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: North East
The North East is one of England's drier regions - around 779mm of rain a year - and one where the payment's weather has cleared faster than anywhere else in the UK.
The late rate dropped from 14% to 5.2% between October and July, the biggest swing of any region in Adfin's book, and now sits well below the Adfin average. Large businesses are almost entirely clear here, at just 3% paid late, while small businesses lag a bit behind at 10.4% - the one segment holding the region back from an even better spot.
That improvement checks out externally too: gov.uk's large-business data independently names the North East as the UK's best-performing region on late payment rate, at 12%, the lowest of any region.
It's also the region least likely to pay by card anywhere in the UK, at just 8.46% of transactions - direct debit does almost all the work here.
Learn about how the North East stacks up against the rest of the UK in our first Payment Barometer →
