The order goes your way, the judge glances up and asks, “And costs?” — and your hands are empty. The sheet you’re missing is Form N260, the statement of costs, and under Practice Direction 44 it had to be filed at court and served on the other side not less than 24 hours before the hearing.
Twenty-four hours. Not on the morning. Not scribbled from the back row while everyone waits.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. You can spend months on the substance — the facts, the law, the bundle that finally made sense at 2am — and the money at the end turns on a single schedule you’d never heard of until the week it was due. The process quietly assumes a costs draftsman sits down the corridor. For a self-represented person there is no corridor.
So it helps to know what the form is for, and when it bites.
The court will usually assess costs there and then — a summary assessment — at the end of a fast track trial, or at the end of any hearing that has lasted not more than one day. That covers most applications: the interim hearing, the strike-out, the afternoon that settles one issue. If you want the other side to pay, the court needs a figure it can look at, and the N260 is where the figure lives. File and serve it not less than 24 hours before the hearing; for a fast track trial, make that not less than two days.
Underneath, it is a plain schedule. Hours spent. The rate for each. Who did the work. The court fees you actually paid. Disbursements. VAT, if it applies. A total at the bottom, and your signature under it. That’s the whole architecture. What makes it feel like a trap isn’t the arithmetic — it’s the deadline, and the fact that a blank in the wrong box reads as nought.
And yes — a litigant in person can claim. This surprises people. You bill nobody, but the rules still let you recover for your time, and there are two ways to do it. If you can show what the hours actually cost you — a provable day of lost earnings — you claim that. If you can’t prove a loss, there’s a fixed rate: £24 an hour since 1 October 2025, up from £19 before. Either way a cap sits over the lot: what a litigant in person recovers won’t exceed two-thirds of what a represented party would have been allowed, disbursements aside. Modest. But not nothing — and yours by right, if you ask for it in the right form.
Now the sting in the timing. Miss that window without a reasonable excuse and the rule doesn’t merely shrug. Under Practice Direction 44 the court will take the failure into account when it decides what costs order to make at all. So the late schedule isn’t a small paperwork sin. It’s the thing that can quietly hand your costs to the other side — after you won.
None of this is secret and none of it is dear. The form is free on GOV.UK, and our Form N260 statement of costs (line-by-line guide) takes you through it box by box. The judiciary publishes a Guide to the Summary Assessment of Costs, and Citizens Advice will point you towards it. Read them and the shape of the thing comes clear. What they can’t do is sit at the kitchen table and turn your actual weeks — the emails, the two half-days off work, the fee you paid to issue — into the ordered lines the court expects to see, totalled, dated, and ready a clear day before you stand up.
That last mile is where most people stall. Not because it’s hard. Because it’s fiddly, and it’s due, and it’s one more form stacked on top of the one that won you the hearing.
Which is where Chris comes in. Tell Chris what you did and when — the hours, the days you took off, the fees you paid, the postage, the printing — and Chris walks you through it line by line, applies the right rate, holds the two-thirds cap in view, and lays it out in the N260 shape: schedule, disbursements, total, signature block. You check every figure yourself. Then you file it and serve it with time to spare, and what you’re left holding is the finished thing — a completed statement of costs, ready to hand up the moment the judge looks at you and asks the question you’re now ready for.
Win the hearing. Then let it pay you back.
Come back when the next form lands — there’s always a next one, and you don’t have to meet it cold.
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