Finepost · Tools · Redundancy & severance
One dismissal. Two severance regimes.
England has a statutory entitlement and caps it hard. Germany has none at all, and the offer formula it does have usually pays more. Drag the years of service: what is owed and what would be offered appear side by side.
Week’s pay capped at £751 since 6 April 2026. Reviewed each April.
These are the statutory formulae, not an assessment of any dismissal. The English figure presupposes a genuine redundancy and two years’ continuous service, s. 155 ERA 1996; a week’s pay is itself a defined term, ss. 221–229, and birthdays inside a service year can shift the banded count by half a week against the official table. The German formula is an offer the employer can attach to an operational dismissal, § 1a KSchG; it presupposes the KSchG applies at all, six months’ service and more than ten employees, and a period of more than six months rounds up to a full year.
Neither figure is the ceiling of what is actually paid. English contracts and policies top the statutory sum up; German severance is mostly negotiated, in a Sozialplan or against the litigation risk, and a court-ordered Abfindung runs on its own caps, § 10 KSchG.