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: Wales
By the numbers, Wales is the wettest place in the UK. Snowdonia gets over 3,000mm of rain a year, Cardiff averages 1,203mm, and the country as a whole sees roughly 1,050mm annually (about 280mm more than England gets on average).
Wales also comes out as the stormiest region in Adfin's regional payment barometer.
Among Adfin's Welsh clients, 18.4% of invoices are paid late on average over the last three quarters - the highest rate of any region in Adfin's book. But the skies have cleared considerably since last year, when the rate sat closer to 25%, and it's held fairly steady around 18% through July.
Externally, the picture lines up: Wales247 recorded 475,000 late payments across the region in Q1 2026, up 3% year-on-year, with around 57,000 Welsh companies currently carrying overdue invoices.
Look closer, though, and the story isn't really about Wales as a whole. Payment promptness (or lack thereof) comes down to who's receiving the cheques. Small businesses in Wales are paid late just 12% of the time, close to the picture elsewhere in the UK. It's larger businesses dragging the average down, with 45% of their invoices paid late - the widest gap between business sizes of any region in Adfin's data.
There's a regional quirk in how Welsh businesses actually get paid, too. Wales leans much harder on card payments than anywhere else in Adfin's book, making up 38% of transactions, more than double most other regions.
Learn about how Wales stacks up against the rest of the UK in our first Payment Barometer →
