Late payments have become a fixture of doing business in the UK - they're the storm clouds that slow businesses' ability to grow and invest. Adfin was built to clear them: businesses that use Adfin see a late payment rate of just 8.7%, well below the wider UK picture. We looked at each region of the UK to understand the challenges in more detail, examining 289,000 invoices paid by 1,216 UK businesses on Adfin, from October 2025 - July 2026.
See how every region compares →
Region report: London
London is drier and sunnier than its reputation suggests - 615mm of rain a year and 1,675 hours of sunshine, more sunshine than most of England outside the South East and South West.
London's payments picture has cleared just as fast: the late rate dropped from 13.6% to 8.2% over nine months, comfortably below the Adfin average, and small and large businesses are close together, at 9.6% and 7.5% - a rare region where large businesses aren't the outlier. That tracks with outside data too: gov.uk's large-business payment practices data confirms London as the UK's fastest large-business payer, at 27 days on average, 11 days quicker than the slowest regions.
There's a real habit worth noting in how London actually pays, too: for the UK's fintech and payments capital, the vast majority of transactions still run on direct debit (80.2%) rather than card (13.3%) - businesses here have automated the collection rather than chasing it manually, which may be part of why the region pays as reliably as it does.
Learn about how London stacks up against the rest of the UK in our first Payment Barometer →
