Explaining your Protective Award
Source: gov.uk (2025-04-09)

If your former employer is insolvent, the Insolvency Service will pay the Protective Award.

A Protective Award is a penalty awarded by an employment tribunal against an employer for not complying with the collective redundancy consultation requirements.

You’re only entitled to get this payment if you or your job role was included in a tribunal judgment.

If your former employer is insolvent, the Insolvency Service will pay a Protective Award, but the amount we can pay is capped at 8 weeks pay.

A Protective Award can be awarded where more than 20 employees are made redundant from one location within specific time frames. Employment tribunals can make various awards from 45 days to 90 days.

Find out if you’re included in a Protective Award

You can only get a Protective Award payment if you, or your job role, was included in a tribunal judgment.

The person or organisation that took the case to the employment tribunal will be able to give you a copy of the judgment and tell you if you are entitled to the Award.

For example, this could be your:
- trade union
- former management team
- solicitor
If you’re included in an award, you should already have received information about the tribunal.

How to apply for a Protective Award

If you’re included in a tribunal judgment, you do not need to take any action to claim your Protective Award.

We’ll contact you if we need any information from you. We’ll write to you when we’re ready to pay you, and let you know how much money you will get.

Amount you can get

We can only pay up to a maximum of 8 weeks. If the Protective Award was for a longer period, your award will be capped at the 8 week limit.

If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2025, your weekly pay is capped at £719. If you were made redundant before 6 April 2025, the lower rate of £700 will apply to calculations before this date.

You cannot get a payment for a protective award and arrears of pay for the same time period. If you’ve already received money for your arrears of pay claim, we will deduct this amount from your Protective Award payment.

If the payment for your award is calculated on or after 6 April 2024 the NI deducted will be at a rate of 8% on payments above the primary threshold. You can find out information about National Insurance contributions (https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/how-much-you-pay).

When you’ll get your Protective Award

We aim to pay Protective Awards within 12 weeks of receiving information about who is entitled to the award.

If you claim benefits

You cannot get a payment for a protective award and claim state benefits for the same time period.

If you’ve received state benefits, or were eligible to claim them, we will deduct this amount from your Protective Award payment.

If you were eligible to claim benefits but decided not to, we have to deduct this amount from your Protective Award payment.

If you have not already provided this information, we’ll write to you and ask whether you received any state benefits during your notice period. We cannot process your Protective Award until you send us this information.

State benefits include:
- Universal Credit
- Jobseeker’s Allowance
- Income Support
If you made a claim for loss of notice we may already have this information, so we might not send you a letter about this.

How your award will be paid

We’ll pay your Protective Award into the same bank or building society account we used when you last made a claim to us.

If you’ve changed your bank details

So we can process your claim correctly, please email your new bank details to:

xxx@xxx.xx (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx)