Wrist Injury Claims
Check if you can claim compensation
If you injured your wrist in an accident that was not your fault, at work, on the road, out in public or playing sport, you may be able to make wrist injury claims. We will explain your options clearly and help you understand the next steps.
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Can you claim for a wrist injury?
You can bring a wrist injury claim if someone else was at fault, even partly, and you are within three years of the accident. What decides the value is not the fracture itself but what grip, movement and rotation you are left with, and what the injury has cost you in earnings and help at home.
Section 11 of the Limitation Act 1980 runs the three years from the accident or from the date you first knew the injury was significant and attributable to it, whichever is later. Where the injured person was a child, section 28 suspends the clock until they turn 18, so they have until their twenty-first birthday.
Being partly responsible does not end a wrist injury claim. The award is reduced to reflect your share rather than refused, so tell us honestly what happened.
Which duty of care applies to you
Where you were hurt decides which duty applies, and that decides who the claim is brought against. Almost every wrist injury falls into one of three places.
At work
Your employer owes duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the regulations made under it. The duty is to take reasonable care for your safety, and it reaches the equipment you use, the place you work and the way the work is organised.
In a shop or any public place
Whoever occupies the premises owes you the common duty of care under the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957, because you were there lawfully. It applies the same way to a supermarket aisle, a car park, a restaurant, a hotel or a leisure centre.
On the road
The duty is the ordinary one every road user owes to everyone else, and it does not change with the vehicle. It is the same standard whether you were driving, riding a bike or crossing on foot when you were hit.
The occupier’s duty is worth quoting, because it is narrower than most people assume and wider than most occupiers admit. Section 2(2) of the 1957 Act calls it a duty to take such care as is reasonable in all the circumstances to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they are invited or permitted to be there. Reasonable, not perfect, and judged on the circumstances at the time.
What a health and safety regulation does, and does not do
Since 1 October 2013, when section 69 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 amended the 1974 Act, a breach of health and safety regulations is not by itself a right to sue. The claim is brought in negligence, and the regulation sets the standard your employer is measured against.
That cuts in two directions at once. It matters less than it used to, because a breach no longer carries the claim on its own and you have to show the failure caused the injury. It also matters a great deal, because the regulations are still what define the standard, so working out which one applied still shapes the whole claim and the evidence it needs.
And it cuts the other way too. A claim does not fail because no regulation fits your accident neatly. An employer’s duty to take reasonable care for the safety of the people who work for them exists at common law, independently of any regulation, and plenty of claims are brought on that footing alone.
You do not need to know which regulation applied
Describe what you were doing, what you were using and what the place was like. Identifying the standard is our job rather than yours.
What you were told, and by whom, is part of it
Training, instructions and whether anyone had raised the problem before all go to the standard a reasonable employer is held to.
Compensation for broken wrist and fractured wrist injuries
Most wrist injury claims are broken wrist compensation claims. What decides broken wrist compensation is not that the bone broke but what the wrist does afterwards.
So the question the medical report has to answer is what grip strength, rotation and range of movement you have left once the cast is off. A report that says the fracture united describes the bone. It does not describe what you can lift, carry or type.
Broken wrist compensation amounts
How much compensation for a broken wrist, and how much compensation do you get for a broken wrist, both depend on two things that have nothing to do with each other: how the wrist ends up, and what the injury cost you. Wrist fracture compensation, compensation for a broken wrist and compensation for broken wrist injuries are all worked out the same way whether the break was a simple one or needed surgery, and the broken wrist compensation amount turns on the evidence rather than on the diagnosis.
A fractured wrist compensation claim is therefore two calculations, not one. Average payout for fractured wrist figures published elsewhere mix the two together, which is why they are useless. The guideline bracket values the injury; the financial losses are worked out separately, and on a wrist injury they are frequently the larger figure, because a wrist you cannot use keeps you off work. Both halves are set out below under settlement amounts.
The specific fracture matters to the valuation
Write down what the fracture clinic called your injury, whether it needed manipulation, and whether a plate, wires or a cast were used. Those facts sit in the records already, and having them to hand shortens the expert’s work and sharpens the bracket your injury is measured against. A distal radius fracture, a scaphoid fracture and a soft tissue injury with no break at all are three different valuations, and the notes are what separate them.
Ask for grip strength to be measured
Against your other hand, so there is a comparison rather than a number on its own. Grip is the single most useful figure in a wrist report and the one most often left out of it.
Ask for rotation to be recorded
Turning the forearm palm up and palm down. It is what you use to hold a steering wheel, a screwdriver or a plate, and losing it affects more daily tasks than losing a few degrees of bend.
Ask whether you can weight-bear
Whether you can put full weight through the wrist, as you would pushing up off a floor or a bench. Trades, care work and anything physical turn on this, and it rarely appears unless somebody asks.
Broken wrist at work compensation, and what your employer had to do
A broken wrist at work claim starts differently from any other, because the injury triggers a legal obligation on your employer that most injured people never hear about, and that obligation creates a document your claim can use.
