Racial Discrimination at Work: Your Rights and How to Claim

Key Points

What Counts as Race Discrimination at Work?

Race is one of the nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. Section 9 defines it as including colour, nationality, and ethnic or national origins. A racial group can be defined by reference to more than one of those things, and a person can belong to more than one racial group at the same time.

That definition is broader than most people expect. It catches discrimination based on skin colour, but equally on being Polish, Nigerian, Irish or Romanian. It catches discrimination against someone for being English or white. Groups recognised by the courts as ethnic groups include Sikhs, following Mandla v Dowell Lee [1983] 2 AC 548, along with Jewish people, Roma and Irish Travellers.

Language and accent sit in an interesting position. Criticising someone’s accent is not automatically race discrimination, but where an accent or a name is used as a proxy for national origin, tribunals treat it as exactly what it is.

Caste: the position is now settled

Section 9(5) of the Equality Act 2010 gave ministers a power to add caste to the definition of race. That power was never exercised. After a public consultation, the Government published its response on 23 July 2018 concluding against fresh legislation, preferring instead to rely on the case law.

The reason it could take that view is Chandhok v Tirkey [2014] UKEAT/0190/14, in which the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that caste can already fall within “ethnic origins” where the facts support it. If your complaint concerns caste, you are not waiting for a change in the law. You bring it as a race claim.

Who is protected

Protection under the Equality Act 2010 is a day one right. There is no qualifying period of service, which sets it apart from ordinary unfair dismissal. It also covers:

• Job applicants, including at the advertising, shortlisting and interview stages
• Employees and workers, including agency workers and those on zero hours contracts
• Self-employed contractors who perform work personally
• Partners, office holders and, in some circumstances, former employees, for example where a reference is refused

The Five Forms of Race Discrimination

Race claims come in five distinct forms. They are not interchangeable, and identifying the right one matters because each has a different legal test and a different defence available to the employer. Many claims plead more than one in the alternative.

Direct discrimination (section 13)

Direct discrimination is treating someone less favourably because of race. There is no defence of justification for direct race discrimination, so if you prove it, the employer cannot argue it had a good business reason.

It covers three situations. Discrimination because of your own race, discrimination by perception, where you are treated badly because someone wrongly assumes your ethnic origin, and discrimination by association, where you are treated badly because of the race of your partner, child or friend.

Example. A candidate applies for a nursery teaching post. She is turned down, and the manager explains on the phone that although she personally has no problem with the candidate being Polish, she worries some parents might, and cannot risk losing them. That is direct discrimination. The employer’s own attitude is beside the point, and the prejudices of customers are never a lawful reason for less favourable treatment.

Indirect discrimination (section 19)

Indirect discrimination works differently. Here everybody is treated the same, but a provision, criterion or practice puts people of a particular racial group at a particular disadvantage, and puts you at that disadvantage too.

Example. An employer advertising an internal conference presenter role specifies that applicants must hold an A level in English. Applied across the board, that requirement disadvantages employees educated outside the UK who hold equivalent qualifications under a different system.

Unlike direct discrimination, indirect discrimination can be defended if the employer shows the requirement was a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. The employer has to show both the aim is legitimate and that it could not reasonably have achieved it in a less discriminatory way. In the conference presenter example, testing presentation skills directly would have been the obvious alternative.

Indirect discrimination by association (section 19A)

Section 19A came into force on 1 January 2024 and is the newest route into a race claim. It allows you to bring an indirect discrimination claim even where you do not share the protected characteristic yourself, provided you suffer substantively the same disadvantage as the group that does.

The provision codifies the decision in CHEZ Razpredelenie Bulgaria (C-83/14), which was itself a race case: a shopkeeper who was not Roma succeeded in challenging a practice affecting a predominantly Roma neighbourhood because she suffered the same detriment. If a policy targets or disadvantages one ethnic group and it happens to catch you as well, you now have standing to challenge it. We cover the mechanics in our section 19A guide.

Harassment (section 26)

Harassment is unwanted conduct related to race which has the purpose or effect of violating your dignity, or of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.

