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 West
Manchester sees around 1,047mm of rain a year - one of the wetter major cities in England, with December its wettest month and April its driest.
It's also, in Adfin's book, the strongest region in the country: the late rate dropped from 10% to 6.3% between October and July, well below the Adfin average, with small and large businesses landing close together at 7.5% and 6% - no single segment dragging it down.
Call it Manchesterism if you like: Andy Burnham's pitch for the region has always been that growth only counts if it's shared, not concentrated at the top, and that's roughly the shape of what's happening in Adfin's book too.
That tracks with the outside data: the North West carried the highest raw volume of overdue invoices of any UK region as recently as a year earlier, but R3's latest figures show both insolvency activity and late-payment volume flattening out and improving.
It's also the most "on autopilot" region in the UK - direct debit accounts for 87.2% of all payments, the highest share anywhere in Adfin's book, echoing the same automated, reliable collection pattern that shows up in London's numbers too.
This is not a moment for the region to rest on its laurels though. As a spokesperson from the Greater Manchester Chamber underlined: "Through our economic research, Greater Manchester Chamber members consistently tell us that cashflow is a priority concern. Not only do late payments cause cashflow concerns, they can also contribute to productivity issues such as chasing payments, and re-forecasting when expected monies do not land. We're encouraged to see businesses like Adfin, offering pro-active support to businesses who are facing such issues."
