Which work this applies to
The rules do not cover everything a firm does. They bite on specific areas of work, split between services to the public and services to business.
For members of the public: residential conveyancing, including freehold and leasehold sales and purchases, mortgages and remortgages; probate for uncontested cases with UK assets only; summary-only motoring offences; employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal; and immigration, excluding asylum applications.
For businesses: debt recovery up to £100,000; defending employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal; and licensing applications for new premises licences or variations.
If none of that is your work, these particular rules do not require you to publish prices — but the complaints and SRA badge requirements further down this page apply to every authorised firm regardless.
What the price information has to contain
The SRA asks for price information "prominently, in as clear and understandable format as possible". In practice that means a page a prospective client can find and read, not a PDF behind a menu item called Legal Information.
- The total cost where you can give one. Where you genuinely cannot, an average or a range is acceptable — but you must set out the basis for the charges, including any hourly rates and the factors that decide the final figure.
- Whether the prices, fees and disbursements include VAT, and the amount of VAT either as a percentage or as a cash figure.
- What is included in the price shown.
- Disbursements — third-party costs such as court fees — identified separately.
- Anything a client could reasonably expect to be included that is not. The SRA is explicit that you must say so rather than leave the gap for them to discover.
That last line is the one worth reading twice. A price that is technically accurate and silently excludes the thing the client assumed was in it is the failure mode these rules were written for.
What else goes with it
Price on its own is not compliance. The rules also require the service information around it.
- The services included within the displayed price, and the services not included that a client might reasonably expect to be.
- Typical timescales, and the key stages of the matter.
- The experience and qualifications of the team or individuals who will carry out the work.
The SRA goes further than most firms realise on that third point, suggesting the information covers years of post-qualification experience, an estimate of the number of cases handled, the proportion of their time spent in that area, and the complexity of matters they take on.
That is an unusual thing for a regulator to ask for, because it is also the single most persuasive content a law firm can publish. A named solicitor with eleven years in the area and a described caseload is a better answer to "should I instruct this firm" than any amount of copy about being approachable and proactive.
The two requirements that apply even if prices do not
Two further website requirements sit outside the price rules and catch firms that assumed they were exempt.
Rule 2.1 requires an authorised body to publish on its website details of its complaints handling procedure, including details about how and when a complaint can be made to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA. A complaints page that describes only the firm’s internal process does not satisfy this — the external routes have to be there, with the timing.
Rule 4.1 requires an authorised body to display in a prominent place on its website its SRA number and the SRA’s digital badge. Prominent is doing work in that sentence: the badge sitting in a footer image that fails to load, or dropped during a redesign, is a common and entirely avoidable breach.
If you take one thing from this page into a redesign brief: the badge and the complaints routes have to survive the rebuild. They are the first casualties of a site rebuilt by someone who was not told about them.
Where this goes wrong on an actual website
The rules describe what must be published. They do not describe how to publish it, and that is where most of the damage is done.
- Price information as a downloadable PDF. It satisfies a reading of the rule and fails every reader on a phone, and search engines read it poorly or not at all — so the page that could win the enquiry is invisible.
- One combined page for every area of work. Conveyancing pricing and probate pricing are different searches by different people; a single Pricing page ranks for neither.
- A price page with no route to an enquiry. The reader has just been told what it costs and the page ends.
- The badge or the complaints routes lost in a redesign, because nobody listed them as requirements.
- Prices that drift out of date. They are published figures and a client can hold you to them, so review them on a schedule rather than when somebody notices.
The firms that do well with this treat each required disclosure as a page in its own right: what it costs, what is included, who does it, how long it takes, what happens next. That is a compliance obligation and a conversion page at the same time, and there is no version of it that is good compliance and bad marketing.
Why doing this properly is worth more than complying
Firms routinely worry that publishing prices starts a race to the bottom. The counter-argument is simple: the comparison happens whether or not you take part in it. A prospective client with three firms open in three tabs and one price between them does not conclude that the two silent firms are better value.
There is a measured reason to care as well. The content the SRA already obliges you to write is exactly the content that wins those searches.
