PayPal will send your invoice and take a card or a wallet payment, and few providers do that better. What it won't do is pull your fee note from a UK client's bank account on the due date, because a UK business can't collect by Bacs Direct Debit through PayPal. If that's what you need, six UK providers are worth pricing.
In this article
The short version
- PayPal publishes no UK Bacs Direct Debit product and no UK direct debit rate. Braintree, its enterprise gateway, supports SEPA Direct Debit in 16 eurozone countries in euro only, and the UK isn't listed.
- PayPal does use the phrase "direct debit" in its consumer help centre, for a shopper funding a PayPal balance. That's money going into PayPal, and a different mechanism from you collecting a fee from a client on a date you set.
- PayPal Invoicing carries no separate rate, no monthly fee and no setup fee. Your invoice is charged at the ordinary commercial transaction rate, published as 2.9% + 30p under "All Other Commercial Transactions".
- PayPal's fee page carries "Last Updated: 15 July 2026", the only pricing page here telling you how old its numbers are.
- The six are alphabetical, because no independent UK ranking exists. Two publish a full rate card. The rest publish a floor, an indicative tier, or nothing.
Why UK businesses look past PayPal for invoicing
Your headline rate is 2.9% + 30p, under the row label "All Other Commercial Transactions" on PayPal's UK merchant fee page. On a £2,000 fee note that's £58.30, where a capped bank-debit provider would charge you £4.
Disputes carry their own tariff on the same page: £14.00 per chargeback, £12.00 per dispute claim, £24.00 on the high-volume tariff. None of the six you'll read about below publishes anything equivalent. And your recurring UK billing runs on a card or a billing agreement, so if clients expect their monthly fee to leave their bank by direct debit, you can't offer it.
At a glance: the six compared
| Provider | Direct debit rate as published | Cap published | Cards | Chasing included | Rate card published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access PaySuite | "From 8p per transaction" | None | Yes | No | Floor rate and one worked example |
| Adfin | 1.0% + 20p | £4 | Yes, plus card uplifts | Yes | Yes |
| GoCardless | 1% + 20p (Standard) | £4 | Not published on pages read | No | Yes |
| London & Zurich | "Pricing around 1%" (Foundation) | None | Yes | No | Indicative tiers only |
| Modulr | Not published | Not published | Not published for collections | Retry logic only | For outbound payments only |
| Stripe | 1%, minimum fee 20p | £4 | Yes, 1.5% + 20p domestic | Basic reminders | Yes |
Each figure is the provider's own published pricing.
1. Access PaySuite
The payments arm of The Access Group, and the home of SmartDebit and EaziPay. Its accreditations page states it is "authorised and regulated as a Payment Institution by the FCA, Firm Reference Number: 730815". You can collect on your own Service User Number, on the bureau's SUN, or by direct file submission, with cards alongside and Xero named through Zapier.
Pricing: "From 8p per transaction" for smaller businesses, "No setup fees", "No commitment", and a worked example where "a business processing 500 payments/month at £30 average transaction value would pay around £215/month". Their SmartDebit page said "transaction fees from just 4p" at the same time, so get your rate in writing.
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 346 reviews, user-reported. Their own site displayed 4.7 from 369.
Limitation: the Access PaySuite pricing page says "No commitment", and the Terms and Conditions V5 of April 2026 published on the same site set a 12-month initial term, 90 days' notice and an early termination fee equal to the previous three months invoiced.
2. Adfin
A UK platform that invoices, collects by direct debit, card, wallet, open banking or bank transfer, then chases what goes unpaid from your own email domain.
Pricing: 1.0% + 20p per successful transaction with bank payments and direct debit capped at £4, a second published tier at 1.5% + 20p, an extra 1% for premium and/or EEA cards and 2% for non-EEA cards, an extra 0.15% on the amount above £2,000 on larger direct debits, 0% + 20p for the Accountants and Bookkeepers Club, enterprise by agreement. No monthly fees, no minimums, no minimum contract length, on our own pricing page.
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 12 reviews, user-reported. A far thinner base than GoCardless's 2,369.
Limitation: no euro or dollar collection. Our pricing page states no VAT position where GoCardless states one, and the 1.5% tier carries no qualifying condition.
