How civil claims are allocated: small claims, fast, intermediate and multi-track

Once a defended civil claim is under way in England and Wales, one of the court’s first jobs is to decide which “track” it belongs on - a classification, governed by Part 26 of the Civil Procedure Rules, that determines how formal, expensive and lengthy the process ahead will be. For most of the Civil Procedure Rules’ history there were three tracks. Since 1 October 2023, under the Civil Procedure (Amendment No. 2) Rules 2023, there have been four.

The small claims track remains the entry point, generally for claims worth less than £10,000, run with simplified procedure and, crucially, very limited scope to recover legal costs from the other side even if you win - a deliberate design choice meant to keep it accessible without a lawyer.

The fast track covers claims generally valued between £10,000 and £25,000, expected to be resolved at trial within a day, and subject to a regime of fixed recoverable costs rather than costs assessed case by case.

The new intermediate track sits between that and the multi-track, generally for claims worth £25,000 to £100,000 that are less complex than a multi-track case but too substantial for the fast track - typically capped at a three-day trial, with limited expert evidence and its own banded system of fixed costs, extending the fixed-costs principle further up the value scale than before.

The multi-track remains the destination for the largest and most complex disputes - generally claims above £100,000, or lower-value claims that are unusually complex or likely to run long at trial - where costs are actively managed by the court through a costs budgeting process rather than fixed in advance. The overriding objective behind all four tracks is the same: matching the resources a case consumes, in both court time and legal costs, to what is actually at stake in it.