SRA Transparency Rules: What Your Website Actually Needs

If your law firm's website mentions certain practice areas, the SRA doesn't just have opinions about your marketing — it has actual rules, and it checks.

Short answer: The SRA Transparency Rules require solicitors to publish clear price and service information for specified practice areas, displayed prominently rather than buried in a footer, alongside details of who's actually doing the work. Non-compliance starts with a warning letter and can escalate to fines or, in persistent cases, a referral to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. None of this is optional once it applies to you, and most of it happens to be good marketing anyway.

Why these rules exist in the first place

It's worth knowing the actual origin of this, because it changes how the rules read. They weren't dreamed up by the SRA in isolation — they trace back to the Competition and Markets Authority's 2016 legal services market study, which concluded that competition in legal services for individual consumers and small businesses wasn't working well. The CMA's finding was specific: there wasn't enough information available on price, quality, and service to help people choose between providers, and that gap was actively weakening competition — with vulnerable consumers in particular sometimes not obtaining the legal advice they needed simply because they couldn't compare their options.

The CMA's recommendation was for regulators to set a new minimum standard for the information their regulated firms published. The SRA's transparency rules, introduced in 2018 and 2019, are the direct response to that recommendation. Which means the underlying goal was never "make solicitors do more paperwork" — it was "make it possible for an ordinary person to compare law firms the way they'd compare almost anything else they're deciding whether to buy." Read that way, the rules make considerably more sense than they do as a standalone bureaucratic requirement.

What the SRA transparency rules actually require

Since December 2018, the SRA's transparency rules have required solicitors to display price and service information on their websites, for firms that publish they work in certain specified areas of law. This isn't a vague "be transparent" guideline — the SRA's own guidance and independent breakdowns of the requirements set out specific, checkable requirements:

• A total cost, or where that's not possible, a realistic range or average based on genuine experience

• The basis of the charges — hourly rate, fixed fee, or whatever structure you actually use

• Disbursements and VAT, spelled out rather than left as a surprise on the final invoice

• Information about who's carrying out the work, including qualifications and experience, linked directly from the pricing information rather than left to a separate, unconnected About page

That last point matters more than it might first appear. The rules don't just want a price — they want the price connected to a real person's stated competence to deliver the work, so a prospective client can evaluate both together.

This is the core of what SRA website compliance actually means in day-to-day terms. It's not an abstract regulatory concept — it's a specific, checkable list of things that either are or aren't present on specific pages of your site, and the SRA's own sweeps check exactly that list.

Which practice areas this actually covers

Not every solicitor is covered by every part of the rules. They apply specifically where a firm publishes that it works in certain specified areas of law — commonly things like conveyancing, probate, employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, and a handful of others the SRA lists directly. If your website mentions one of these areas, the transparency requirements for that area apply, whether or not it's your firm's main focus.

A small firm that does a little conveyancing alongside its main commercial practice is still in scope for conveyancing, on whichever page mentions it — the rules don't scale down because it's a minority of your caseload. This catches out firms that think of themselves primarily as, say, a commercial or family practice, but that list one or two covered areas on a "services we also offer" page almost as an afterthought. That afterthought page still needs to meet the same standard as a firm that specializes in it.

Worth checking your own site against this directly: go through every practice area mentioned anywhere on the site, including secondary pages you haven't updated in a while, and confirm whether each one falls under the SRA's specified list. It's a fifteen-minute audit that most firms have never actually done.

This is worth checking deliberately rather than assuming. A firm with a broad "we also handle" mention of a covered practice area on a single page is still in scope for that page, even if 90% of the firm's actual work sits outside it.

What "prominent" actually means in practice

The rules don't just require the information to exist somewhere on the site — they require it to be genuinely easy to find. SRA guidance and practitioner breakdowns are consistent on this point: pricing and service information needs to sit on the pages that actually describe the relevant service, clearly signposted, not buried three clicks deep or dropped quietly into a footer alongside your copyright notice.

That's a meaningfully different bar than "it's on the site somewhere, technically." The SRA runs random web sweeps of firm websites specifically to check ongoing compliance, so "we published it once, in a hard-to-find spot, two years ago" doesn't hold up well against an actual audit.

Beyond pricing: the other things your site needs

Price and service transparency gets most of the attention, but it isn't the only regulatory display requirement a law firm website needs to satisfy. A few others worth checking directly:

Your SRA number, clearly displayed. Usually placed in the header or footer so it appears on every page, not tucked away on a single About page where a visitor has to go looking for it.

A findable complaints procedure. This needs to set out how your firm handles complaints internally, the relevant timeframes, and contact details for the Legal Ombudsman as the next step if a client isn't satisfied with your internal response. Burying this doesn't make complaints go away — it just makes your firm look like it's hiding the process.

Confirmation of professional indemnity cover. Clients don't need a copy of your policy on the homepage, but there should be a clear, findable way for them to request the details if asked.

Optionally, the SRA digital badge. Not mandatory, but it's a low-effort trust signal — it links directly to your firm's regulatory record, which is exactly the kind of independently verifiable proof a skeptical prospective client is looking for.

What happens if you don't comply

This isn't a theoretical risk. Not remotely. Analysis of SRA enforcement patterns describes a fairly consistent escalation path: a warning letter first, then fines — commonly cited around £750, rising to £1,500 for firms that don't fix the issue after being warned. Firms that persist in breaching the rules after formal warnings can be referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, which is a considerably more serious outcome than a marketing oversight was ever meant to become.

