Full Arbitration Cost Calculators

Our arbitration cost calculators estimate the overall cost of resolving a dispute via international arbitration, which can be costly. Cases can require thousands of hours of legal work, and since international arbitrations are private, the fees of the arbitrators and arbitral institutions administrating a dispute must also be paid, rather than being supported by taxes. Since costs typically follow the event in international arbitration, however, the majority of these costs can potentially be recouped by the winning party.

While many arbitral institutions, such as the ICC, have created online cost calculators of their own, such online cost calculators only estimate the ICC’s own administrative expenses and the fees to be paid to ICC arbitrators, which are based on the sliding scale contained in Article 4 of Appendix III to the ICC Rules. While this is useful information, and the ICC cost calculator can determine the approximate amount of the advance on costs that a party will be required to pay the ICC, the figures it provides do not attempt to encompass the overall costs of a given arbitration.

This is because only 2% of the average cost of an ICC international arbitration is caused by administrative fees to paid to the ICC, and only 16% of arbitration costs are attributable to fees paid to arbitrators (see ICC Publication No. 843, Introduction).

The remaining 82% of the cost of international arbitration, which concerns a party’s costs to present its case, are not accounted for in the ICC cost calculator.

Legal fees are by far the largest single expense in any international arbitration, accounting for approximately 2/3 of the costs of resolving a dispute via international arbitration, although the cost of legal experts can also be significant. The ratio between administrative and arbitrator costs versus party costs is similar at other international arbitration institutions, and a good rule-of-thumb is that administrative expenses and arbitral fees will constitute 20% of the costs of an international arbitration that does not settle, and an international arbitration will take 18 months from start to finish.

To fill the need for estimates of the total likely cost of resolving a dispute via international arbitration, we have taken the official cost calculators and gone one step further, adding automatic estimates of the remaining costs of an average arbitration. We have used models based on the best data available with respect to the time and cost of international arbitrations to do so, and the results tend to be rather accurate. These calculators estimate the total cost of resolving a dispute via international arbitration automatically, including administrative costs, arbitrator fees, legal fees, expert costs and witness costs. They also estimate the expected duration of a given arbitration.