Two features make it a powerful claim. First, the conduct only has to be related to race, so it does not have to be directed at you personally. Racist jokes told across an office, or a slur about a nationality nobody in the room belongs to, can found a claim. Second, you do not need to share the characteristic. An employee of any background can bring a claim about racist abuse aimed at a colleague if it created that environment for them.

The effect test is judged by reference to your perception, the other circumstances, and whether it was reasonable for the conduct to have that effect. That last limb is where cases are won and lost.

Victimisation (section 27)

Victimisation protects you for complaining. If you do a protected act, which includes raising a grievance about discrimination, bringing a tribunal claim, or giving evidence in someone else’s claim, your employer cannot subject you to a detriment for it.

Detriment is interpreted broadly: being sidelined, excluded from meetings, denied a promotion, given an unexpectedly poor appraisal, or dismissed. Victimisation claims are often stronger than the underlying discrimination claim, because the sequence of events tends to be documented and the timing speaks for itself. You can succeed in a victimisation claim even if the original complaint fails, as long as you made it in good faith. See our victimisation guide for more.

Who is legally responsible

Under section 109, employers are vicariously liable for discrimination by their employees committed in the course of employment. It makes no difference whether the person responsible was a director or a colleague on your own grade.

The employer has a defence under section 109(4) if it can show it took all reasonable steps to prevent the discrimination. In practice this defence is harder to run than employers expect. A dusty equal opportunities policy and an online training module completed three years ago rarely satisfies it. Individual perpetrators can also be named as respondents personally under section 110.

Racial Harassment by Customers and Clients Changes in October 2026

If the abuse you face comes from customers, patients, clients or members of the public rather than colleagues, the law has been unsatisfactory for over a decade. Third party harassment provisions were repealed in 2013, leaving employees in retail, hospitality, healthcare, transport and care work with limited recourse where their employer stood by and did nothing.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 reverses that from October 2026. Employers will be liable for harassment of their employees by third parties in the course of employment where they have failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it. The new duty covers all relevant protected characteristics, race included, and is not restricted to sexual harassment.

The new provision is also wider than the one repealed in 2013. There is no requirement that you were harassed on two previous occasions, and no requirement that the employer knew about earlier incidents. The question is simply whether the employer took all reasonable steps.

“The employees who have had the rawest deal under the current law are the ones facing racist abuse from customers. I have had to tell people that their employer’s failure to move them off a till, or to bar an abusive regular, was not something we could easily attack. From October that changes, and employers who treat customer abuse as part of the job will find themselves defending claims.”

Tom Street Principal Solicitor, Tom Street & Co.

If you are being racially abused by customers now, keep reporting it in writing and keep the responses. Evidence that your employer knew and did nothing will matter a great deal once the new duty is in force.

Proving Race Discrimination: The Burden of Proof

Almost nobody writes down a discriminatory reason. Race discrimination is usually proved by inference, and the law builds that reality into the procedure.

Section 136 of the Equality Act 2010 sets up a two stage test. At stage one, you must show facts from which the tribunal could decide, in the absence of any other explanation, that discrimination occurred. If you clear that hurdle, the burden shifts to the employer at stage two, and it must prove the treatment was in no sense whatsoever because of race.

The Supreme Court examined this in Royal Mail Group Ltd v Efobi [2021] UKSC 33, itself a race discrimination case brought by a postman who applied unsuccessfully for a long series of internal roles. The court confirmed that a claimant does still carry a real burden at stage one, so the shift is not automatic. Just as importantly, it held that tribunals should rarely decide stage one before hearing the employer’s evidence, which means applications to throw out discrimination claims halfway through a hearing should be very unusual.

What builds a stage one case

A “something more than a difference in treatment and a difference in race” threshold applies, so a bare assertion will not do. The material that does the work in practice tends to be:

• Comparators. A colleague of a different racial group in materially the same circumstances treated better. Where no real comparator exists, a hypothetical one can be constructed
• Statistics. Patterns in promotion, recruitment, discipline or redundancy selection across teams. A tribunal can and does infer discrimination where, for example, one ethnic group is consistently passed over
• Inconsistent or shifting explanations. An employer that gives one reason at the grievance stage and a different one in its response to the claim damages its own case badly
• Procedural failures. Departures from the employer’s own policy, unrecorded interview scoring, or a grievance that was never properly investigated
• Missing documents. Absent notes and deleted messages can support an adverse inference

The statutory discrimination questionnaire was abolished in 2014, so there is no longer a formal procedure obliging your employer to answer written questions. What replaces it is a written grievance framed carefully, a subject access request under data protection law for the emails and notes that mention you, and disclosure once proceedings are underway.

