About Know Your Rights UK: Free Legal Rights Guidance

Our mission is simple: to make UK legal rights accessible to everyone, regardless of income, education, or background. Legal information should not be a privilege reserved for those who can afford a solicitor. Understanding your rights is the first step to exercising them.

Know Your Rights UK covers the areas of law that affect people most in their everyday lives:

• Benefits, PIP, Universal Credit, ESA, housing benefit, carers allowance, attendance allowance, mandatory reconsideration, and tribunal appeals
• Employment law, unfair dismissal, redundancy, discrimination, sick pay, employment tribunals, zero-hours contracts, TUPE, and whistleblowing
• Housing rights, eviction, Section 21, renters rights, repairs, deposits, damp and mould, and housing disrepair
• Debt, CCJs, bailiffs, statute-barred debt, IVAs, Debt Relief Orders, bankruptcy, and breathing space
• Council services, council tax, housing applications, planning, freedom of information
• Consumer rights, faulty goods, refunds, Section 75, small claims court, chargeback, and subscription traps
• Immigration status and the right to work, eVisas, share codes and employer checks
• Wills, probate, power of attorney, and what to do when someone dies
• Family, child maintenance, separation and divorce
• Health and legal rights, legal aid, jury service, and ADHD and autism rights
• Protection insurance, and what to do if an insurer refuses a claim

Everything on this site is free to read, with no paywall. The guides need no registration.

The first step with any problem is to find out what it is called, what the law says and what to do next. Know Your Rights UK tries to answer those questions in everyday words, whether the problem is a benefits decision, a letter from a landlord, a debt, a faulty purchase or a will.

We want people who need a person to know where to find free advice. We also want to work alongside Citizens Advice and other advice services, so that people arrive better informed and advisers have more time for the people who need them most.

Over time I want to:

• Have each guide reviewed by an adviser or solicitor who works in that area, named on the guide if they agree
• Offer the guides in more formats and languages, such as Easy Read, large print and audio
• Work with libraries, foodbanks, carers groups and advice services, including through printed copies of the guides
• Publish more of our own data on how benefit decisions turn out, as we already do for PIP
• Set the site up as a charity with independent trustees, to keep it free and independent. The timing is still open

The roles we are looking for help with are listed on the volunteer page. Advice services, libraries and community groups who would like to work with us can email contact@knowyourrightsuk.com.

I worked all my life as an agricultural engineer. A few years ago a back problem meant I needed the benefits system for the first time, and I was clueless about how it worked. I assumed that if I handed over everything they needed, the system would be there to help. I sent test results, doctors' notes and MRI scan details, and I was still refused PIP.

It took months of appeals to get to a tribunal. When I got there it took about five minutes. I was told the claim should never have been refused, and I was awarded PIP. By then I had started to wonder how many other people were going through the same thing without knowing their rights. It felt as if the system was built to wear people down, and as if it was designed not to give you what you are entitled to.

So I began writing guides in everyday language, on benefits and on our rights more widely, as they stand in current law. Most people have no time to track down some obscure regulation that might help them. I wanted to do that part for them. Steven Butler, editor

Know Your Rights UK is edited by Steven Butler. It is run by one person, as an individual, not by a company or a law firm, and it is not a regulated advice service. Steven decides what is published and what is corrected, and messages sent to the contact address below reach him.

The site is paid for by display advertising, managed by Mediavine, and by voluntary donations through the Support page. There are no affiliate links, and nothing on the site is sold.

Nobody pays for a guide to say something, and a guide does not change because of an advertiser.

Each guide is written from official sources only. Where we state a figure or a rule, it is tied to an exact quotation from one of those sources in our records, and a check that runs every time the site is built stops a guide being published if one of its figures has no source behind it.

The official sources we use are:

• Acts of Parliament and statutory instruments, as published on legislation.gov.uk
• Official government guidance on GOV.UK, and its devolved equivalents on mygov.scot, gov.wales and nidirect
• The NHS, and public bodies such as DWP, HMRC, Acas and the FCA
• Tribunal and court decisions, referenced directly where cited

We do not use law firm blogs, news articles, comparison sites or forums as evidence. Charities such as Citizens Advice and Shelter help us see which questions people ask, but where one of them differs from an official source, the official source wins.

Because the site covers so much law, a custom AI agent helps find and collect the legislation and helps draft the guides. A person fact checks every guide before it goes live. The Editorial Policy explains how AI is used and when we plan to stop.

Where the law is different in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the guide says so and, where it matters, sets the nations out side by side.

Pages are updated when the rules change, for example after the April uprating or a new Act. Each guide shows the date it was last checked against official sources and keeps its older date until it has actually been re-checked. You can read more about our process on our Editorial Policy page.

Know Your Rights UK is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) site. The topics we cover, benefits entitlements, employment rights, eviction, debt, have real consequences for people's lives. We treat legal accuracy as a primary obligation, not a secondary consideration.

When the law changes, we work through the affected pages and re-check them, rather than promise a fixed turnaround we cannot measure. What you can check is the date at the top of each guide: it shows when that page was last checked against official sources, and a page keeps its older date until it has actually been re-checked, so it never implies it is current when it is not.

Recent updates: Pages covering eviction and Section 21 have been updated for the Renters' Rights Act. Employment pages, including sick pay, have been updated for the Employment Rights Act.

Our guides span the areas of law that affect ordinary people in the UK most frequently. Here is an overview of the topics we currently publish guidance on:

We are committed to keeping our content accurate and up to date. If you spot an error, believe information is outdated, or have a suggestion for a topic we should cover, please let us know. We take accuracy reports seriously and review all submissions promptly.

You can contact us at: contact@knowyourrightsuk.com

When reporting an inaccuracy, please include the URL of the page in question and a brief description of the specific issue. We aim to acknowledge accuracy reports quickly and to correct a confirmed significant error as soon as we can. We do not publish a fixed turnaround-time promise for this, for the same reason explained on our Editorial Policy page: a promise nobody measures is worth less than the checked date already shown on every guide.

We do not accept paid content, sponsored articles, or external contributions. All content on this site is written and reviewed independently.

If the site has helped you, you can add Know Your Rights UK as a preferred source on Google so that our guides show up more often when you search. You can also follow new and updated guides through our RSS feed.