# Form N279: how to discontinue a court claim cleanly (and the costs rule that follows)
The decision arrives quietly, usually at a kitchen table, usually late — the claim you started months ago, and the sudden, clean wish for it to simply stop. To end it on the record you file Form N279, the notice of discontinuance, and serve a copy on every other party; and unless the court orders otherwise you then carry the other side’s costs up to the day it was served — except on the small claims track.
That is the whole shape of it. The rest of this is just reading the small print with the lights on.
Rule 38.3 of the Civil Procedure Rules is calm about the mechanism. To discontinue you must “file a notice of discontinuance” and “serve a copy of it on every other party to the proceedings,” and the notice “must be in Form N279 unless the court permits otherwise.” File it, serve it, done. No hearing. No speech.
Then you read the next rule and the temperature drops. Rule 38.6: “Unless the court orders otherwise, a claimant who discontinues is liable for the costs which a defendant… incurred on or before the date on which notice of discontinuance was served.” Walk away, and the default is that you pick up the other side’s costs to that date. Not a penalty. A default — the rule assumes the person who set the machinery running and then stopped it is the one holding its bill.
There is a large exception, and it deserves reading twice. Rule 38.6(3): “This rule does not apply to claims allocated to the small claims track.” If your claim sits on the small claims track — the track built for the modest disputes most people actually bring — that costs rule does not bite the same way. One sentence, three sub-paragraphs down, and it changes the whole sum for a great many people doing this without a solicitor.
Two more things the form keeps quiet about.
Permission first, sometimes. Usually you do not need it — you file and serve, and that is that. But rule 38.2 blocks the simple route in a few situations: where the court has granted an interim injunction, where anyone has given an undertaking to the court, or where you have received an interim payment. In those cases it asks for the court’s permission first — or, for an interim payment, the paying party’s written consent. You cannot just post the notice and call it closed.
And the door does not lock the instant you file. Under rule 38.4 a defendant “may apply to have the notice of discontinuance set aside,” but “may not make an application… more than 28 days after the date when the notice of discontinuance was served.” Twenty-eight days: done, but not yet untouchable.
None of this tells you whether to stop. That call is yours, and if you want to test it before you commit, the free routes are genuinely good — Citizens Advice for a steer on your options, and GOV.UK for the official guidance on Part 38 and the court’s own forms. Discontinuing has consequences; the time to understand them is before you sign, not after.
What most people want, once they have decided, is the dull, exact thing: the notice filled in correctly. The right claim number. The right parties. A clear statement of what is being discontinued — all of it, or one part of it, or the claim against one defendant and not another. Put a box wrong and the relief you were reaching for comes back as a letter from the court.
That is where our technology helps. You tell Chris, in plain words, what you are stopping and why; Chris walks you through the notice the rules ask for — who must be served, whether your claim looks like the kind that needs permission first, what the discontinuance should actually say. It decides nothing for you. It builds the right form from what the rules require, so the thing you file matches the thing you meant. (eLitigant, where Chris works, exists for exactly this: people in England and Wales preparing their own court documents.)
And then, on the screen, the payoff — your completed N279. Your name, your claim number, the parties, the words that end it: a notice of discontinuance, ready to file and serve. Not a template with gaps. The finished form.
Draft my document with Chris →
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