3. GoCardless
The largest dedicated bank-debit brand in the UK, and the only provider here whose rate card you can read end to end without talking to anyone. Standard merchants collect on "a single Service User Number", so you need no bank sponsorship. Contracts are monthly rolling, you close the account from the dashboard, and their terms give you an express exit right to a bulk change deed and a "machine-readable list" of your customers and their mandate details.
Pricing: Standard 1% + 20p capped at £4, Advanced 1.25% + 20p capped at £5, Pro 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60, plus 0.3% on amounts over £2,000 outside the cap, £50 a month for your name on the payer's statement and £150 a month for a custom checkout. Prices exclude VAT, and the page says "we need to charge VAT on all transaction fees invoiced to UK merchants". Their support page says "Failure fees only apply in the US, Germany and Austria".
Reviews: Trustpilot 2.5 out of 5 from 2,369 reviews against G2 4.6 out of 5 from 321 reviews, both user-reported. Either score on its own would leave you with a very different picture of this provider, so both are here.
Limitation: cards aren't published on the pages we read, and nothing chases an unpaid invoice, so most users buy a chasing subscription costing more than the rate difference.
4. London & Zurich
An independent Northampton provider with "over 30 years' experience", "authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, authorisation number 712747 for the provision of payment services". Either "we will obtain an SUN on your behalf through our sponsor bank" or they act as bureau on yours. You get "direct access to our friendly UK based support team", a named account manager, and on a migration they send the Bacs Notification of Change to your payers themselves.
Pricing: indicative tiers only, quoted after a conversation. Foundation on a shared SUN at "Pricing around 1%", Business with a branded SUN "from 0.5% or 20p", banded Enterprise pricing. No cap on any tier.
Reviews: none we can cite. Trustpilot returned 403 from every mirror we tried and no G2 or Capterra listing exists.
Limitation: no customer terms are published at all and /terms-and-conditions/ returns a 404, so you can't read the minimum term, the notice period or the exit fee before you sign.
5. Modulr
An FCA-authorised electronic money institution selling accounts, outbound payments and collections. Its collections page sells a "Flat per-collection rate" against "Costs that scale with transaction value", built around your own SUN so "Your company name appears on your customer's bank statement". Collections settle by Faster Payments with "immediate failure notifications".
Pricing: the published plans price outbound payments, from Bronze at "£30.00 per month" for "80 Payments included" up to Platinum at "£500.00 per month" for 3,000. Direct debit collection appears in no published plan, and no figure is attached to the flat-rate claim anywhere on the site.
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 130 reviews, user-reported.
Limitation: you can't price the collections product from the website, and no shared or facilities-managed SUN appears on any page we read, so budget for your own SUN and the bank sponsorship behind it.
6. Stripe
The broadest platform in this set, and the one PayPal gets compared with most often on cards. Its payment methods page publishes "125+ payment methods" including Bacs Direct Debit, and methods are "dynamically selected using AI that incorporates signals like your customer's device, location, and local currency", with A/B tests you run from the dashboard. Stripe publishes "99.999% historical uptime", and it documents a mandate-import review where it checks your imported mandates and shares a summary for your approval. Most providers publish nothing on that, us included: our own guidance asks you to compare the arrival list yourself.
Pricing: UK domestic cards 1.5% + 20p, premium cards 2.8% + 20p, EEA cards 2.5% + 20p, "International cards" 3.15% + 20p, "+ 2% if currency conversion is required". Bacs Direct Debit 1% with a 20p minimum fee capped at £4, plus £4.00 per failed payment and £5.00 per disputed payment. Invoicing runs 0.4% per paid invoice on Starter and 0.5% on Plus, and "Stripe Invoicing has no fixed fees or setup costs, but Stripe Payments pricing will apply".
Reviews: no score is quoted, because none was retrievable with a review count from a platform we could reach.
Limitation: premium means "Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard", so a B2B book lands on 2.8% more often than a consumer one. Invoicing stacks on processing, and £4.00 for one failed Bacs collection equals the whole capped fee on a £400 invoice, on our arithmetic from their figures.
What PayPal can and can't collect in the UK
The loose version of this gets it wrong in both directions, so here's what you can rely on.
PayPal's UK merchant fee page has no Direct Debit or Bacs row anywhere in its fee tables, and its only bank-adjacent category is "Alternative Payment Method (APM)". Braintree, PayPal's enterprise gateway, does support direct debit, but only SEPA Direct Debit across 16 eurozone states in euro, and the United Kingdom isn't among them, on PayPal's own Braintree documentation. The Braintree UK fee page publishes no direct debit rate.
