The ICAC in Kyiv: Arbitration Fees, Timelines and the Case for Choosing It

Dispute Resolution | JVS Law

Negotiations over an arbitration clause usually break on one point: your counterparty has never heard of the ICAC at the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and defaults to London, Stockholm or Vienna. “It is our national institution” is not an argument. Numbers are.

Below is what you can put on the table: what a case costs, who pays and when, what is refunded, and where the ICAC loses to foreign institutions. All figures come from the Rules on Arbitration Fees and Costs, an annex to the ICAC Rules as amended with effect from 18 February 2025.

Two payments, and the claimant makes both.

Registration fee — USD 600. Payable on filing; until it is paid the claim is not considered filed, and it is non-refundable. It is not lost, though: it is credited against the arbitration fee.

The arbitration fee follows a scale based on the amount in dispute. The minimum is USD 1,800 for claims up to 10,000; the scale is regressive and has a ceiling built into it:

• up to 10,000 — 1,800;
• 10,001–50,000 — 1,800 + 6% of the excess over 10,000;
• 50,001–100,000 — 4,200 + 4%;
• 100,001–200,000 — 6,200 + 3%;
• 200,001–500,000 — 9,200 + 2%;
• 500,001–1,000,000 — 15,200 + 1%;
• 1–2m — 20,200 + 0.5%;
• 2–5m — 25,200 + 0.45%;
• 5–10m — 38,700 + 0.3%;
• 10–20m — 53,700 + 0.2%;
• 20–50m — 73,700 + 0.15%;
• over 50m — 118,700 + 0.1%, capped at 350,000.

That USD 350,000 ceiling is what many institutions do not have, and on large claims it is where the difference stops being cosmetic.

Two multipliers worth knowing in advance: a claim combining demands under two or more contracts is charged as the sum of the fees for each contract, and if the proceedings are conducted in two or more languages, a further USD 400 is added.

“At the ICAC the claimant pays the whole fee, whereas elsewhere each side pays half” is a common line. It is right about cash flow and incomplete about final incidence.

Section VI of the fee rules: unless the parties agree otherwise, the arbitration fee is borne by the party against whom the award is made. Where the claim succeeds in part, it falls on the respondent in proportion to the part upheld and on the claimant in proportion to the part dismissed.

So the claimant funds the proceedings and the losing party ultimately pays. For an exporter chasing an unpaid delivery this is closer to an advantage: you control the pace instead of waiting for the respondent to advance its half — which, at institutions that split the advance, is a standard place to stall.

Timing: the arbitration fee, less the USD 600 already paid, is due within 30 days of the ICAC’s notice. A reasoned application for deferral is possible. Until it arrives, the case does not move.

Institutional comparisons usually skip this, although it directly prices the strategy of filing in order to get the other side to the table.

• proceedings terminated before the first hearing — 50% of the arbitration fee refunded (registration fee excluded);
• terminated during the first hearing without an award on the merits — 25%;
• terminated by order of the President of the ICAC — 75%;
• award on agreed terms at the first hearing — 25% refunded, and the remainder split equally between the parties unless the settlement provides otherwise.

Separately: if an ICAC award has been set aside by a court and the same claim is brought again, the fee on the second filing is 50% of the ordinary amount (but not less than the minimum).

And a detail with practical weight: where the dispute was settled through the “Mediation-Arbitration” procedure, no registration fee is payable on a subsequent application to the ICAC, and the arbitration fee is charged at 50%.

An application for security is decided by the President of the ICAC (before the tribunal is constituted) or by the tribunal itself, on the written request of either party, if it considers the request justified (Article 25 of the Rules). The order binds the parties, is enforceable immediately and stands until the final award unless varied earlier.

The fee rules contain no separate charge for deciding such an application: the list of additional costs — expert examinations, translations, arbitrators’ travel, multilingual proceedings, hearings away from the seat — does not include interim measures. That is a real advantage over institutions charging a separate, and often substantial, emergency-arbitrator fee.

What it does not change: a tribunal’s order is not a state court’s order, and enforcing it against assets still runs through a court. Applying to a state court for interim relief is not a waiver of arbitration — the mechanism is set out separately in our guide to challenging an arbitration agreement.

“Fast” is the least verifiable word in any institution’s pitch, so here is the ICAC’s own 2025 report.

304 cases accepted, 296 heard. 53.4% concluded within three months, 90.5% within six. The list of arbitrators runs to 114 people from 38 states, 61% of them foreign. Languages: Ukrainian in 214 cases, Russian in 56, English in 34, Polish in 2. Applicable law included that of Ukraine, England, Türkiye, China and Chile, as well as the Vienna Convention.

