What the SRA Transparency Rules Require on Your Firm's Website

Most law firm websites that fail an SRA transparency check do not fail because the firm ignored the rules. They fail because the pricing page was written once, in 2019, by whoever built the site — and nobody has looked at it since.

The Transparency Rules came into force on 6 December 2018. The digital badge requirement followed on 25 November 2019. Neither is new. But the SRA has run web sweeps of firm websites since the rules landed, and the compliance picture has never been uniform: in its year three evaluation, the SRA found that around 68% of regulated firms said they were publishing the required price and service information, with roughly 78% publishing complaints procedures.

That gap is the point of this article. Below is what the rules actually require, where firms most often fall short, and what a compliant page looks like in practice.

Which firms are caught

The rules apply to all SRA-regulated law firms and to individual freelance solicitors who publish that they offer certain services. If your firm has a website, the information goes on the website. If it does not, the information must be available on request in another format.

The trigger is publication, not practice. If your website says you handle a covered service, the price obligation applies — even if that work is a small part of what you do. Conversely, a firm that has never publicised a service and takes an isolated instruction as a favour to an existing client is not brought into scope by that single matter.

This creates a specific risk for firms whose websites have grown organically. A practice-area page written years ago to look comprehensive may now be advertising services the firm no longer actively wants, while creating a price-publication obligation it has not met.

What must be published

The Transparency Rules require three separate things.

Price and service information for the covered practice areas. This is set out in Rule 1 of the SRA Transparency Rules and covers, broadly: residential conveyancing; uncontested probate where all assets are in the UK; certain motoring offences; employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal; immigration work excluding asylum; debt recovery up to £100,000; and licensing applications for business premises. Firms should check the current rule text directly, as the scope has been reviewed since introduction.

Where the rules apply, the published information must include a total cost or, where that is not possible, an average or a range. It must explain the basis of charging — hourly rates, fixed fees, or otherwise. It must set out disbursements and VAT, with the specific rates applying. Where disbursements cannot be anticipated, a realistic range based on the firm's experience is expected. The information must also describe what is and is not included, the key stages of the matter, and likely timescales.

Details of the people doing the work — their qualifications and experience — linked directly from the pricing information rather than buried on a separate team page.

Complaints information for every regulated firm, whether or not it does covered work. This must explain how to complain, and how and when a client can escalate to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA.

The prominence requirement is where firms fail

Rule 1 requires the information to be published in a prominent location: accessible, clearly signposted, easy to find.

In practice, this means the pricing information belongs on or directly adjacent to the pages describing the service. A single "Our fees" link in the footer, three clicks from any practice-area page, does not meet the standard even if the content behind it is faultless.

This is the most common gap we see on audit. The content exists. It is written correctly. It is simply somewhere nobody would look. Firms migrating to a new website design are particularly exposed, because a redesign often moves compliance content into whatever navigation slot is left over.

Two related failure modes are worth naming:

• Orphaned pricing pages. Content that survived a site migration but is no longer linked from anywhere, sometimes still carrying rates from three years ago.
• Inconsistent figures. A fixed fee quoted on the conveyancing page that does not match the figure on the pricing page. Both are published; they contradict each other.

The digital badge

The SRA clickable logo — referred to as the digital badge in the rules — became mandatory on 25 November 2019. It is delivered through the SRA's partner Yoshki and validates against your registered domain, so only regulated firms can display it.

Two practical points cause repeat problems.

First, the badge validates against the website address recorded on mySRA. If your firm has changed domain, added a www variant, or launched a separate microsite for a practice area, the badge may silently fail to render. Nobody notices, because a missing badge looks like nothing at all.

Second, the badge loads third-party script. Firms with strict content security policies, aggressive consent management, or script-blocking cookie banners can end up suppressing it. If your cookie banner blocks the badge until consent is given, a visitor who declines non-essential cookies sees a website with no regulatory identification on it. This needs to be handled deliberately rather than discovered later.

A compliant structure

For a firm doing covered work, the structure that holds up under scrutiny looks like this:

1. A dedicated pricing page per covered service, not one page covering everything.
2. That page linked directly from the corresponding practice-area page, above the fold, in body content rather than only in navigation.
3. Total cost, or an average or range, with the basis of charging stated explicitly.
4. Disbursements and VAT itemised with current rates.
5. A short "what is included / what is not included" block.
6. Key stages and indicative timescales.
7. A direct link to the profiles of the people who will do the work, with qualifications and experience.
8. Complaints procedure reachable from every page, covering escalation to the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA.
9. The digital badge rendering on the live site, verified from a browser with cookies declined.

Then a review date. Rates change, VAT treatment changes, staff leave. A pricing page is not a launch task; it is a maintained document.

Why this matters beyond compliance

There is a commercial argument that sits alongside the regulatory one.

Price and service information is exactly the kind of structured, specific content that search engines and AI assistants extract and cite. A page that states a clear fee range, the basis of charging, what is included, and how long the matter takes is answering the question a prospective client actually typed. A page that says "contact us for a quotation" answers nothing and gets cited by nothing.

Firms that treat the Transparency Rules as a content obligation rather than a legal chore tend to end up with better-performing pages. The regulator's minimum and the commercially useful version are closer together than most firms assume.

Common questions

Does the firm need to publish prices if it only does commercial work?
If none of the services the firm publicises fall within the covered areas, the price publication obligation does not apply. The complaints information and digital badge requirements still do.

Can the required information sit in a downloadable PDF?
It is possible, but it is a poor choice. PDFs are harder for clients to navigate on mobile, are inconsistently indexed, and make the prominence requirement harder to satisfy. HTML pages are better on every axis.

What happens if a firm gets it wrong?
The SRA has taken enforcement action for transparency breaches, including financial penalties. The more common outcome, though, is a request to put it right — which is far easier if the firm knows where its own compliance content is.

Who owns this internally?
It should be the COLP or the compliance lead, not the marketing supplier. In practice the supplier implements; the firm remains accountable. That distinction matters when choosing who builds and maintains the site.

---

TIKF Group builds and maintains websites for SRA-regulated firms, with compliance content treated as part of the build rather than an afterthought. See our work with law firms.

This article describes publicly available regulatory requirements and is not legal or compliance advice. Firms should verify current obligations against the SRA Transparency Rules and take advice from their COLP or compliance function.