The Personal Injuries Guidelines explained: what they are and how a bracket is found

If you have searched for what an injury is worth in Ireland, you have met the Personal Injuries Guidelines, even if nobody named them. They are the document the Injuries Resolution Board and the courts use to place a figure on pain and suffering. This guide explains what they are, how they are built, and why they give a bracket and never a number.

Where the Guidelines come from

The Guidelines were adopted by the Judicial Council on 6 March 2021 under section 7 of the Judicial Council Act 2019. A committee of judges, the Personal Injuries Guidelines Committee, drafted them from data on awards made in Ireland and in comparable jurisdictions.

They took effect on 24 April 2021, the day section 99 of the 2019 Act was commenced. The Guidelines apply to any personal injuries claim that had not been assessed by the Board before that date. Earlier claims were valued under the Board's Book of Quantum, which is why older figures still turn up in searches: the Book of Quantum guide explains the difference.

The Guidelines say why they exist in their own introduction. Judges had made "widely varying awards of damages in respect of relatively comparable injuries", and the Guidelines "seek to promote a better understanding of the principles governing the assessment and award of damages for personal injuries with a view to achieving greater consistency in awards".

Who has to use them

Two bodies must have regard to the Guidelines.

The Board must, under section 20(5) of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board Act 2003 as amended by the 2019 Act, when it assesses general damages. The assessment guide describes how the Board does that on the documents.

A court must too. Section 99 of the 2019 Act amended section 22 of the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004 so that a court "shall, in assessing damages in a personal injuries action, (a) have regard to the personal injuries guidelines, and (b) where it departs from those guidelines, state the reasons for such departure in giving its decision".

So the Guidelines bind in a particular way. They are not a tariff that fixes the figure. A judge keeps discretion, but must start from the Guidelines and must explain, in the judgment, any decision to leave them.

General damages only

The Guidelines cover general damages: the award for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, past and future. They do not cover special damages, which are the vouched financial losses an injury causes: lost earnings, medical bills, travel, care, future treatment. Those are added to whatever the bracket produces and are explained in the special damages guide.

That split matters when you read the Board's figures. The Board's 2025 median award of €14,020 includes special damages; the median was €12,000 without them. Both are on the figures page.

How the document is built

The Guidelines run to twelve chapters, each for a part of the body or a kind of harm:

1. Injuries resulting in foreshortened life expectancy
2. Injuries involving paralysis
3. Head injuries
4. Psychiatric damage
5. Injuries affecting the senses
6. Injuries to internal organs
7. Orthopaedic injuries
8. Chronic pain
9. Facial injuries
10. Non facial scarring and burns
11. Damage to hair
12. Dermatitis and other skin conditions

Chapter 7, orthopaedic injuries, is the one most people need. It is divided into lettered sections: neck, back, pelvis and hips, shoulder, the arm, elbow, wrist, hand and fingers, vibration white finger, other upper limb disorders, the leg, knee, ankle, Achilles tendon, foot and toes. The whiplash and neck guide, the back guide and the head, shoulder, wrist, knee and ankle guide quote those sections bracket by bracket.

Within a section, the brackets run from the most severe injury down to the most minor. A heading describes the injury; a short paragraph says what falls under it; a range in euro follows. For minor injuries, the Guidelines usually divide by recovery period: substantial recovery within six months, between six months and a year, within one to two years, and sometimes two to five years. That pattern is the same across the neck, back, shoulder, wrist, knee and ankle sections.

How a bracket is found

The Guidelines describe their own method under the heading "Use of Guidelines":

At the conclusion of every case the trial judge should ask each party to identify, by reference to the dominant injury sustained, the relevant damages bracket in the Guidelines which most closely matches that supported by the evidence. Brief submissions should also be made as to where, within the relevant bracket of damages, the claimant's injuries should be located in terms of severity i.e. top, middle or bottom, having regard to the evidence, the presence or absence of other lesser injuries and all relevant considerations.

Three things follow from that paragraph.

First, the starting point is the dominant injury, matched to the bracket whose description fits the medical evidence. That is why the medical report matters so much: it is the evidence of what was injured, how badly and for how long. The Form B guide covers what the Board's medical report records.