Wrist injury at work compensation is met by your employer’s insurance, not by the business. That is the point most people worry about and nobody says out loud, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else: the money does not come out of the wages of the people you work with.
You cannot be dismissed for bringing a genuine claim. An accident at work broken wrist is one of the most commonly reported workplace injuries there is, and compensation for broken wrist at work is met by the compulsory employers’ liability insurance every employer must hold.
Agency, temporary and subcontracted workers are covered too. Who owes you the duty depends on who controlled the site and the task rather than on whose name is on your payslip, and on a labour-only contract it is often not the business that pays you. Tell us both names and we will work out which one answers for it.
Under RIDDOR 2013, the reporting regulations, a fracture is a specified injury. The HSE states the rule plainly:
“All fractures are reportable, except those to fingers, thumbs and toes.”
A broken wrist is not a finger, thumb or toe. It should have been reported.
What the claim itself turns on
The regulation that fits how you were hurt sets the standard: the manual handling regulations where you were lifting, the work equipment regulations where a machine or tool was involved, and the workplace regulations where the floor, the lighting or a traffic route was the problem. As set out above, since 2013 a breach is evidence of negligence rather than a separate right to sue, so the question is always what a reasonable employer would have done about the risk that regulation addresses.
Two records to ask for, and they are different documents
If the report was not made, that is a breach of the reporting duty in its own right, and it also tells you something about how the employer treated the accident. Where the seriousness of an injury was not obvious at first, the HSE expects the authority to be notified as soon as a specified injury has been confirmed, so a late diagnosis is not a reason for there to be no report at all.
Ask for both in writing, and keep whatever comes back. A claim in which the employer cannot produce either document is in a different position from one where both exist and agree with each other.
The accident book entry
Kept by the employer. Ask for a copy of what was written at the time, not a summary of it written later.
The RIDDOR report made to the enforcing authority
A separate document that leaves the building. Ask whether it was made, and note the answer you are given.
Wrist injury settlement amounts and wrist injury compensation amounts
A wrist injury settlement is made of two separate calculations, and mixing them up is why published averages are useless. How much compensation for wrist injury you receive, and what your wrist injury claim value turns out to be, depends on getting both halves right.
General damages: the injury itself
This covers the pain, the treatment, and any permanent loss of movement or grip. Courts value it against the Judicial College Guidelines, the reference judges and solicitors work from across England, which set guideline brackets by severity.
It is the half people expect, and on a wrist injury it is usually the smaller of the two.
Special damages: what it has cost you
Lost earnings for the time you could not work, treatment and physiotherapy, travel to appointments, and help at home with the things a working wrist does. These are proved with documents rather than estimated.
On a wrist injury this is routinely the larger figure, and it is the half most often left thin.
That is why there is no useful average compensation for broken wrist claims, and why a broken wrist settlement varies so widely. Two people with the same fracture settle for very different amounts, because one of them lays bricks and one of them does not. The bracket is the same; the earnings loss is not.
It is also why no wrist injury compensation calculator can give you a figure. A calculator cannot know what you earn, what your job asks of your hands, or what you can no longer do.
The one thing you can influence today. Keep your payslips and your sickness record from the first week. The earnings part of a wrist injury settlement is the part most often left thin, and it is the part that does not need a medical expert to prove.
Average time off work with a broken wrist
There is no average worth quoting, because the honest answer depends on something nobody asks about: not the fracture, but what you do with your hands all day.
A broken wrist that keeps a desk worker off for a fortnight keeps a plasterer off for months, and the same X-ray produces both. What matters for the claim is that the time off is recorded properly while it is happening, because it is the largest recoverable loss on most wrist claims and the easiest to lose.
Get the fit note, and get the next one
A gap between fit notes reads as a period you were fit to work, whether or not you were. If there is already a gap, ask your GP to record why, because an explanation given now is worth more than one reconstructed at settlement.
Keep the payslips from before the accident too
The loss is the difference between what you earned before and what you earned after, so the earlier ones are half the calculation. Twelve weeks before the accident is usually enough to establish the pattern, including overtime.
Write down what you were moved on to
Light duties at reduced pay, lost overtime and lost shifts are all recoverable, and none of them appears in a medical report. Nobody will ask you for this unless you raise it, because only you know it happened.
Could not return to the same job, say so early
Retraining costs and a continuing loss of earning capacity are claimable, and they change the size of the claim entirely. Raised late, they need evidence that is harder to assemble after the event.
Ask the question the other way round: not how long people are usually off, but what your return to work will look like and what it will be worth. That is the figure the claim is built on.
Wrist injury car accident settlement
A wrist injury from a car accident is valued differently from the neck injury that often comes with it, and knowing which is which stops people accepting the wrong figure.
Regulation 2 of the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021 sets tariff amounts for damages payable in relation to “one or more whiplash injuries”, and for whiplash together with “one or more minor psychological injuries suffered on the same occasion”.
Those are the only injuries it prices. A wrist fracture is not a whiplash injury, so it falls outside the tariff and is valued at common law against the guideline brackets.
