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: Yorkshire and the Humber
Ask anyone in the Yorkshire Dales about the weather and you'll hear the same line: you can get all four seasons in one day. Sunshine and mild air in the valleys, sleet and poor visibility twenty minutes later at the top of the Three Peaks - Yorkshire's climate rewards flexibility more than any single number can capture.
Adfin's numbers for the region tell a steadier story than the weather does. Among Adfin's Yorkshire and Humber clients, the late rate has dropped from 13.5% to 8.2% over nine months, one of the sharpest improvements anywhere in Adfin's book, and now sits below the Adfin average of 8.7%. Small and large businesses are close together too, at 10.3% and 11.1% paid late - no single segment carrying the blame.
That improvement is worth noting against the backdrop locally: research reported in the Yorkshire Post found 45% of small businesses across the region saw more late payments than the year before, with half expecting the problem to worsen over the next 12 months. As Andrew Langton, head of debt recovery at Leeds-based LCF Law, put it: "Late payments significantly impact cash flow and hinder growth. In extreme cases, they can even cause otherwise successful businesses to cease trading."
Against that wider pressure, Adfin's Yorkshire clients are moving the opposite way - a sign that the tools businesses use to get paid make a real difference to which direction these numbers move.
