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: West Midlands
The West Midlands sits close to the England average on rainfall (the combined Midlands figure is around 798mm a year) - unremarkable weather for a region with anything but an unremarkable payments story.
Adfin's own book has been fairly steady here - flat around 8% year-over-year, peaking at 10% in February before easing back to 7.4% - with larger businesses running noticeably hotter than small ones (11% vs 6.6%).
Locally, the pressure is well documented: the West Midlands recorded 3.05 million overdue invoices in Q1 2026, the highest of any UK region, up 17% year-on-year. Regional reporting has put real numbers on what that means day to day - small firms spending an average of 86 hours a year chasing payment, 37% hit by cash flow problems as a result, and 30% forced onto overdrafts just to stay operational.
That's exactly the strain Nic Lonsdale, founder of Ginger Bucks accounting, sees from his clients: "For a smaller business, a late invoice isn't an admin annoyance - it's the difference between paying yourself this month or not... paying on time stopped being a basic professional standard and became a negotiable one, and that shift costs the smallest businesses the most."
Against that backdrop, Adfin's clients in the West Midlands look like they're weathering a real storm - a steady, even improving, late rate in a region where the wider numbers are moving sharply the other way.
