SRA Transparency Rules: What Solicitors Must Publish

In 2019 the SRA checked 500 solicitor firm websites against the price and service rules it had just brought in. Of the 447 it could actually load and read, a quarter were fully compliant. More than half were only partly there. Complaints information, the bit that tells a client how to escalate to the Legal Ombudsman or the SRA itself, was missing entirely from 52% of sites. That is the regulator's own finding, from its 2019 web sweep, and it is worth sitting with, because these are not obscure or optional rules. They came into force on 6 December 2018 and they still apply to your firm today.

If you do conveyancing, probate, motoring offence work, employment tribunal claims or immigration work (excluding asylum) for individuals, or employment tribunal defence, debt recovery up to £100,000, or licensing applications for businesses, the SRA Transparency Rules already require you to publish specific pricing and service information. Not just have it available on request. Publish it, prominently, on your website, in a place a visitor can actually find.

What the rules actually make you do

The SRA Transparency Rules sit under the Legal Services Act 2007. The Legal Services Board approved them in August 2018 and they came into force that December. For each area of work they cover, you have to publish:

• The total cost, or where that is not practical, an average cost or a range
• The basis for the charge, whether that is an hourly rate or a fixed fee
• Whether the price is subject to VAT, and how
• What disbursements are likely and roughly what they cost
• What is included in the price you have quoted
• What is likely to be needed but is not included
• The likely timescale and the key stages of the matter
• The experience and qualifications of whoever will actually do the work

That last one catches firms out more than any other. It is not enough to say "our team is experienced." The rule wants specifics: who, with what qualifications, doing the work.

Alongside the pricing rules, every authorised firm has to show its SRA number and the SRA's digital badge prominently on its website, a requirement that became mandatory in November 2019, about a year after the core rules. The badge is not an image you upload. It is a piece of code the SRA issues once you register your website through mySRA, and it links out to a page confirming you are regulated. On letterheads and in emails, you separately need your SRA authorisation number and the words "authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority."

You also have to publish how a client complains, and to whom, covering both your own procedure and the routes to the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA.

"Prominent" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

The SRA's own guidance says this information has to sit "in a prominent location... accessible, clearly signposted and easy for visitors to find." That is a low bar to describe and a surprisingly easy one to fail. A pricing page that exists but is not linked from your main navigation is not prominent. A PDF buried three clicks deep, with no heading a search engine or a screen reader can make sense of, is not clearly signposted. A page that loads slowly, or that only shows on desktop, is not easy to find for someone checking your fees from a phone on their lunch break. If your firm does not have a website at all, the rules still apply, just in a different form: you have to make the same information available on request, in another format, without making a client chase you for it.

This is where the wording of the rule and the practice of SEO turn out to be the same exercise. "Prominent," "accessible," "clearly signposted" are also, more or less, what search engines are trying to establish before they decide whether your page is worth showing someone. A properly structured page with a clear heading, marked-up pricing, and a genuine link in your main menu satisfies the regulator and gives Google, and increasingly an AI assistant summarising local solicitors, something legible to work with. A firm that gets the compliance side right by accident, because someone built the site sensibly in the first place, is not unusual. A firm that gets it wrong tends to get it wrong on both counts at once.

Where firms were actually falling down

The SRA's 2019 sweep broke compliance down by area of work. Immigration came out worst by some distance.

Source: SRA web sweep report, sra.org.uk, cross-checked against the Law Gazette's coverage of the same sweep. 78 firms found non-compliant across the board were told the SRA would come back and check again within two months, and the regulator then committed to running a sweep of 600 firm websites every six months from that point.

None of that has gone away. And the SRA is not standing still on it either. It is currently consulting, from 3 July to 1 September 2026, on tightening the complaints side further: a requirement to give a client a timeline for resolution when they first complain, regular progress updates after that, and a new Complaints Handling Requirements Statement to help firms understand what is expected. That consultation has not concluded and the proposals are not yet in force, but it tells you which direction this is moving. The SRA's Aileen Armstrong put the reasoning plainly: "it is important that people have readily accessible and clear information about how to raise any concerns."

