How much does a medical chronology cost in the UK?

For fee-earners, costs lawyers and practice managers · ~6 min read · prices correct at July 2026

The traditional model: hourly rates

Most UK medical chronology and pagination providers price by the hour. Published rates at the time of writing include:

• £35 per hour + VAT — for chronology preparation, or combined sorting, pagination, indexing and chronology (HG Legal Services).
• £45 per hour fixed — across all areas of service, with no uplift for urgent work (Professional Paginating Services).
• £57.75 per hour + VAT — for a chronology, summary and missing-records review (Medical Collation and Chronology).

Hourly pricing is honest about one thing: the work scales with the records. Industry commentary puts a chronology built from raw records at 20+ hours for a substantial set — and clinical negligence files running to several thousand pages sit well beyond that. At £35–£58 an hour, three figures is the floor and four figures is common.

Why the hours add up

The bill is driven by page count, not case value. A modest fast-track claim can arrive with the same 2,000-page GP and hospital history as a catastrophic injury claim — the reading is identical, but the recoverable costs are not. The hours go on:

• Opening, de-duplicating and sorting records from multiple providers;
• Ordering and paginating hundreds or thousands of pages;
• Reading every page to extract each dated clinical event;
• Formatting the chronology and index so others can navigate them.

None of that is legal judgement — it is essential-but-mechanical preparation, done at professional hourly rates.

Fixed and capped fees

With fixed recoverable costs extending across lower-value claims, some providers now offer capped or fixed-fee schemes so preparation costs stay inside the recoverable envelope. That caps the downside, but the underlying economics are unchanged — a human still reads every page, so the fee still has to fund the hours, and the turnaround is still days to weeks.

The per-document model

AI-assisted preparation changes the unit of pricing. Because the reading and assembly are automated, the cost no longer scales with hours — so it can be priced per document produced rather than per hour worked. At Med-Legal, a cited Chronology & Medical Summary is from £8, and a fully indexed, paginated, hyperlinked bundle from £32 — delivered in minutes, with every entry cited to its source page and reviewed by your own fee-earner before use. No subscription; you pay only when you produce a document.

Side by side

What to check when comparing quotes

• Is every entry cited? A chronology you cannot trace back to the page is a chronology you must re-check line by line.
• Who reviews it? However it is produced, a qualified fee-earner should approve it before it is relied on — automated or human.
• Data protection. Medical records are special-category data; ask where they are processed and under what agreement (see our UK GDPR checklist).
• What happens on the next records drop? Cases accrete records. A per-document price makes updating cheap; an hourly model bills the re-read.

Rates quoted are the named providers' published prices at July 2026 and may change; always confirm current pricing directly. General information for legal professionals, not legal or costs advice.