Those are ceilings. They are not what cases are worth, they are not what commissioners hand out, and they are not a starting point for a negotiation.
This guide explains what the CCMA can order, what the caps mean, and what the numbers do not include. It explains the law generally. It cannot tell you what your case is worth, and neither can anyone else who has not seen your facts.
Reinstatement comes first, not money
People are usually surprised by this. Where a dismissal is found to be unfair, the primary remedy is to put you back in the job. A commissioner is required to order reinstatement or re-employment unless one of a limited set of circumstances applies, such as where you do not want to go back, where the relationship has become intolerable, where it is not reasonably practicable, or where the dismissal was unfair only because a fair procedure was not followed.
That last exception does a lot of work in practice, and it is why a purely procedural defect and a dismissal with no fair reason behind it are very different cases. Substantive and procedural fairness: the two tests explained is the guide to that difference.
Reinstatement can also be ordered with retrospective effect, meaning back pay from a date the commissioner sets.
What compensation actually is
Compensation under the LRA is an amount the commissioner considers just and equitable in the circumstances.
It is worth being clear about what that is not.
It is not damages for how the dismissal made you feel. Hurt, humiliation and the effect on your family are real and they are not what this calculation measures.
It is not everything you would have earned. Compensation is not designed to replace your salary until retirement, or until you find work.
It is not a fine on the employer. The question is what is fair in the circumstances, not what the employer deserves.
It is not your notice pay, your leave pay or your severance. Those are separate entitlements with their own basis, and they are not part of an unfair dismissal compensation award. If your employer has not paid what you are owed on termination, that is a different claim on a different route.
The caps, and what they really mean
The cap for an ordinary unfair dismissal is 12 months' remuneration. For an automatically unfair dismissal, which is a separate and more serious category, the cap is 24 months.
Three things follow from that, and all three matter more than the number.
A cap is a maximum, not a tariff. An award at the cap is not the normal outcome of a successful case.
The cap only applies if you get that far. It is the ceiling on what a commissioner may order after arbitration, in a case where the dismissal has been found unfair. It says nothing about the odds of getting there.
"Remuneration" has a meaning. It is not necessarily the same as your basic salary or your take-home pay.
Why most people receive less than the cap, and usually much less
Most dismissal disputes do not reach an arbitration award at all. They end at conciliation, in a settlement, for a figure both sides can live with.
A settlement is not a discount on what you would have been awarded. It is priced on risk: how likely each side thinks the other is to succeed, how long the process will take, and what it costs both of them to keep going. An employer who is confident is not offering much. An employer who is exposed offers more, sooner.
That is the mechanism behind the whole process, and understanding it is worth more than memorising a cap.
What about a CCMA compensation calculator?
People search for one. There is a reason you will not find a reliable one.
A commissioner deciding what is just and equitable is weighing the facts of a specific case: what the employer did, what you did, how long you worked there, what the procedural failures were and how serious, and what has happened to you since. Those are not inputs you can put in a box and multiply.
Anyone showing you a number before they have heard your facts is showing you an average of other people's cases, and nobody has an average case.
What you can do is understand the range your case plausibly sits in, and what moves it up or down. That is a different and more honest thing than a calculator.
Tax and what actually lands in your account
An award or a settlement is not always paid to you in full. There can be tax consequences, and the treatment is not the same for every component of a settlement.
If a settlement is being discussed, ask what the figure is before or after deductions. It is a short question and people routinely forget to ask it.
The order this actually happens in
- You refer within the deadline. See How long do you have to refer a case to the CCMA?.
- You go to conciliation, where most disputes end, in a settlement.
- If it does not settle, you go to arbitration, where the dismissal has to be proved unfair before any of this applies.
- Only then does a commissioner decide between reinstatement, re-employment and compensation.
The decision that determines what you actually receive is almost always the one at step two: the offer you accept or turn down at conciliation. That decision is made in a room, in a few minutes, usually with no idea of what the case is really worth.
The honest position
We cannot tell you what your case is worth, and we do not pretend to. Nobody can from the outside, and a page that hands you a figure is either guessing or selling.
What FairCase gives you is a written assessment of your own unfair dismissal case for R249, once off: a probability score out of 100 with the calculation shown, a settlement range, the procedural and substantive fairness analysis, the legal principles matched to your facts, the honest risks, and the referral details.
If your case is weak, the report says so. That is the one thing every other party in this process has no reason to tell you, and it is the answer that saves you the most time and money. The deadline check is free either way.