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FOI Cost Estimator — Will Your Request Breach the Section 12 Limit?

Section 12 is the most common way an FOI dies, and it is decided by an authority’s estimate of staff hours rather than by anything you can see. Doing the arithmetic yourself first at least tells you where the ceiling is.

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FOI Cost Estimator

Estimate whether your Freedom of Information request is likely to exceed the statutory cost limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (£600 for central government, £450 for other public authorities, calculated at £25/hour).

Select all four options above to see your estimated cost outcome.

Note: This is an illustrative estimate only, using the statutory £25/hour rate set out in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. Only time spent determining whether the information is held, locating, retrieving and extracting it counts toward the limit — not time spent considering exemptions or redacting. Not legal advice.

How it works

  • Four dropdowns: request type, sector, an estimated-hours band and delivery method.
  • The figure comes from the midpoint of the hours band you chose — 1.5, 4.5, 9, 15, 21 or 30 hours — multiplied by the statutory £25 an hour. Nothing else feeds the number; request type and delivery only change the advice text.
  • The limit shown is £600, equal to 24 hours, if you selected a central government department, and £450, equal to 18 hours, for everything else.
  • The verdict bands are fixed: at or below 70% of the limit hours is “likely within the cost limit”, up to the limit is “borderline”, and above it is “likely to exceed”.
  • Reframing suggestions are picked by request type and delivery method, plus two fixed ones: narrowing the request’s date range, department or category rather than slicing it into instalments — with an explicit warning that regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations lets an authority aggregate similar requests from the same person received within 60 working days and refuse them as one — and asking the authority for advice and assistance under section 16 before resubmitting.

When to use it

  • Before sending a bulk data or correspondence request that could plausibly be refused on cost.
  • After a section 12 refusal, to work out how far the scope has to come down to get under the cap.
  • Deciding whether to ask for three years of data or one, when one will actually arrive.
  • Explaining to an editor why a request has to be narrowed before it is worth sending.

What it does not do

  • It does not estimate anything about your request. You supply the hours and it multiplies by 25 — the accuracy of the output is entirely the accuracy of your guess at how long an authority will take.
  • Only determining whether the information is held, and locating, retrieving and extracting it, count towards the limit. Time spent considering exemptions or redacting does not — the tool’s own footnote says so, and it is often the strongest ground for challenging a cost refusal.
  • The £600 limit only applies to authorities listed in Part I of Schedule 1 FOIA — in practice, central government departments — which is what the sector dropdown’s split is built on. NHS bodies and police are not Part I bodies, which is why they get £450 here rather than £600; if you are unsure whether the specific body you are writing to counts as a Part I authority, check Schedule 1 rather than assume from the dropdown label.
  • Scotland is not modelled. Under FOISA the projected-cost regime and the fee mechanism both differ, and this tool covers neither.

More tools

This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.

Related guides

FOIHandling FOI refusalsRead →FOIHow to file an FOI requestRead →FOIFOI exemptions by typeRead →FOIFOI in Scotland under FOISARead →FOIFOI hubRead →

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