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Data breaches have increased in volume and the numbers of people potentially affected. Many companies and organisations have faced claims, resulting in some very large data breach claim payouts. Find out if you have a valid data breach claim.
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A data breach is defined as the exposure of sensitive or confidential information to an unauthorised person, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The breach may be due to a hacker or the offender may be someone who has unintentionally has made errors when handling personal data, or could even be a grudging acquaintance who has intentionally leaked data.
If a company that holds your data gives it to an unauthorised party without your permission, this is also considered a data protection breach under GDPR. Any one of us can be the victim of a GDPR breach when we have entrusted our data to a third party.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) describes a personal data breach as a violation of secure or confidential personal information by an unauthorised party. The personal data may be lost, misused, stolen, or destroyed. This covers both accidental and deliberate breaches of data.
An example of a personal data breach is when an unauthorised third party, such as a hacker, gains access to your data. Another data breach example concerns the loss of availability or alteration of personal data without permission.
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The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place in 2018, and was later superceded following Brexit by UK GDPR in January 2021, and aims to protect individuals and give them the right to redress in circumstances where their data has been mishandled. The relevant third party that a claim could be be brought against would be organisations that operate both online and offline services where a person’s data needs to be stored.
Under GDPR you can make a data breach claim if you believe that your data has been breached. In many circumstances you will have already been informed about the breach by the organisation holding your data as they will have usually taken steps to minimise the impact of the breach and the potential risk.
When a breach has occurred, it is common practice for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to be informed. In some instances, the organisation may attempt to reach a settlement with you outside of the court process, but for the best chances of maximising your data breach compensation, we would recommend your claim being properly represented.
To claim data breach compensation, it’s important to act without delay, as there are usually strict time limits in place. Missing the claims deadline could mean forfeiting your right to claim compensation.
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Data breach incidents have a wide impact on the UK public, according to Information Commissioner’s Office stats:
30%
of data breach victims report emotional distress as a result of the breach
55%
of UK adults have had their data lost or stolen
80%
of data breaches in the UK may be due to human error
A data breach claim is an attempt to get compensation from an individual, an entity, or a number of defendants. In the claim, you state the defendant to be a responsible party for the exposure of your personal information, and are seeking financial compensation for the damages.
The current law allows you to make a claim for the material damage of the breach, like losing money, and the non-material damage, like suffering from any distress and anxiety caused by the data breach. If data protection law is breached, GDPR gives you an opportunity to claim compensation from the organisation responsible for data protection breaches who should have been properly protecting your data.
The amount of data breach compensation varies according to the type of the breach and the court judgment.
These are some of the typical GDPR breach compensation example ranges:
The lowest level compensation applies to mild breaches of personal data, such as your name, date of birth, home address, and email address.
You’ll likely get a bigger compensation amount for a breach of medical information, starting from £2,000 to £5,000. You can get from £3,000 to £8,600 if your financial information is breached, depending on the implications of the breach.
You can get from £8,600 to £25,700 for the more serious data protection breach cases that have led to serious consequences.
If the data breach has caused any sort of physical or mental issues/emotional distress, your compensation can amount to up to £42,900. However, in such cases, you must provide evidence for your medical condition and your financial losses.
It’s important to note that these estimates aren’t fixed; it’s left for the court to decide your exact compensation award. In some cases, the court may deny your demand for compensation if it sees that you’ve not provided enough evidence for your case. It might even order that you pay for the defendant’s costs in such a case.
This is why we always recommend that you seek advice from an independent legal entity.
Under the DPA and GDPR, you are entitled to file a claim for data breach compensation if:
For your claim to be successful you will need to demonstrate that the company that held your data failed to take all appropriate steps to ensure the safety and security of your data and that, as a result of their negligence, your data was released or made available to other, third parties or organisations without your consent.
Any company that is holding your data has certain obligations with that data and a claim can be made if:
The average compensation for breaching the Data Protection Act varies according to the specific circumstances of each case, but compensation amounts usually fall between £1,000 and £42,900, depending on the seriousness of the data breach. In some cases, you might be able to claim more compensation for a personal data breach that has related to a leak of sensitive information which has caused you significant emotional distress.
