In Adfin's payment data, 65.7% of invoices that customers pay themselves arrive on or before the due date, and the typical late one arrives 8 days late. Direct debit collections succeed first time 97% of the time. The figures come from small UK businesses, many of them accountancy practices billing small recurring fees, so use them as a comparison for your own ledger rather than a national statistic.
In this article
The short version
- 65.7% of customer-paid invoices in Adfin's data arrived on or before the due date.
- The typical late payment was 8 days late, but 7.1% took more than 90 days.
- A quarter of repeat payers produced about half of all late payments.
- Direct debits succeeded first time 97% of the time and 98.7% were collected in the end.
- Weekend due dates and invoices issued already overdue were paid on time less often.
What the figures cover
The report covers paid invoices raised through Adfin by UK businesses between June 2024 and August 2026. Many are small accountancy practices, and the typical invoice a customer paid themselves was £180. If you send £40,000 invoices on 60-day terms, the pattern may hold for you but the levels probably won't.
Paid invoices fall into three groups that shouldn't be added together:
- Direct debit, about six in ten paid invoices.
- Invoices paid by other routes and recorded against the invoice, about a quarter.
- Invoices the customer chose to pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, pay by bank or bank transfer, about one in eight.
Every on-time and days-late figure below is for that last group, where your customer decides when to pay. A direct debit normally lands a few days after the due date because of the Bacs cycle, so blending it in would make the settlement calendar look like lateness.
Keep three limits in mind. Lateness is only measured on invoices that were eventually paid, so every late rate here is on the low side. There's no record of chasing, so nothing here tells you what a reminder did. And most gaps between groups reflect who uses what.
How on time customers pay, and how late the late ones are
Most customers aim at the date they're given: 65.7% paid on or before the due date, and 22% paid on the due date itself. Others pay as soon as your request arrives: almost a quarter paid within an hour.
The other 34.3% paid late, and how late they were varies a lot. The median delay was 8 days, but the average was 28.4, because a small group runs on for months. Close to half of late payments (48.3%) arrived within a week of the due date, while 7.1% took more than 90 days. Xero's UK small business data, measured differently, puts the average at 8.3 days late in the June 2026 quarter.
Lateness is also concentrated in a minority of customers. Among customers who paid the same business five or more times, 27.4% were never late, and the quarter who were late at least 80% of the time produced 51.9% of all the late payments in that group. That group leans towards customers who never moved onto a mandate, so the shape is more reliable than the exact shares.
Practices were later than other businesses: small accountancy practices were paid on time 59.9% of the time, with a median of 10 days when late, against 72.3% and 5 days for other small businesses.
Direct debit and mandates
Direct debit is measured against the Bacs cycle, not your due date. Of collections at least four weeks old, 97% succeeded first time and 98.7% were collected in the end. A second attempt after a failure succeeded 47% of the time and a third about a quarter of the time, so after two or three failed attempts it's usually worth asking the customer to pay another way.
Whether your customer already had a mandate when you raised the invoice made the biggest difference to whether it got paid at all:
- With a mandate in place, 97% of invoices were paid and 1.3% were still open six months later.
- Without one, 90.3% were paid and 5.4% were still open, about four times as many.
That isn't a controlled comparison: mandated invoices were smaller (a typical £126 against £180) and went to customers who'd already agreed to pay that way. Mandate cover falls as invoices grow, from 74.1% under £100 to 37.4% at £2,500 and over, so your largest invoices are often the ones still paid by hand.
The due dates and terms you set
Invoices due on a Saturday or Sunday were paid on time about 60% of the time, against 66% to 67% for weekday due dates. A Saturday deadline leaves Friday as the last working day to act. And 5.5% of customer-paid invoices went out with a due date that had already passed, so they were late before your customer even saw them.
Giving customers longer didn't make them less punctual. On-time payment rose with terms up to two weeks, then levelled off:
| Terms set | Paid on time | Median days late, when late |
|---|---|---|
| Due the same day | 59.5% | 5 |
| 1 to 7 days | 70.9% | 7 |
| 8 to 14 days | 76.4% | 9 |
| 15 to 21 days | 73.5% | 10 |
| 22 to 30 days | 75.8% | 9 |
| 31 to 60 days | 76.3% | 11 |
Read that as an association, not advice to extend your terms. Businesses that set proper terms may run a tighter ledger anyway, and late payers on longer terms ran a little later.
So check where your due dates land, put recurring customers on a mandate, and make paying by link easy for everyone else. Adfin collects by direct debit, card, wallet and pay by bank in one place, and its Customer Agents chase the invoices that do slip over email, SMS or WhatsApp, on rules you set and approve.
Common questions
How quickly do UK businesses get paid? In Adfin's data, 65.7% of invoices customers paid themselves arrived on or before the due date, and the late ones arrived a median of 8 days late. The figures describe small UK businesses, not the whole economy.
What percentage of invoices are paid late? 34.3% of customer-paid invoices arrived after the due date. Direct debit is measured separately, because Bacs settles a few days after the due date by design.
How many days late is a typical late invoice? The median is 8 days and the average 28.4, because 7.1% of late payments take more than 90 days. The median is the fairer single figure.
Which payment method gets paid on time most often? Apple Pay (72.9%), then Google Pay (70.0%), card (65.1%), pay by bank (62.0%) and bank transfer (57.9%). Compared inside one business's own ledger, the gaps fall below 1.5%, so the ranking mostly reflects who uses each method.
Does a weekend due date get paid later? In this data, yes. Weekend due dates were paid on time about 60% of the time against 66% to 67% on weekdays, though moving a due date hasn't been tested as a cause.
Is late payment worse in December? It was in December 2025, though that's one December. For the same set of businesses, on-time payment fell from 66.1% in November to 61.9% in December and recovered to 66.0% in January, and the same test found no clear August dip.
Sources
- Xero - United Kingdom Small Business Insights (accurate as of October 2026) https://www.xero.com/uk/resources/small-business-insights/latest-united-kingdom/
- Bacs - The little Bacs guide to Direct Debit (accurate as of October 2026) https://www.bacs.co.uk/media/ezwlg0dn/little_bacs_guide_to_direct_debit-v2.pdf
- Adfin - Next-generation direct debit (accurate as of October 2026) https://www.adfin.com/direct-debit-payments
- Adfin - Credit control (accurate as of October 2026) https://www.adfin.com/credit-control