Time Limits: The Deadline That Ends Most Claims

More good race discrimination claims are lost to the deadline than to any argument about the merits.

Under section 123 of the Equality Act 2010, the current limit is 3 months minus 1 day from the act complained of. From 1 October 2026 that becomes six months, but only where the act you are complaining about occurs on or after that date. For anything that happened before, the three month deadline continues to apply, so do not assume the longer period is available to you.

Three further points matter:

• Acas early conciliation is compulsory and must be started before you can lodge a claim. Notifying Acas pauses the clock, and you receive a certificate at the end. Our guide to registering with Acas early conciliation explains the process
• Continuing acts. Where discrimination forms an ongoing course of conduct rather than a one off event, section 123(3) treats time as running from the end of that course of conduct. This is often the argument that saves an otherwise late claim, but it has to be pleaded properly
• Just and equitable extension. Tribunals have a discretion to extend time in discrimination cases where it is just and equitable to do so. It is a genuine discretion, wider than the test for unfair dismissal, but it is an exception rather than a safety net and you should never plan around it

What a Race Discrimination Claim Is Worth

Discrimination compensation is not capped. The statutory cap that applies to ordinary unfair dismissal has no application to a discrimination award, and it is one of the main reasons discrimination claims carry the negotiating weight they do.

An award normally has three elements: financial loss, injury to feelings, and interest.

Financial loss covers past and future loss of earnings, lost pension, bonuses and benefits. Where discrimination has forced someone out of a career, future loss can run for years and is often the largest component.

Injury to feelings is awarded in every successful discrimination claim, whether or not you lost any money, and is assessed using the Vento bands.

On top of those, a tribunal can award aggravated damages where the employer behaved in a high handed or malicious way, or defended the claim oppressively, and personal injury damages where the discrimination caused a diagnosable psychiatric injury. Interest runs on injury to feelings from the date of the act, and awards can be increased by up to 25% where an employer unreasonably failed to follow the Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures.

A realistic view of outcomes

The most recent published tribunal award statistics, covering 2023/24, show a median race discrimination award of £10,253 and an average of £29,532, with the highest award that year reaching £431,768. Award data for 2024/25 has not yet been published while HMCTS quality assures figures from its new case management system.

The gap between the median and the average tells you something useful: most awards are modest, and a small number of very large awards pull the average up. Those larger awards are typically the cases involving career ending loss of earnings rather than exceptional injury to feelings.

Most claims never reach a judgment. The great majority settle or are withdrawn, so published award figures describe only the minority of cases decided at a final hearing. Any source quoting a simple “success rate” for discrimination claims should be treated with caution, because withdrawn and settled claims are not failures.

Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting Is Coming

Large employers already publish gender pay gap data. Ethnicity is heading the same way. The Government consulted between March and June 2025 on mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting, and published its response in March 2026 confirming that reporting will become mandatory for employers with 250 or more employees through the draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill.

No implementation date has been set. For anyone considering a claim, the significance is evidential: published pay and progression data is precisely the sort of material that supports an inference at stage one of the section 136 test, and it will be in the public domain rather than something you have to extract through disclosure.

What to Do If You’re Facing Race Discrimination at Work

How We Can Help

We act for employees bringing race discrimination claims, from the first grievance letter through to a final hearing. In practice that means assessing honestly whether the evidence supports an inference of discrimination, framing the grievance so it does the work it needs to do, protecting your time limit, and negotiating where settlement serves you better than a hearing.

We offer a free initial assessment, and we work on a no win no fee basis in suitable cases. If your claim is not strong, we will tell you at the outset rather than after you have spent a year on it.