Second, the bracket is a range, and the place within it is a judgment. Each section lists considerations that move an injury towards the top or the bottom. For the neck, for example, they are age; the nature, severity and duration of the injury and its symptoms; the extent of medical intervention and treatment; the presence or risk of degenerative changes; impact on work; interference with quality of life and leisure activities; impact on personal relationships; and prognosis.

Third, nothing in the method produces a figure from a form. A description of an injury points to a bracket. Only the evidence places it within the bracket, and only the Board or a court does the placing. This is the honest answer to every search for a claim calculator: the Guidelines' bracket for an injury described like this can be shown, and the injury checker shows it, but no site can tell you the figure.

More than one injury

Most accidents hurt more than one part of the body. The Guidelines do not add the brackets together. Their introduction says:

The assessment of general damages in cases involving multiple injuries gives rise to special difficulty given that in these Guidelines each injury is valued separately. The principal difficulty stems from the fact that there will usually be a temporal overlap in the injuries sustained such that if each injury was to be valued separately the claimant would be overcompensated to the point that the award would be unjust to the defendant and disproportionate when compared with other awards commonly made for other greater or lesser injuries. Each injury will, of course, cause additional pain and suffering which must be reflected in the award, but the question is how to ensure that the award will be just in light of the overlap of the injuries. In a case of multiple injuries, the appropriate approach for the trial judge is, where possible, to identify the injury and the bracket of damages within the Guidelines that best resembles the most significant of the claimant's injuries. The trial judge should then value that injury and thereafter uplift the value to ensure that the claimant is fairly and justly compensated for all of the additional pain, discomfort and limitations arising from their lesser injury/injuries. It is of the utmost importance that the overall award of damages made in a case involving multiple injuries should be proportionate and just when considered in light of the severity of other injuries which attract an equivalent award under the Guidelines.

In plain terms: find the bracket for the most significant injury, value it, then add an uplift for the rest. The uplift is for the extra pain and limitation the lesser injuries caused, not a second full bracket. The whole must still look proportionate beside what the Guidelines give for a single injury of similar weight.

Pre-existing conditions and injuries not listed

Where an accident makes an existing condition worse, the Guidelines say the court "should have regard only to the extent to which the condition had been made worse and the duration of any increased symptomology". Several brackets say so expressly, describing an acceleration or exacerbation of a pre-existing condition over a stated number of years.

Some injuries have no bracket at all. The Committee drew up the Guidelines from data on awards actually made, and where there was too little data it did not propose a bracket. The introduction gives the loss of an ovary and the severance of a nerve or artery as examples. In such a case a court values the injury "by reference to the damages guided for equally significant injuries in the Guidelines".

The cap

The Guidelines set the top of the scheme. In their words, "the most devastating and catastrophic of injuries will attract an award of general damages of in or about €550,000". That figure appears as the upper limit for the most severe brain damage and for injuries resulting in foreshortened life expectancy, and every other bracket is placed in proportion to it. That proportionality is what the Guidelines mean by "fair and reasonable to both claimant and defendant".

The 16.7% increase that is not in force

The 2019 Act required a review within three years. The Committee's review proposed an overall increase of 16.7% to reflect inflation since 2021, and the Judicial Council approved amended Guidelines in December 2024.

They are not in force. The 2019 Act, as amended by the Personal Injuries Resolution Board Act 2022, requires a positive resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas before amended Guidelines take effect. The Law Society Gazette reported in October 2025 and again in January 2026 that the Government had not put the resolution to the Oireachtas. In January 2026 the Government published the General Scheme of a Judicial Council (Amendment) Bill 2026, which would move reviews from every three years to every five and add a route for the Council to reconsider amendments. It does not itself change any bracket.

Until the Oireachtas acts, every figure in this guide, in the injury checker and in the Board's assessments is the 2021 figure. The changes page tracks the resolution and will say the day it moves.

Where this leaves you

The Guidelines give the Board and the courts a bracket for each described injury, a list of what moves an award within it, and a method for more than one injury. They give nobody a figure for a particular claim; that comes from the medical evidence and the decision-maker. The injury checker shows the Guidelines' bracket for an injury described like yours, drawn to scale with the Guidelines' own words and the Board's median for context, so you know where your search was pointing.