That distinction has a practical consequence. Where you suffered both, the whiplash element is tariffed and the wrist is not, and a settlement offer that treats the whole claim as a tariff case is undervaluing the part that is worth more.
If you were offered a single figure early, ask which part of it is for the wrist.
An offer that cannot be broken down into a tariff element and a common law element is an offer nobody has valued properly, and it is much easier to question before it is accepted than afterwards.
Scaphoid fracture compensation, and a missed scaphoid fracture
Scaphoid fracture compensation splits into two different claims, and they have to be kept apart because the defendant, the legal test and the evidence are all different. Missed scaphoid fracture compensation in particular is not an accident claim at all.
A scaphoid fracture claim after an accident
If you fell because of someone else’s negligence and fractured your scaphoid, this is an ordinary injury claim against whoever caused the fall, and scaphoid fracture compensation amounts are assessed on the same basis as any other wrist fracture on this page. Ask for the imaging, including any repeat imaging, and the fracture clinic notes.
A scaphoid fracture claim after an accident
This is a clinical negligence claim, against the hospital or practice rather than against whoever caused the accident, and it is judged by a different test.
Under Bolam v Friern Hospital Management Committee a clinician is not negligent if their management was supported by a responsible body of medical opinion. Bolitho v City and Hackney Health Authority, decided by the House of Lords on 13 November 1997, added that the body of opinion relied on must itself withstand logical analysis. So the question is not whether the fracture was missed. It is whether missing it, and what was done next, fell outside what a responsible body of opinion would support.
Then there is causation, which is where these claims are usually won or lost. You have to show the delay made your outcome worse than it would have been with earlier treatment. That is a separate question from whether the fracture was visible on the first film, and it is the one the expert evidence has to answer.
What to obtain
Every X-ray and scan with its date, not the written report alone
Whether imaging was repeated, and when
What you were told at the first attendance, and what follow-up you were given
The notes from whoever eventually diagnosed it
That last date matters twice over, because the date the fracture was confirmed is also the date your three years may start running under the Limitation Act 1980.
How long does a wrist injury claim take?
No average is worth quoting, so here is what actually decides it. Four things, and you will usually know which of them applies to you.
Whether liability is admitted
An admission moves the claim straight to valuation. A denial means expert evidence on both sides and adds months, and it is the single biggest fork in the road.
Whether your wrist has settled
A claim valued before the medical picture is clear is valued on the wrong bracket. Where grip or movement is still improving, waiting is usually worth more than settling.
Whether you are back at work
An earnings loss cannot be finalised while it is still running, and on a wrist injury that is often the largest head of loss in the whole claim.
Whether a missed fracture is part of it
A clinical negligence element needs its own expert and runs on its own timetable, so a claim with both halves takes longer than either would alone.
Evidence that supports your wrist injury claims
Clear evidence is an important part of wrist injury claims because it helps show how the accident happened and how the injury has affected your life.
Was a fracture missed at hospital? A scaphoid fracture that is not spotted on an early X-ray can lead to longer-term problems. If that happened to you, it may be a medical negligence claim. See our medical negligence page or ask our team.
No Win No Fee wrist injury claims
Most wrist injury claims are handled on a No Win No Fee basis, so you do not pay anything upfront.
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.
How much compensation will I get for a broken wrist?
It depends on how serious the injury is and how long it affects you. The courts use the Judicial College Guidelines, which set guideline brackets from a few thousand pounds for a minor wrist injury with full recovery up to tens of thousands for a severe injury with lasting disability. These are a guide, not a promise. Financial losses, such as lost earnings, can be claimed on top. We can give you a clearer idea once we understand your situation and have a medical report.
How is a wrist injury claim valued?
In two parts. The injury itself is valued using the Judicial College Guidelines and an independent medical report on how it has affected you. On top of that, your financial losses are added up, such as lost earnings, treatment costs and any help you have needed. There is no reliable single figure or instant calculator, because every injury and every person’s circumstances are different.
Can I claim for a broken wrist at work?
Yes, if your employer failed in their duty to keep you reasonably safe and that led to your injury. You cannot be dismissed for making a genuine claim. See our accidents at work page, or speak to our team.
Can I claim if a scaphoid fracture was missed or misdiagnosed?
You may be able to. Scaphoid fractures are commonly missed on a first X-ray, and if that delay made your outcome worse, it may be a medical negligence claim rather than an accident claim. See our medical negligence page, and we can tell you which type of claim fits your situation.
How long do wrist injury claims take?
In most cases you have three years from the date of the accident, or from when you realised the injury was linked to it. For children, the three years usually starts on their 18th birthday. If you are unsure, contact us and we will check whether you are still in time.
How long does wrist injury claims take?
It depends on how serious the injury is and whether the other side accepts responsibility. A straightforward claim can settle in a few months, while one where you are still recovering, or where fault is disputed, takes longer. Your solicitor will keep you updated throughout.
Check if you can make wrist injury claims
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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