If your website says you do residential conveyancing, uncontested probate or employment tribunal work, the Transparency Rules apply to you — and a price page missing VAT amounts, named key stages or the SRA digital badge is a £750 fixed penalty. The SRA finds these with proactive web sweeps, and it has been running them since 2023.
Guide · Updated August 2026
The current Transparency Rules have been in force since 11 April 2025. Rule 1 applies where a firm publishes, as part of its usual business, the availability of a listed service. Read that again: the trigger is publishing that you offer the service, not publishing a price. A firm whose website lists residential conveyancing among its services is caught by rule 1 even if it has never published a fee in its life — and is then in breach for not publishing the required information.
Rule 1.2 is the one exclusion: the rules do not apply to publicly funded work.
The qualifiers are where firms fail. Contested probate is not caught; uncontested UK probate is. Asylum work is not caught; other immigration work is. Debt recovery above £100,000 is not caught; below it is. If your page covers both, the caught part still needs the full rule 1.5 information.
Seven limbs, and a page that satisfies five of them is still non-compliant.
Rule 1.6 requires all of it to be clear, accessible and in a prominent place on your website. Information that is technically present but three clicks down, in a PDF, or in a footer link is a rule 1.6 problem even where the content is right.
Rule 2 requires you to publish your complaints handling procedure, including how and when a complaint can be made to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA. Both bodies, and the when as well as the how. A complaints page that names only the Legal Ombudsman is incomplete.
Rule 3 covers firms with no website: the rule 1 and rule 2 information must be made available on request.
Rule 4.1 requires your SRA number and the SRA's digital badge to be displayed in a prominent place on your website. Rule 4.2 requires your SRA authorisation number and the words authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority on your letterhead and on your emails.
These two are the cheapest compliance in the whole regime and the easiest to be caught on. The badge is free, it takes minutes to install, and a missing badge is visible to an automated sweep from the outside without anyone reading a word of your content. The email requirement catches firms whose letterhead is perfect and whose email signature was set up before anyone thought about it — and whose new joiners inherit a template nobody has checked since.
Transparency breaches carry fixed penalties: £750 for a first breach and £1,500 for a subsequent breach within three years. That is the headline, and it understates the exposure in two ways.
First, the SRA does not wait for a complaint. It runs an ongoing programme of proactive web sweeps alongside compliance declarations from firms. Since May 2023 it has issued 439 official warnings and 36 fixed penalty fines on the transparency rules, with over 500 previously non-compliant websites changed. Your website is public, and checking it costs the regulator almost nothing.
Second, fixed penalties sit alongside the general fining powers. Since 20 July 2022 the SRA can fine traditional firms and their solicitors up to £25,000, it has unlimited fining powers over licensed bodies, and since March 2024 its powers are unlimited for breaches relating to the prevention or detection of economic crime under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023.
Worked example — illustrative. A conveyancing page quotes £950 plus VAT and disbursements, names the department but no individual, gives no supervisor, sets out no key stages or per-stage timescales, and the site carries the SRA number in the footer but no digital badge. That single page fails rule 1.5(c) on qualifications and supervisors, rule 1.5(d) on disbursements, rule 1.5(e) on the VAT amount and rule 1.5(f) on stages and timescales, and the site fails rule 4.1 on the badge. A first breach carries a £750 fixed penalty; a subsequent breach within three years carries £1,500. Fixing all five takes an afternoon.
Work through this on your own site, in this order. It is genuinely an afternoon's work for most firms.
The transparency rules are a compliance obligation, but a properly built price page — real numbers, named stages, honest timescales, the VAT stated — is also the best-converting page most law firm websites have. Firms that treat rule 1.5 as a marketing brief rather than a form to fill in tend to end up with both the compliance and the enquiries. If you are setting up, our guide to starting a law firm covers where this sits in the sequence; if you are acquiring, check the target's pages during due diligence, because you inherit the exposure with the website. This is information about the rules, not legal advice. Our COFA support page explains how we work alongside compliance officers on the finance side.
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Any firm that publishes, as part of its usual business, the availability of a listed service. The trigger is publishing that you offer the service, not publishing a price — so a website listing residential conveyancing among its services is caught even if no fees appear anywhere on it. The listed services to individuals are residential conveyancing including mortgages, uncontested UK probate, immigration applications excluding asylum, First-tier Tribunal immigration appeals excluding asylum, summary-only road traffic matters dealt with at a single hearing, and employee unfair or wrongful dismissal claims. For businesses: employer dismissal defence, debt recovery up to £100,000, and business premises licensing. Rule 1.2 excludes publicly funded work.
Rule 1.5 sets out seven limbs and all seven are required. The total cost, or an average or range where a total is not practicable. The basis of charges, including hourly rates or fixed fees. The experience and qualifications of whoever does the work and of their supervisors. Likely disbursements, described and costed. Whether VAT applies and how much, because the words plus VAT do not satisfy this limb. What is included, the key stages, the likely timescale for each stage, and anything a client might expect to be included but is not. And the conditional fee or damages-based agreement position where relevant. Rule 1.6 then requires it clear, accessible and prominent.
Fixed penalties are £750 for a first breach and £1,500 for a subsequent breach within three years. The SRA does not wait for a complaint: it runs an ongoing programme of proactive web sweeps alongside compliance declarations from firms, and since May 2023 it has issued 439 official warnings and 36 fixed penalty fines under these rules, with over 500 previously non-compliant websites changed. Fixed penalties also sit alongside the general fining powers — up to £25,000 for traditional firms and their solicitors since 20 July 2022, unlimited for licensed bodies, and unlimited for economic crime breaches under ECCTA 2023 since March 2024.
Yes. Rule 4.1 of the Transparency Rules requires your SRA number and the SRA's digital badge to be displayed in a prominent place on your website. It is one of the cheapest compliance items in the whole regime and one of the easiest to be caught on, because a missing badge is visible to an automated web sweep from the outside without anyone reading a word of your content. Rule 4.2 is the companion obligation and catches even more firms: your SRA authorisation number and the words authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority must appear on your letterhead and on your emails, including every signature template.
No. Rule 1.2 provides that rule 1 does not apply to publicly funded work, so legal aid matters sit outside the costs information requirements. That exclusion is narrower than it first appears, though. It applies to the publicly funded work itself, not to the firm as a whole, so a practice doing both legally aided and privately funded work in a listed service still has to publish the full rule 1.5 information for the private side. The complaints obligations in rule 2 and the regulatory information requirements in rule 4, including the SRA number, the digital badge and the email wording, apply regardless.
Yes. Rule 4.2 requires your SRA authorisation number and the words authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to appear on your letterhead and on your emails. In practice this is an easy one to be caught on, because letterheads get designed carefully and email signatures get set up once and then inherited by every new joiner without anyone checking them again. Audit every template, including mobile devices, autoresponders and any marketing platform that sends on the firm's behalf. It takes minutes to fix and it is the sort of failure that is trivially visible to anyone who emails the firm.
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