Estimator: advice and assistance

This estimator helps you work out if you are likely to qualify financially for advice and assistance in a civil, criminal, or children's case.

Please use the 'Help/Information' boxes - these give more details on what is being asked for.

Once you complete these fields, an estimate will automatically be provided.

"*" indicates required fields

Step 1: Type of case

Help / Information

Type of Case

  • Children's: Legal advice about a Children's Hearing – for example, a solicitor can tell you what to expect, what decisions can be made and how to appeal in a civil court.
  • Criminal: Advice from a solicitor to help if you are in trouble with the police and are going to appear before a criminal court.
  • Civil: Advice from a solicitor to help you with non-criminal matters - things like divorce or adoption or getting compensation after an accident.

Step 2: About your household situation

Tell us about your situation and any dependants living with you - this is a child or person(s) who has (have) no income of their own.
Help / Information
  • Partner: You should include your partner or spouse in these steps even if you don’t always live in the same household. For example your partner may work away or be in prison. You do not have to include your partner or spouse if the application is against them or you consider the relationship to be over.
  • Dependants: You should only declare children who are wholly dependent on you full time. We may consider making an allowance when we receive your application, for children in your care part of the time or adult children who have some income of their own but for this calculation you should not include them.
Do you have a partner or spouse?*

Step 3: Do you qualify automatically based on income?

If you are in receipt of, or included in your partner's award of, any of the benefits below, select 'Yes'.

Do you receive, or are you included in your partner's award of, universal credit, income support, income-based jobseeker's allowance, income-related employment and support allowance?*

Step 4: Do you qualify based on capital?

We may take into consideration any capital disposed of when you were likely to be aware of your involvement in litigation, if we don’t consider the reasons given justified.

If you think this may be a situation that applies to you, you can contact us on 0131 226 7061 to check if you should include the capital in this calculation. Please ask to speak to either the criminal, civil or children's assessment team depending on what type of advice and assistance you are wanting to check your eligibility for.

Add up all your capital and that of your partner (unless we do not have to consider their resources - see the 'Help/Information' box for Step 2). The calculator will work out your allowances using what you told us at Step 2 above.

(If you are a pensioner, you may qualify even if your capital is more than £1,716 – speak to your solicitor about this.)

Help / Information

Total capital



By capital we mean money and anything else of value you and your spouse or partner (if you have one) own.

Examples of capital include:
  • The value of any interest in land and buildings owned after the deduction of any loans secured on them, including interests in timeshares. We do not include the home you live in.
  • Money in the bank, building society, Post Office, credit union, premium bonds etc.
  • Investments, stocks and shares
  • Cash-in values of any policies
  • Money owed to you or your spouse or partner
  • Money due from the will of someone who has died
  • Money due from a trust fund
  • Money available from your or your spouse’s or partner’s business or which could be borrowed against the business assets.
  • The value of any valuable possessions such as a boat, caravan, jewellery (but not wedding or engagement rings) or items bought for investment purposes
Capital not to be included:
  • The house which you live in
  • Tools and equipment you need for work
  • The value of any property or item you have an interest in which is being sought by the opponent in the action for which your civil application relates to will be disregarded for assessment purposes. However, we will only disregard the amount/share they are putting at issue. For example if you own 50% of a house or some savings and the opponent is asking for it to be split 60/40 in their favour only 10% of your share would be disregarded for assessment purposes.

Enter 0 if you do not have any capital

Step 5: Estimate

Once you complete these fields, an estimate will be provided:


  • Type of case
  • Weekly income (if not receiving benefits)
  • Maintenance payments (if not receiving benefits)
  • Total capital
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Hidden Variables

The field names for each of the hidden variables shoudl be self-descriptive. If the number of allowance brackets change, this form will need rewritten. If the number of brackets sstays the same, but the limits change, then just adapt the variables accordingly. Use numbers, not currency.
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Hidden Calculations

All of the below is where the "magic" happens. Note the followning. 1. There is a JS file in /resources/assets/js/gravity-extras.js, which communicates with these variables. It was not possble to do everything we needed in Gravity Forms alone. This is a SCSS file, so gulp will need to run before changes will be committed to the front-end version of the site. 2. The HTML content blocks above include a couple of spans with unique IDs. If you choose to remove those Spans, then the user will never see the outputs from the contribution scales.
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This figure ultimately decides whether the user qualifies by capital. Do not adjust the field in any way.
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This figure ultimately decides whether the user qualifies on income. Do not adjust the field in any way.
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This figure ultimately decides whether the user qualifies in full on income. Do not adjust the field in any way.
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This is calculated dynamically. Do not adjust this question. It's not actually used by the calculator outputs, but helps with debugging.
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This must be sorted in numeric order by Label (click "show values" if you cannot see labels). Label should represent the band in which the user's income must fall. So it's greater than the previous label, and less than this current label. Think of label as Upper Limit for a band. The value is the contribution they'll have to pay as a result of their income. Anyone with income less than the first label will pay £0 contribution. Anyone with income higher than last label will not qualify for assistance. * will only work if contribution-scale is applied as a CSS class in the advanced tab *
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This is calculated dynamically. Do not adjust this question. It's not actually used by the calculator outputs, but helps with debugging.
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See description above for contribution_scale. This works in the same way.

Find a solicitor

Use our Solicitor Finder tool to search for registered solicitors who may be able to provide advice and represent you in your case.