of work counts as part of the workplace, and suitable handrails are required on staircases. In a shared building the party responsible is often the occupier rather than your employer.
Manual handling
Lifting boxes of files, shifting furniture for a reshuffle, and taking in deliveries nobody planned for. An employer must so far as is reasonably practicable avoid the need for hazardous manual handling, and where it cannot be avoided, assess it and reduce the risk of injury to the lowest level reasonably practicable. An office move with no plan behind it is where most of these start.
You may also be able to claim for manual handling injuries from lifting or moving items at work. Tell us what happened and we will let you know where you stand.
Can you claim for an injury while working from home?
Sometimes, and which duty you are relying on decides it. Your employer’s workstation duties follow you home. Its premises duties stop at the office door. Most pages on this subject blur the two, and a reader who acts on that ends up disappointed.
What decides most home working claims, in practice, is not the law at all. It is whether you raised a problem and what your employer did about it. If you asked for a chair, or said the laptop was giving you neck pain, or filled in a home assessment form that flagged something, and nothing happened, that record is the claim. Tell us what you reported and when.
Common injuries from office accidents
In almost every claim an independent medical expert will examine you and report on the injury, its cause and your likely recovery. That report, rather than the accident, is what sets the value of the injury, which is why we do not quote figures before it exists.
How much compensation for an office accident?
There is no single figure and we will not promise you one. Office injury compensation is built from two halves, and the second is often the bigger of the two.
The injury itself
Valued once an independent medical expert has reported on what you suffered and how long it is expected to last. Courts assess this against the Judicial College Guidelines, now in their 18th edition, published on 9 April 2026. Anyone quoting you a number before that report exists is describing somebody else’s case.
What the injury has cost you
Proved with documents rather than opinion, and on a lasting injury frequently the larger half:
One threshold worth knowing about
The small claims track is where the costs rules are least favourable, so whether a claim lands there matters. Two conditions have to be met. The claim as a whole has to be worth no more than £10,000, and on a claim that is not a road traffic accident the injury element has to be £1,500 or less, under rule 26.9(1)(a)(ii)(cc) of the Civil Procedure Rules.
Both limbs matter. A claim with £1,200 of injury and £14,000 of lost earnings is not a small claim, because it fails the first test even though it passes the second. We will tell you which side of those lines your claim sits before you decide anything.
Evidence that supports your claim
Clear evidence helps show what happened and how it has affected you. You do not need to gather everything before you get in touch. We can help.
Not sure what you have? Get in touch anyway. We can request your employer’s records and arrange the medical evidence for you.
No Win No Fee office accident claims
You can start an office accident claim without paying anything upfront. If your claim is unsuccessful, you will not pay a fee for our work, subject to the terms of your agreement.
If your claim succeeds, an agreed success fee is deducted from your compensation. Your solicitor will explain this clearly before you commit to anything.
You will see the full terms in writing before your claim begins.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know before starting your claim.
Who is liable for an accident in an office?
Two practical tests usually settle it faster than any legal argument. Who holds the cleaning contract, and what does the lease say about who repairs what. Both are documents, and we can ask for both. It is also worth knowing you are not limited to one defendant: where the employer and the building manager each got something wrong, the claim can be brought against both and they can argue between themselves about shares.
Can I claim if I was injured working from home?
Send us three things if you have them: any home working assessment you were asked to complete, any request you made for equipment, and the reply. Those decide most of these claims. It also matters whether the arrangement was permanent or a few days here and there, because an employer is expected to do more about a setup you use every day than about a desk you borrowed for a week.
My office chair collapsed. Can I claim if the chair was faulty?
Ask for the chair not to be thrown away, and say so in writing today. Facilities teams dispose of broken furniture quickly and it is the single most useful item of evidence you will ever have in a claim like this. If it has already gone, the next best things are the purchase record and any maintenance or inspection log for the furniture.
Can I claim for carpal tunnel or RSI from typing?
The part people underestimate is the medical evidence. A GP note recording wrist pain, or the words repetitive strain injury written on a sick note, is not enough on its own. These claims need a specialist report that links the specific condition to the specific work pattern, and the earlier you tell us how long you have worked that way and on what equipment, the easier that report is to obtain.
Can I claim if I am agency staff, self-employed or on a zero hours contract?
The useful question is which insurer ends up paying. If an agency placed you, there are often two policies in play, and we approach both rather than guessing. Tell us who paid you, who gave you your instructions day to day, and whose premises you were on, because those three answers rarely point at the same organisation and we need all of them.
How long does an office accident claim take?
The step that takes longest is almost never the one people expect. It is waiting for your condition to stabilise enough for an expert to say what the long-term position is. Liability arguments and insurer correspondence run on fixed timescales we can push. A prognosis cannot be hurried, and a claim settled before it is clear tends to be settled for too little.
Will I have to attend a medical examination?
In almost every claim, yes, and it is usually one appointment lasting under an hour. You can ask for an examiner of a particular gender, or one closer to home, and reasonable travel is paid as part of the claim. Nothing invasive happens. The expert takes a history, examines the affected area and writes to us.
Can you claim for an accident in an office?
Yes, if the accident was caused by your employer failing to keep the workplace reasonably safe. Offices carry real risks, from slips and trips to faulty equipment, and the same health and safety duties apply as in any other workplace.
How much compensation can you get for an office accident?
It depends on your injury, how much it affects your daily life and work, and the financial losses that follow. A minor injury and a lasting one are worth very different amounts, so there is no reliable average. Our team can give you a clearer idea once the medical evidence is in place.
What are the most common office accidents?
Slips, trips and falls are the most common, often from wet floors, trailing cables, or cluttered walkways. Other frequent causes include faulty chairs and furniture, objects falling from shelves, and strain injuries from poorly set up workstations.
How long do I have to make an office accident claim?
In most cases you have three years from the date of the accident. For injuries that build up over time, such as repetitive strain, the three years usually run from when you first knew the injury was linked to your work. It is best to check your position rather than assume you are out of time.
Will making a claim affect my job?
Understandably, this worries a lot of people. Your claim is made against your employer’s insurance, which they are required by law to have, so the money does not come out of their own pocket. If you have concerns about your job, we can talk them through with you before you decide anything.
Check if you can make an office claim
Tell us what happened and we will review your details and get back to you. We will explain your options in plain English, with no obligation to go ahead.
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Check if you can make a claim
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Don't leave it too late to claim
Office accident claims usually must be started within three years of your accident. The sooner you begin, the easier it is to gather evidence and secure your employer’s records.
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