The envelope has a plastic window and your name spelled almost right, and inside is a judgment you never turned up to argue. To ask the court to set that default judgment aside you file one form — the N244 application notice — and, for a standard on-notice application, pay a court fee of £321, the figure since 13 July 2026. There is no tidy deadline printed anywhere on it. The test the rules apply is a single adverb: promptly.
Where money claims are filed: the official portal is www.moneyclaims.service.gov.uk — HMCTS’s own Money Claims service. It is new (still badged beta), and following the 181st Practice Direction update there is no upper limit on the amount you can claim through it — and if you qualify for Help with Fees, the issue fee itself can be reduced to zero, whatever the size of the claim. New to the portal? Read our step-by-step walkthrough.
That word does a lot of work. We’ll come back to it.
First, how you got here, because it is almost never drama. A claim form arrives at an old address, or under a drift of takeaway menus, or during the fortnight you were in hospital. The reply clock — fourteen days to file a defence or an acknowledgment of service — runs whether or not you ever open the envelope. Miss it, and the other side can ask for judgment in default: no hearing, no argument, a number entered against your name because the calendar said so.
The instinct is to phone someone and explain. Explaining is not a step the process recognises. The step it recognises is the application notice.
From here there are two doors.
If the judgment should never have been entered — you did file in time, say, or you’d already paid the debt before it was entered — the rules say the court must set it aside. That is the door marked *as of right*, and it is worth checking first, free, at Citizens Advice or on GOV.UK, before you spend a penny, because you may not be arguing the merits at all. You may just be pointing at a mistake.
The other door is discretion, and it is the one most people walk through. Under the rules, the court may set aside a default judgment if you have “a real prospect of successfully defending the claim,” or if “there is some other good reason” why it should be set aside or you should be allowed to defend. Read the words slowly. Not a good excuse for missing the date. A real prospect of defending the thing on its merits — the debt isn’t yours, the sum is wrong, the work was never done.
And promptly. The rules say the court must have regard to whether you applied to set aside promptly — not within a fixed number of days, but promptly, measured from the moment you found out. Which is exactly why the worst thing you can do with that envelope is slide it into a drawer and resolve to deal with it next month. The drawer is not neutral. The drawer is evidence.
So the N244 asks you three plain things, and dressed in their legal furniture they can intimidate: what order you want (the judgment set aside), why (a real prospect of defending, and the defence in outline), and whether you want a hearing. There is a statement of truth to sign, and a box — section 10 — where the reasons go. That box is where good intentions go to die, because people write “I would like a chance to explain” instead of the two or three facts that would actually move it. If you want the box-by-box tour, the full walk-through lives in our N244 guide.
This is the point where Chris is useful. Chris is our technology — not a person, not a hotline. You tell it what landed on the doormat, when you actually found out, and what you’d have said had you been in the room. It asks the questions the form doesn’t think to ask: the date you learned of the judgment, whether you ever filed anything, what your defence is in a single sentence. Then it turns that into the fields of the N244, in the order and the register the court reads. It will not promise you’ll win — nothing honest could. It makes sure the form says what you mean, promptly, in the place the rule is looking.
And then the thing exists. Not advice, not a phone call you have to reconstruct from memory afterwards — a completed N244 application notice, your reasons sitting in the box, the statement of truth ready for your signature, the number of that judgment no longer the only document in the world with your name on it.
Here it is, filled in, yours to check and sign.
Most people arrive for one document and come back for the next.