The following figures can be used as a rough guide based on past data breach compensation examples, showing how much you could receive as a result of different types of breaches.
| Type of breach | Possible compensation amount |
| Breach of a person’s name, date of birth, home address, and email address | £1,000-£1,500 |
| Breach of medical records | £2,000-£5,000 |
| Breach of financial information | £3,000-£7,000 |
| Breach that leads to an illness or depression (medical evidence would be needed to support this alongside evidence to show any other losses e.g. earnings) | £25,700-£42,900 |
If you make a successful claim for a breach of your personal data, you could be awarded compensation for your material damage (money lost because of the compromise of your data) and non-material damage (harm to your mental health due to the data breach). Your settlement could consist of compensation for both your material and non-material damage or compensation for either type of damage.
If you are claiming for damage to your mental health, those responsible for valuing this part of your claim may refer to the compensation guidelines published by the Judicial College (JCG) to help them do so.
In the table below, we look at how compensation could be awarded in a successful data breach claim. The top row shows how you could be awarded compensation for both types of damage in the same claim. In the following rows, we look at a few figures for psychological injuries drawn from the 17th edition of the JCG (published in April 2024 and with compensation figures increased to take into account inflationary pressures in recent years). It should be noted that the top row is not from the JCG. As all claims are different, the table is only to be used as a guideline, not an indication of a definitive compensation amount.
Harm | Severity | Notes | Compensation Guideline |
Very Serious Mental Harm and Material Damage | Very Severe | Settlements could compensate for both material and non-material damage, including money stolen from bank accounts. | Up to £250,000+ |
Psychiatric Damage | Severe | The claimant struggles to cope with life, work and education with an effect on personal relationships. The prognosis is very poor. | £66,920 to £141,240 |
Moderately Severe | Although there are significant problems coping with life, work and education with an impact on relationships, the prognosis is better than more severe categories. | £23,270 to £66,920 | |
Moderate | The claimant experienced problems coping with life and relationships, but they’ve improved and the overall prognosis is positive. | £7,150 to £23,270 | |
Less Severe | The award considers how long the disability lasted and to what extent the claimant’s daily life and sleep were impacted. | £1,880 to £7,150 | |
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) | Severe | Permanent effects prevent the claimant from functioning at the same level as prior to the trauma. This badly impacts all areas of their life. | £73,050 to £122,850 |
Moderately Severe | Although there will be some recovery with professional help, the effects will likely cause significant disability into the foreseeable future. | £28,250 to £73,050 | |
Moderate | Any continuing symptoms are not grossly disabling. | £9,980 to £28,250 | |
Less Severe | Although minor symptoms persist, a virtual full recovery occurs within 1-2 years. | £4,820 to £9,980 |
If you suffered financial losses because of the breach of your personal data, you can be compensated for these under material damage. For example, if criminals gained access to your bank account and spent the available funds, you could be reimbursed this lost money.
If you have any questions about how compensation could be awarded in a successful data breach claim, speak to a member of our advisory team.
While there are a number of specific companies that have been affected by sizeable data breaches (as outlined above), there are some sectors where data breaches are common, and the impact in many cases could be significant because of the often highly sensitive nature of the data involved.
Some of the types of data breaches where you could have a claim include: Government Data Breaches, School Data Breaches, Credit Card Data Breaches, Bank Data Breaches, NHS Data Breaches, Charity Data Breaches, App & Website Data Breaches, and Private Company Data Breaches. We are able to assist you if you have been a victim of a data breach in any of these specific areas, as well as others.
Data leaks happen when an organisation (or individuals within) provide confidential information to an unauthorised recipient. This includes any form of unapproved transmission of data to an external party, electronically or physically.
This criminal act, however, isn’t always intentional. In fact, just under a fifth of all data leak cases happen by accident and are caused through human error. Examples include sending confidential information to the wrong email address and mishandling a file containing private info and misplacing it.
