Direct debit is cheaper at almost every invoice size, and the size of your invoices decides whether the difference is worth acting on. At 1% + 20p capped at £4, a direct debit fee stops growing once your invoice passes £380. A card at 1.5% + 20p carries on rising: £15.20 on a £1,000 invoice and £75.20 on £5,000.
The short version
- Bank debit is typically 1% + 20p with a cap of about £4. Card pricing is a percentage with no cap.
- The cap is reached at £380, so every invoice above that costs you the same £4 to collect.
- On a £1,000 invoice the card fee is nearly four times the direct debit fee. On £5,000 it's around eighteen times.
- Below about £250 the difference is small enough that your customer's convenience matters more.
- The "direct debit is cheaper on large invoices" argument is currently made by providers about their own product. No regulator has published a comparison, so the arithmetic below uses published prices and you can check it.
- Prices are as published on 16 August 2026 and need re-checking before you rely on them.
The prices the sum is built on
Two published rates set the whole comparison, and you can check both yourself. They were taken from the providers' own pricing pages as of August 2026, and neither page carries an effective date, so treat them as a snapshot.
For bank debit, GoCardless publishes Standard at 1% + 20p capped at £4, Advanced at 1.25% + 20p capped at £5 and Pro at 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60, with an extra 0.3% on transactions over £2,000. Stripe publishes Bacs direct debit at 1% with a 20p minimum, capped at £4. Adfin charges 1% + 20p capped at £4 for direct debit and bank payments, with 0.15% on the amount above £2,000.
For the cards your customers actually use, Stripe publishes 1.5% + 20p on standard UK cards and 2.8% + 20p on premium ones. Adfin charges 1% + 20p on cards, with 1% added for premium and EEA cards and 2% for non-EEA ones. GoCardless doesn't offer card acquiring at all.
The comparison below uses 1% + 20p capped at £4 for direct debit and 1.5% + 20p for a standard UK card, since those are the most widely published rates on each side. Swap in your own provider's numbers if they differ.
The numbers, invoice by invoice
| Invoice | Direct debit at 1% + 20p, capped £4 | Card at 1.5% + 20p | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| £50 | £0.70 | £0.95 | £0.25 |
| £100 | £1.20 | £1.70 | £0.50 |
| £250 | £2.70 | £3.95 | £1.25 |
| £380 | £4.00 | £5.90 | £1.90 |
| £1,000 | £4.00 | £15.20 | £11.20 |
| £2,000 | £4.00 | £30.20 | £26.20 |
| £5,000 | £4.00 | £75.20 | £71.20 |
Two things jump out of that table. On small invoices you're arguing about pennies, and no cost case is going to persuade a client to sign a mandate for 25p. Past £1,000 the gap becomes real money for you, and past £5,000 it's the sort of number that shows up in your annual accounts.
Multiply by your own volume before deciding it doesn't matter. If you bill 200 clients £1,200 a quarter, that's 800 collections a year. On a card at 1.5% + 20p you'd pay £18.20 each, or £14,560. On direct debit you'd pay the £4 cap each time, or £3,200.
Where the cap starts to bite
The crossover is easy to calculate for yourself. At 1% + 20p, the fee reaches the £4 cap at exactly £380, because 1% of £380 is £3.80 and the fixed 20p tops it up. Every invoice above £380 costs you £4 to collect, whether it's £400 or £40,000.
Your card fee has no such ceiling, since interchange, scheme fees and your acquirer's margin are all charged as percentages of the amount. That's the whole difference between the two methods in cost terms: one stops, the other doesn't.
Card type widens it further. If your client pays a £5,000 invoice on a premium company card at 2.8% + 20p, that's £140.20 against a capped £4. Commercial cards are outside the UK interchange caps, so they carry a higher cost to you and providers price them accordingly.
Small extras that change the outcome
Headline rates are only part of your bill, and a few add-ons can close the gap or widen it, depending on how you collect.
High value collections carry an uplift on the bank debit side. Adfin adds 0.15% on the amount above £2,000, and GoCardless charges 0.3% on the same basis. On a £5,000 invoice that's £4.50 on top of the £4 cap with Adfin and £9 with GoCardless. Either way, £13 against £75.20 on a card leaves the direct debit well ahead.
Failed collections are priced differently by different providers, and that's worth checking line by line before you switch. Adfin doesn't charge for a failed direct debit or a retry. Chargebacks apply on the card side only, at £15 with Adfin.
Then there are the fees that have nothing to do with the payment: GoCardless charges £50 a month for custom branding and £150 a month for a fully customised checkout, and Adfin charges £36 a month to put your own business name on the direct debit. If your book is small, those monthly charges can outweigh everything your per-transaction saving gives you.
Who says direct debit is cheaper
You'll almost always meet this claim in material published by companies that sell direct debit, and that's worth naming, but no UK regulator has published a comparison of direct debit against card costs for merchants.
What the regulator has published covers one side of your question. The Payment Systems Regulator's work on card acquiring sets out what merchants pay for cards and how the fee is composed, and our guide to what it costs to take payments works through those figures. There's no equivalent official dataset for bank debit pricing, so the comparison has to be built from published provider rates.
That's exactly why the sum above uses list prices and shows the working. You can open both pricing pages and check every line of it, which is more than you can do with a vendor claim.
When a card is worth paying for
Cost is one input and getting paid is the other, so the cheapest method isn't automatically your best option on a given invoice.
A card works when you have no relationship yet. Your mandate takes time to set up and the Bacs cycle takes three working days to clear, so for a first sale to a new customer, or a client who wants to settle today, a card link gets your money moving now. Direct debit is at its best on contracted, recurring revenue where the date matters more than the speed.
The mix most businesses land on is direct debit for anything predictable in your ledger and a card or open banking link for everything else. With Adfin you can run both from the same invoice, with a (free) fallback to card if a direct debit fails, so a failed collection doesn't turn into a chasing job.
Common questions
Is direct debit cheaper than card payments in the UK? Yes, at almost any invoice size. Bank debit is typically 1% + 20p capped at about £4, while card pricing is an uncapped percentage. On a £1,000 invoice that's roughly £4 against £15.20.
At what invoice size does the difference start to matter? Around £380, where a 1% + 20p fee hits the £4 cap. Below £250 the difference is a pound or less per invoice, so convenience usually matters more than cost.
How much does direct debit cost on a £5,000 invoice? £4 at the capped rate, plus any high value uplift. Adfin adds 0.15% on the amount above £2,000, so £4.50 on a £5,000 collection, and GoCardless adds 0.3% on the same basis, so £9. A standard card at 1.5% + 20p would cost £75.20.
Why do card fees keep rising with the invoice amount? Because interchange, scheme fees and your acquirer's margin are all charged as a percentage of the transaction. Nothing in card pricing caps the total, whereas providers cap bank debit fees.
Do business cards cost more than personal cards? Yes. Commercial cards are outside the UK interchange caps, so providers charge a higher rate for them, and premium card pricing of 2.8% + 20p is published by Stripe.
Is there an official comparison of direct debit and card costs? No. The Payment Systems Regulator has published card-acquiring costs, but no regulator has published a direct debit comparison, so any cost claim you read is built from providers' own published prices.
Reviewed by the Adfin team. This article compares published payment pricing and is not financial advice. Provider prices change without notice; check the current pricing pages before relying on any figure here. Last updated August 2026.
