Scottish court costs rise from 10 October 2026

If phrases like ‘taxation of judicial expenses’ make your eyes glaze over, you are not alone. In Scottish civil courts, this is not about tax in the HMRC sense. It is about checking and allowing a bill of legal expenses after a case, under a rules framework that applies to proceedings begun on or after 29 April 2019. (scottishciviljusticecouncil.gov.uk) That matters because court costs can shape decisions long before a judge reaches the merits. If you are weighing up a claim, defending one, or teaching yourself how civil justice works, the small print on expenses tells you who may recover money, for what work, and on what basis.

The new Scottish instrument was made on 18 August 2026, laid before the Scottish Parliament on 20 August 2026, and comes into force on 10 October 2026. Its headline change is simple: the value of the expenses ‘unit’ moves from £18 to £22.10, but only for work carried out on or after that October date. **What this means:** older work stays on the old rate. The current published material still points readers to the post-30 June 2023 version of Chapter 3, and a 2025 Sheriff Appeal Court judgment described the present value of the unit as £18.00, which helps show the size of this latest rise. (scotcourts.gov.uk)

To see why that matters, we need to strip back what a ‘unit’ is. Since the move to unit-based charging, Scottish civil expenses have been built around tables of charges. The Scottish Civil Justice Council’s published material on the 2023 amendment explains that the uplift applied across Schedules 1 to 5, which regulate what an entitled party can recover for a solicitor’s work in civil proceedings. (scottishciviljusticecouncil.gov.uk) So this is not one single fee going up in isolation. It is a building block inside the wider charging structure. When that building block rises, the recoverable amount attached to many pieces of work can rise too, even if the exact effect depends on the table used and the work actually done.

The amendment also tidies up rule 3.7 on simple procedure. The heading is changed to ‘reduction of charges’, and the wording is sharpened so the rule clearly applies where simple procedure expenses are taxed or assessed by reference to the table in schedule 5. That may sound minor, but these clean-up changes matter. When court rules are vague, people argue about the wording before they even reach the bill itself. Clearer drafting does not make the system magically easy, but it does remove one avoidable source of confusion.

Another small change has a practical punch. Rule 4.2 on outlays is adjusted so that ‘outlays’ expressly include court fees. In everyday language, outlays are the extra costs paid out during a case rather than the solicitor’s own charged work. **What this means:** if you are trying to understand an expenses account, court fees now sit in the rulebook as a named example of something allowable. That does not end every disagreement about recovery, but it gives the wording a lot less room for doubt.

There is also an important date line running through all of this. The increase to £22.10 does not reach backwards. The instrument says the change has no effect on fees payable for work done before 10 October 2026. For anyone budgeting for a live case, that is the key practical point. If work is done before the change, the old figure still matters. If work is done on or after 10 October, the new unit matters. In other words, timing is not a side detail here; it is the rule.

One final point is worth holding on to. Acts of Sederunt are the procedural rules used to regulate civil court processes in Scotland, and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service publishes them as part of the court rules framework. That is why a change that looks technical is still a public-interest story: these are the rules that shape access to justice in real cases. (scotcourts.gov.uk) For teachers, students and first-time readers, this amendment is a useful reminder that law is not only about headline judgments. Sometimes the most important shift is a number inside a costs rule, because that number can affect whether a case feels affordable, whether settlement looks sensible, and how confident people are about using the civil courts at all.