About Unfair Dismissal Help
Unfair Dismissal Help explains one process carefully: an unfair dismissal or general protections claim at the Fair Work Commission, starting from the 21-day deadline that decides whether the rest of it is even possible.
Who writes it
It is written and maintained by the Unfair Dismissal Help editorial team. Nobody here is a lawyer, and no page is presented as legal advice or as a prediction of how a specific case will turn out. What the team does is read the Fair Work Commission's and the Fair Work Ombudsman's own published pages, quote them accurately, and mark the places where a source does not exist.
Unfair Dismissal Help is an independent information site. It is not the Fair Work Commission, not the Fair Work Ombudsman and not a law firm, and it has no affiliation with any of them. It does not give legal advice, does not predict the outcome of any case, and does not replace advice from a lawyer who has seen your facts.
How a figure gets onto a page
Every number, date and quotation on this site was read out of the source page itself and recorded, with the URL and the date it was checked, before it was written into any page. If a claim could not be traced to a primary source, it was cut rather than softened.
That rule also means this page corrects itself when a gap turns out not to be one: an earlier version said no average payout figure was published anywhere. That was wrong. The Fair Work Commission publishes a median of 5 to 7 weeks' pay, well below the $95,050 compensation cap, and states that fewer than 0.4% of applicants ever receive the cap itself; this site now states the median beside the cap wherever the cap appears. What is genuinely not published is a dollar-figure average (the Commission states the median only as a range of weeks' pay) and a single percentage success rate across all applications lodged. The figure that is published, that about 75% of cases resolve at conciliation, is a settlement rate, and this site is careful to label it as one rather than let it read as a rate of claims being won.
The sources this site uses
- The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), for the statutory tests and deadlines themselves.
- The Fair Work Commission's own guidance pages and Unfair Dismissals Benchbook, for how those tests are applied in practice.
- The Fair Work Ombudsman's guidance, for plain-English confirmation of eligibility rules.
- Firms' own pages, where a no-win-no-fee arrangement is discussed, quoted and attributed to that firm.
Every guide and article carries the sources it was built from, under the heading Where this came from, linking straight to the source rather than to a summary of it.
What this site will not publish
- Any prediction of how a specific case will turn out, or any suggested probability of success.
- Any specific compensation figure as an estimate for an individual reader's situation.
- Any suggestion that the 21-day deadline is soft, negotiable, or that an extension is routine.
- Any invented case example presented as a real decision.
- Legal advice of any kind. What is published here explains how the process works; it does not tell a reader what to do about their own dismissal.
How it is funded, and what that means
Unfair Dismissal Help is independent of the Fair Work Commission, the Fair Work Ombudsman, and every firm mentioned on it. Where a firm is named, such as on the no-win-no-fee guide, it is because it publishes an unfair dismissal service and states specific terms about it, not because of any commercial arrangement with this site. No firm pays for placement and none is ranked.
Telling us something is wrong
Fee amounts, thresholds and caps change every 1 July, and a source page can be updated at any time. If a quotation here no longer matches the page it came from, or a figure is out of date, email team@unfairdismissalhelp.com.au with the page and what you found. Corrections to sourced material are made against the source, not against a recollection of it.