A missing complaints procedure or an absent SRA number can turn what started as a website project into a regulatory one. That's a strange place for a homepage redesign to end up, and it's entirely avoidable.

If you're redesigning or switching agencies

A redesign is exactly the moment this tends to slip. Attention goes to the new visual design, the new navigation, the new photography — and the compliance pages that were quietly correct on the old site sometimes just don't make the migration list, because nobody explicitly owns "carry the SRA information over" as a task. It's worth writing it down as its own line item before a redesign starts, not trusting it to survive the move by default.

The same applies if you're switching from one agency to another mid-relationship. A departing agency isn't always motivated to flag what it did right on the old site, and an incoming one won't necessarily know to check for SRA-specific requirements unless you tell them directly or they have real law-firm experience already. Asking a prospective agency, directly, "how do you handle SRA transparency requirements" is a reasonable question to ask before signing anything — and a vague answer is itself useful information.

Why generalist web agencies get this wrong

A web design agency without specific law-firm experience can build a genuinely attractive site that fails on compliance anyway, simply because they didn't know these specific rules existed. Guidance aimed at solicitors evaluating agencies is blunt about this: firms often choose an agency based on portfolio aesthetics alone, and end up with a site that looks polished but hasn't accounted for compliance, conversion, or the specific behavior of legal clients browsing online.

This isn't really the agency's fault in the sense of malice — it's a knowledge gap. A generalist designer builds what generalist clients need, and most generalist clients aren't subject to sector-specific regulatory display requirements. Law firms are a genuine exception, and it's worth confirming directly, before a project starts, whether the agency you're evaluating has actually accounted for this.

It's also worth asking the question a different way: does the agency you're talking to actually know the difference between a "lawyer" and a "solicitor," and use the term your actual clients search for? Small detail. Big tell. It's a reasonable proxy for whether they've done real homework on the UK legal market specifically, rather than repurposing a template built for a US-market law firm client.

A practical checklist for law firm website compliance

Rather than treating this as an abstract set of principles, here's a direct way to check your own site right now:

• Pull up every page that mentions a specified practice area. Does each one have price and service information, or does it link to a page that does?

• Time how long it takes to find your SRA number. If you have to search, so will a visitor — and so will an SRA reviewer during a web sweep.

• Find your complaints procedure without using search. Click through your own navigation as a visitor would. If you can't find it in under thirty seconds, it isn't prominent.

• Check whether pricing and practitioner information are linked together, not sitting on two disconnected pages with no reference between them.

• Confirm the information is current. A price range from three years ago that no longer reflects your actual fees is its own kind of compliance problem, separate from whether the page exists at all.

This isn't a one-time exercise, either. Solicitor website compliance is an ongoing responsibility, not a box to tick once at launch — fees change, practice areas shift, and a page that was compliant at launch can quietly drift out of compliance a year later if nobody revisits it.

The good news: compliance and good design mostly overlap

Here's the part that should be reassuring rather than discouraging: almost everything the SRA requires is also just good practice for converting visitors into clients. Prominent pricing helps prospects self-qualify before they call — the same finding that shows up repeatedly in general lead-generation research, not just law-specific guidance. Clear information about who's doing the work builds exactly the kind of credibility a visitor is looking for before trusting a firm with something as significant as a property purchase, a probate matter, or an employment dispute. A findable complaints procedure signals a firm confident enough in its own service to make the process visible rather than hidden.

Treating these as two separate checklists — one for compliance, one for conversion — makes the work feel doubled. In practice, fixing one usually fixes most of the other.

Getting started

Start with an honest audit of what's actually on your site today: is your pricing information genuinely prominent, or technically present but hard to find? Is your SRA number on every page, or just one? Is there a real, complete complaints procedure, or a single sentence that doesn't mention the Legal Ombudsman at all? Running through the SRA transparency rules against your own site directly, page by page, is the only way to actually know where you stand — guessing isn't a strategy the SRA's own web sweeps will care about.

If the answer to any of those is uncomfortable, it's worth fixing directly rather than waiting for a web sweep to find it first. We build law firm and solicitor websites with this structure in from the start — prominent pricing and service pages, SRA number and complaints information built into the template, not bolted on after launch — as part of a monthly subscription with no big upfront cost. If compliance isn't the only thing prompting a rebuild, our guide to the signs a redesign is actually overdue covers the rest of what's worth checking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do the SRA transparency rules apply to every solicitor's website?
They apply if your firm publishes that it works in certain specified areas of law — not every practice area is covered, but the common ones (conveyancing, probate, employment tribunal claims, and others) are. Check the SRA's own list for your specific practice areas.

What happens if a law firm website breaches the SRA transparency rules?
The SRA typically starts with a warning letter. Continued breaches can lead to fines — commonly cited at £750, rising to £1,500 for repeated issues — and persistent non-compliance can be referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Does my SRA number need to be on every page?
It needs to be clearly displayed, usually in the header or footer so it appears site-wide, rather than buried on a single About page.

Is the SRA digital badge mandatory?
No, but it's a good idea. It's not required by the transparency rules themselves, but it links directly to your regulatory record and signals legitimacy to a prospective client checking you out.

Can I just publish an hourly rate and call it compliant?
Not on its own. The rules ask for a total cost where possible, or a realistic range, plus the basis of charges, and for some services, a note on likely additional costs like disbursements and VAT.