an adviser guide to work capability assessment regulations & case law
To get started, choose an option…
Limited Capability for Work
Physical disabilities
- Activity 1: Mobilising
- Activity 2: Standing and sitting
- Activity 3: Reaching
- Activity 4: Picking up and moving or transferring
- Activity 5: Manual dexterity
- Activity 6: Making self understood
- Activity 7: Understanding communication
- Activity 8: Navigation and maintaining safety
- Activity 9: Evacuation of the bowel and/or bladder
- Activity 10: Consciousness during waking moments
Mental, cognitive & intellectual function
- Activity 11: Learning tasks
- Activity 12: Awareness of everyday hazards
- Activity 13: Initiating and completing personal action
- Activity 14: Coping with change
- Activity 15: Getting about
- Activity 16: Coping with social engagement
- Activity 17: Appropriateness of behaviour
Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity
- Activity 1: Mobilising
- Activity 2: Transferring from one seated position to another
- Activity 3: Reaching
- Activity 4: Picking up and moving or transferring
- Activity 5: Manual dexterity
- Activity 6: Making self understood
- Activity 7: Understanding communication
- Activity 8: Evacuation of the bowel and/or bladder
- Activity 9: Learning tasks
- Activity 10: Awareness of hazard
- Activity 11: Initiating and completing personal action
- Activity 12: Coping with change
- Activity 13: Coping with social engagement
- Activity 14: Appropriateness of behaviour
- Activity 15: Conveying food or drink to the mouth
- Activity 16: Chewing or swallowing food or drink
Issues
Conditions
- Agoraphobia
- Anger management
- Anxiety and depression
- Back and neck pain
- Epilepsy
- Fatigue
- Foot and leg problems
- Hearing loss
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Learning disability
- Migraine
- Obsessive compulsive disorder
- Parkinson’s disease
- Post traumatic stress disorder
- Psychosis
- Renal issues
- Skin disorder
- Sleep apnoea
- Substance misuse
- Vision loss
Choose from the options above for details of regulations and case law relating to the work capability assessment. You can search by activity, issue or health condition to find out more about the legal framework and how the Upper Tribunal has interpreted the law.
Wcainfo helps advisers assisting people to make a new claim for benefit on the basis of their incapacity for work, and challenging decisions to refuse, or award a lower rate of, the benefit.
Note: In March 2025, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall announced the publication of the Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper that includes proposals to abolish the work capability assessment with effect from 2028, instead linking the universal credit health element to eligibility for the daily living component of PIP, and replacing contributory employment and support allowance with a new non-means-tested benefit that is time-limited for everyone.
Like wcainfo? See also our personal independence payment tool pipinfo.net, part of our family of web tools.