Damp and mould compensation calculator

There is no fixed price list for living with mould. What there is instead is a method, and it has been the same one since 1998, when the Court of Appeal decided Wallace v Manchester City Council. The court described three ways of valuing a disrepair claim: a global figure for the discomfort suffered, a notional reduction in the rent, or a combination of the two. Whichever route a judge takes, they were told to cross-check the result against the rent paid over the period of disrepair.

That cross-check is why almost every conversation about disrepair compensation ends up being about percentages. The logic is straightforward. You agreed to pay a certain amount for a home in a certain condition. For however many months the landlord failed to keep its side of that bargain, you did not get what you paid for, and the shortfall is what you are owed. A bedroom you cannot sleep in is not a small fraction of a two-bedroom flat.

On top of the general damages figure sits a 10% uplift that has applied to all such awards since Simmons v Castle in 2012. It is automatic. Any calculator or solicitor quoting you a figure without it is quoting you a figure that is 10% light.

What pushes a claim up the bands

The percentage is not really about how much mould there is. It is about how much of your home you lost the use of, and for how long. A patch of black mould on a bathroom ceiling that you cleaned every few weeks is a nuisance. Mould across a bedroom wall that meant a child slept in the living room for eight months is a different claim entirely, even if the affected area in square metres is similar.

The things that reliably move a claim upward:

• Rooms taken out of use. A bedroom is worth more than a spare room, and the only bedroom in a one-bed flat is worth more again.
• How long it ran. Two winters carries far more weight than two months, and repeated reports that went nowhere carry more than a single one.
• Who lives there. A household including a baby, an elderly person or anyone with asthma or a respiratory condition is treated more seriously, and should have been treated more seriously by the landlord at the time.
• Health effects. Documented ones. A GP record of worsening asthma that lines up with the dates is worth more to a claim than a general sense of feeling unwell.
• How the landlord behaved. Missed appointments, blaming you for breathing and drying washing, painting over it and calling it fixed. Tribunals and ombudsmen notice.

And the things that pull it down: refusing access, not reporting it in writing, or a gap where the landlord genuinely did not know. You cannot claim for a period when nobody had told them anything was wrong. That single fact is why the first piece of advice anyone gives is to put it in an email.

There are two ways to get compensation for damp and mould, and picking the wrong one costs you either money or a year of your life.

The Housing Ombudsman

Free, no lawyers, and open to you once you have been through your landlord's own complaints process. The Ombudsman can order the landlord to do the work, to apologise and to pay compensation. Awards are generally smaller than court awards, often in the low hundreds to low thousands, but you keep all of it, and you are not exposed to any risk on costs. For most social tenants with a moderate claim, this is the sensible first move. The Complaint Handling Code has been statutory since April 2024, so a landlord that ignores its own complaints procedure is already on the back foot.

A county court claim

Higher awards, and the only route that gets you an order compelling the repairs on a timetable. It is also slower and more involved, and there is a pre-action protocol for housing conditions claims that both sides are expected to follow. A claim that also asks the court to order the repairs only goes on the small claims track if the works are estimated at £1,000 or less and the damages at £1,000 or less; above that it is fast track, where some costs are recoverable. Damages-only claims under £10,000 go on the small claims track, where you generally cannot recover your legal costs from the other side even if you win, which is the fact the no-win-no-fee adverts leave out.

If a firm offers to run it for you, ask two questions before signing: what percentage of my award do you take, and what happens to the costs if we lose. On a £3,000 claim, a 25% success fee plus a deducted insurance premium can leave you with less than the Ombudsman would have awarded for free.

Compensation is backward-looking. It pays you for a year you already lost. What actually improves your life is the mould being gone and staying gone, and those are two different jobs: killing what is there, and removing the reason it grew.

A landlord who sends someone to wipe the walls, spray them and repaint has not complied with anything. The mould will be back by the following winter, and your claim simply keeps accruing. The work that counts is the second half: the failed extractor fan replaced, the leaking gutter fixed, the cold bridge insulated, the blocked airbrick opened. If you want to know what a proper job involves and what it should cost, the mould removal cost calculator breaks it down, and the damp survey cost calculator covers getting an independent diagnosis rather than one written by the company hoping to sell you the cure.

Mould remediation is not a licensed trade in the UK, so the standard of the contractor your landlord sends is a real variable. The UK Academy of Mould Experts trains and certifies damp and mould professionals against the IICRC S520 standard and lists members whose credentials have been checked, and it runs Awaab's Law training for the housing teams on the other side of these deadlines. Asking who is coming and what they are qualified in is a fair question to put in writing.