Any event that exposes private information to unauthorised persons in an unwanted or harmful way is considered a data leak. A few common examples are as follows:
If any of the below apply to you, you should check to see if you might be able to claim compensation.
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First, you’ll need to find out what kind of data has been affected, and the steps the organisation plans on taking to help you. If they fail to repair the damage or have not given you GDPR compensation for the damage done, then, you can reach out to Data Breach Claims.
Data Breach Claims will connect you with the expertise the situation calls for. We’ll put you in contact with claims experts who will act as an intermediary between you and the company being claimed against.
You can also report your case to the ICO who will investigate the matter and potentially fine the organisation. If the organisation is found to have broken data protection laws, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) won’t give you compensation, but their findings will help your compensation claim greatly.
If your data is breached, that means that your personal information has been accessed, altered, lost, destroyed, or shared with an unauthorised person without your consent. It’s basically a failure of the system that is intended to protect the data of individuals, companies, or even the government itself.
If you suffer any damage whether it’s material, or emotional because of a data protection breach, then you have a right to make a claim for data protection breach compensation.
Whereas businesses based in or outside the UK had previously been following EU GDPR for processing UK users’ personal data, this is now governed by a new domestic law called UK GDPR. This effectively provides the EU equivalent level of data protection. Those businesses offering goods and services to EU users should continue to follow EU GDPR.
UK Claims that relate to the period up to Dec 31, 2020 would be under EU GDPR, and any after that, the new UK GDPR Regulations would apply. In practical terms this won’t make much difference to your ability to claim as the data protection principles are largely the same.
If you’ve been victim to a data security violation – meaning your personal information has been violated, copied, stolen, destroyed, or transmitted by an organisation – then you have the right to claim personal data breach compensation.
If there’s a data breach affecting your personal information, an organisation is obligated to inform both you and the ICO.
The organisation should clarify in plain language:
If you think that your personal information has been violated due to a data breach but haven’t been notified by the organisation involved, contact them straight away.
When making a claim for data breach compensation for distress, this can be more difficult to demonstrate than proving a financial loss, where you can easily provide evidence of what has been taken from your account.
If your experience of distress from a data breach is serious and you want to make a claim, some evidence that could help your chances of it being successful include the following:
Data breaches have become more and more frequent as companies regularly hold personal data about you. Having that data breached can be highly stress inducing and you should be able to hold the organisation accountable and claim the compensation you deserve. Contact us today and we will put you in touch with specialist data breach solicitors who can help validate and pursue your GDPR compensation for distress.
Your initial action should be to protect the rest of your data to ensure no further data breach is made. The next step should be looking into how your data has been breached, then seeking help on your case for compensation.
Here are detailed steps you should take once you’re aware of the data breach.
If an organisation has failed to protect your data, you are entitled to claim compensation regardless of whether you have suffered any material losses or not. We can make a claim on your behalf for anguish or anxiety caused by a data breach, especially in cases of sensitive data or medical data breaches. If you have suffered financial harm as a direct result of the breach, the amount of compensation you might be able to claim would likely be greater.
At Data Breach Claims we work on a no win, no fee basis. We only take on data protection claims cases we believe have a good chance of success.
If your case is successful we will ask for a pre-agreed percentage of your compensation amount as our management fee or legal costs. If your claim is unsuccessful, you will owe nothing. This way there is absolutely no risk involved for you in making a data breach claim today.
When you contact us, we’ll put you in touch with an expert data breach solicitor who will be able to contact the company in question and use any information you have provided, plus that available from the ICO, to establish whether your data has indeed been breached.
If you’re determined on pursuing a data protection compensation claim, you should have expert legal support at your side throughout. At Data Breach Claims, we’ll help you determine whether you have a strong claim for compensation or not. If it’s a yes, our team will introduce you to the best and most suitable solicitors and claims management companies for you.
The data breach solicitors will give you solid legal advice and handle the entire data breach claims process, including presenting your claim to the court to guarantee you get the compensation that truly makes up for the difficulties you had to face due to the breach.
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