Whether outsourcing your marketing gets you off the hook

It does not, and the SRA has been explicit about this. Its warning notice on marketing to the public, published 19 December 2024, puts the compliance burden on the regulated firm, not whoever built or runs your website. You are expected to be able to show that any client referred by a third party was not acquired through cold calling or unsolicited approaches, that any introducer you use understands your regulatory duties, and that you are running spot checks on new clients about how they found you. If a marketing agency's copy overstates your prospects of success or understates what something costs, that is your problem with your regulator, not theirs. Worth knowing before you hand your website over to someone who has never read the transparency rules.

Doing the arithmetic

Take conveyancing, since it is the area most firms are checked on and the one most consumers shop around for. The HomeOwners Alliance put the average solicitor fee for a buyer at around £1,474 in its 2026 guide to conveyancing costs, with a typical range of roughly £400 to £1,500 depending on the firm and the property. That is a membership body's market snapshot, not an SRA-audited figure, so treat it as indicative rather than gospel. But it is directionally right, and it tells you something useful: one missed instruction, one prospective client who could not find your pricing, your qualifications or your complaints procedure and went to the firm that made it obvious, is worth more than a year of a modest monthly spend on getting your site right.

Run the same logic across a full year rather than a single case. A small high-street firm doing conveyancing does not need a flood of new enquiries to make this worthwhile, it needs a handful it would otherwise have lost to a competitor whose pricing page was easier to find. At roughly £1,474 a matter, two or three extra instructions a year cover several years of a £100-a-month spend with room left over. That is not a promise of extra instructions, nobody can honestly make that promise, it is simply what the numbers look like once you write them down.

The transparency rules and getting found are not two separate jobs. A page that clearly states your total cost or range, your basis for charging, what is and is not included, and who on your team does the work, structured properly and placed somewhere a visitor and a search engine can both find easily, satisfies the SRA requirement and gives you a chance of ranking better for people searching "conveyancing solicitor [your town]" at the same time. Firms that treat the transparency page as a buried PDF are failing the rule and getting nothing back for it. Firms that build it as a proper, well-marked-up page are doing the compliance work once and getting the visibility benefit as a byproduct.

What will not help, and the technical work that gets you found without paying per lead

I will not tell you a website rebuild fixes everything, because for some of your work it will not. If you do motoring offence work or urgent immigration matters, a lot of your prospective clients are searching in a hurry, on a phone, often outside office hours, and what they see first is your Google Business Profile, not your website. Opening hours, phone number, reviews, and how quickly you respond to a message matter more there than anything structural on your site. No amount of schema markup fixes a Business Profile with the wrong phone number or three-week-old unanswered reviews. If that is where your instructions actually come from, sort that first.

Content writing will not come from this either. I do not write your "About us" page or your case studies, and I do not run paid ads or build links. What I handle is the technical side: site structure, crawlability, structured data that marks up your services and pricing correctly, metadata, making sure AI crawlers can actually read your site (increasingly relevant given how many prospective clients now ask an AI assistant to compare local solicitors before they search Google at all), and keeping all of that correct every month as your site and your rules change. That is £100 a month, no lock-in, first month free.

What I would do about it, and what it costs

Here is what makes this urgent rather than tidy. Someone looking for a solicitor is comparing three or four firms, and the one whose fees, timescales and named people are easy to find is the one that gets the call. If yours are buried in a page that search engines cannot parse, you do not lose that client visibly. There is no enquiry, no email, nothing in your inbox to tell you it happened. You simply never hear from them, and you have no way of knowing how often it happens.

Most firms treat the transparency rules as a compliance chore, publish a page nobody can find, and move on. That page is the single best asset on a high street firm's website and almost nobody uses it as one. It is the exact information a client is trying to find, sitting on your site, invisible.

Here is what I would do with it. Structure the price and service information properly so search engines and AI assistants can read it as prices, timescales and named people rather than as a wall of prose. Mark up each area of work so the firm surfaces for the thing it actually does. Make sure the complaints and regulatory information is where the SRA expects it and where a client can find it. Then keep it right as your fees and your team change.

That is £100 a month. First month free, no contract, and you are dealing directly with the person doing the work. If you would like to know how your own transparency page currently reads to a machine, tell me your firm name and I will look, or get started here.