Three quarters of the 2025 caseload arose from contracts concluded during the war years, and 24% of cases had an amount in dispute between USD 1m and 50m. This is not a venue for small domestic claims.

A piece that lists only advantages does not persuade the lawyer on the other side of the table. So here is the honest list.

1. A foreign arbitrator costs extra — and not paying is not an option. If you appoint an arbitrator based away from the seat of the hearings, you advance the cost of their travel, accommodation, meals and visas. The sanction is hard: fail to advance it in time and fail to appoint someone else, and you are treated as having waived the right to appoint — the arbitrator is then appointed for you by the President of the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Where that person chairs the tribunal or sits as sole arbitrator, both parties advance in equal shares; if the respondent does not pay, the burden falls on the claimant.

2. Language and governing law drag the tribunal with them. Choose English and a foreign governing law, and you need arbitrators comfortable with both — in practice, foreign ones. That loops back into point 1 and into the USD 400 multilingual surcharge.

3. “Finality” is no longer absolute. In 2025 there were 39 applications to set ICAC awards aside (13.2%) and 11 awards were set aside (3.7%). For comparison, in 2024 there were 26 applications (5.9%) and one award set aside (0.2%). The jump is sharp, and an argument built on “the award cannot be challenged” no longer holds. What to do about it in practice: recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards in Ukraine.

4. The Presidium may increase the fee on the tribunal’s proposal, where the case is particularly complex, involves multiple claims or parties, or demands substantial time and cost. The scale is not an absolute ceiling for complex multi-party matters.

An argument that did not exist a year ago. Law No. 4856-IX of 28 April 2026, in force from 21 May 2026, expanded the competence of international arbitration and reached the ICAC directly.

• A new internationality test on the UNCITRAL formula: it is enough that the parties expressly agreed that the subject matter relates to more than one state, or that the place of arbitration, the place of performance of a substantial part of the obligations, or the place most closely connected lies abroad.
• Investor–state investment disputes are now expressly within its competence; the same was written into the Statute of the ICAC.
• Bond disputes — between the issue administrator and the issuer — where at least one party is an enterprise with foreign investment.

And the part that matters most for contracts already signed: clause 2 of the Final Provisions extends these changes also to arbitration agreements concluded before the Law entered into force. Clauses signed years earlier became broader on their own.

Separately, the Cabinet of Ministers was directed to provide for the ICAC as one option in new bilateral investment treaties and to recommend national arbitral institutions to state enterprises and in public-private partnership projects.

1. Compute the fee on your actual claim value from the scale above and put it next to the calculator of the institution your counterparty proposed. At mid-range values the difference is usually a multiple; at the top the 350,000 ceiling does the work.
2. Propose a sole arbitrator in the clause itself. That is 20% off the fee and a faster case — and it is what happens in most cases anyway.
3. Do not promise finality. Say plainly that an award can be challenged and that in 2025 the attempt succeeded in 3.7% of cases. The argument does not weaken; your credibility improves.
4. Agree language and governing law together with the tribunal. English plus foreign law means foreign arbitrators and extra cost — decide it, do not discover it.
5. If your counterparty insists on a neutral forum, compare not only the fees but the cost of enforcing the award where the assets actually are. A cheaper forum can become the expensive one at the enforcement stage.

Also settled at this stage: ICC Rules or ICAC Rules, arbitration or court at all, and what happens to the clause if the claim is assigned.

Sources

• Rules of the ICAC at the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry — as amended with effect from 18 February 2025, together with the Rules on Arbitration Fees and Costs annexed to them (in Ukrainian). Every figure in this article comes from there.
• ICAC report for 2025 — caseload, timelines, composition of the arbitrator list, languages, set-aside statistics.
• Law on International Commercial Arbitration — with the Statute of the ICAC in Annex 1; the current text reflects Law No. 4856-IX of 28 April 2026.

Updated in August 2026. Fees are stated per the Rules on Arbitration Fees and Costs annexed to the ICAC Rules as amended with effect from 18 February 2025; statistics are from the ICAC report for 2025. Tariffs are revised from time to time — check the current text on the ICAC site before relying on a figure.

The author has practised in international commercial arbitration since 1991, served as Ukraine’s national correspondent to UNCITRAL (CLOUT) from 2017 to 2022, and teaches arbitration at the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. His work is collected separately: books and papers on cross-border litigation and arbitration. A wider walk-through of the procedure: guide to international arbitration in Ukraine and the ICAC.