PayPal does use the words "direct debit" in its consumer help centre, where a shopper links a bank account to fund a PayPal balance. Two mechanisms wear one name. One has a consumer pushing money into PayPal; the other has you pulling an agreed amount from your client's account on a date you set, under a Bacs mandate you hold. So the accurate claim stays narrow: a UK business can't collect by Bacs Direct Debit through PayPal.
Where PayPal is still the better tool
PayPal is better than any UK collections platform at getting a stranger to pay you today. Its own page offers "400M+ active accounts the choice to pay with PayPal", says it is "available in more than 200 markets and support 140 currencies", and gives you Fastlane by PayPal for guest checkout with autofill. No UK collections product brings your payer a stored credential. PayPal publishes no claim about what that does to conversion, so we won't invent one on their behalf.
Their invoicing terms are good too. "PayPal Invoicing has no setup or monthly fees", and the invoicing page says "No monthly or setup fees. Only pay when you get paid." There's no invoicing row on the fee page because there's no invoicing rate: your invoice is charged at the commercial transaction rate of 2.9% + 30p, or 1.2% + 30p where a card-funded non-account-holder pays under PayPal's Terms for Payments. Stripe charges 0.4% or 0.5% per paid invoice on top of processing.
And one thing PayPal alone does: its fee page carries "Last Updated: 15 July 2026" and its Braintree fee page "Last Updated: 29, June 2026". No other pricing page here carries an effective date, so of six websites, only PayPal tells you how old its numbers are.
What the six do not publish
The gaps matter as much as the prices when you're budgeting.
- No effective date, anywhere but PayPal. Stripe's three pricing pages carry none and neither do the other four, so every figure above is a dated snapshot.
- No VAT position, except GoCardless. Stripe's UK page states none, its global tax page doesn't list the UK among the jurisdictions where it charges VAT on fees, PayPal's page never mentions VAT, and Adfin's doesn't either. Two providers on the same headline rate can differ by 20% on what you pay.
- No accountant price from any vendor here, and no failure or indemnity fee from four of the six: London & Zurich, Access PaySuite, Modulr, Adfin. Stripe publishes £4.00 and GoCardless publishes that UK failure fees don't apply, so ask for yours in writing.
- No cap from London & Zurich on any tier. On their published wording, "around 1%" uncapped is about £30 on a £3,000 fee note where a £4 cap charges £4. That's our arithmetic on their words.
- No collection price from Modulr, and no reconciliation between Access PaySuite's 8p and its £215 example.
How to choose
| Your situation | Start here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One-off sales to people who've never heard of you | Stay with PayPal | 400M+ accounts, 200+ markets, a button your buyers recognise |
| You invoice in euros or dollars | PayPal or Stripe | 140 currencies at PayPal. Adfin collects no foreign currency |
| Recurring sterling fees, collected and chased together | Adfin | Direct debit and cards on one published rate, chasing included |
| Bank debit only, and you want the contract first | GoCardless | Full rate card, monthly rolling, an express data-export clause |
| No SUN, and you want a person on the phone | London & Zurich | Managed SUN through their sponsor bank, plus a named account manager |
| Large collections where a flat fee beats a percentage | Modulr or Access PaySuite | Per-collection and per-transaction pricing, both quote-based |
| Developers, many methods, many currencies | Stripe | 125+ methods and the deepest documentation here |
How we chose these providers
You'll find the six in alphabetical order, because no independent UK ranking of them exists and every "best" page ranking today is published by one of the vendors. Each entry comes from that provider's own pricing page, listed in the sources below so you can check any figure. Where a provider publishes no price, you'll see it recorded as not published instead of estimated, and the same goes for any capability missing from their site.
Review scores are third-party, carry their platform and the count, and are labelled user-reported. Where two platforms disagree materially, as they do for GoCardless, you get both; where none could be retrieved with a count, you get none.
Want to see what your own invoice book costs on one rate? Book a demo or read the pricing.
Common questions
Can a UK business collect direct debit through PayPal? Not by Bacs Direct Debit. PayPal's UK merchant fee page has no Direct Debit or Bacs row, and Braintree's direct debit support is SEPA in euro across 16 eurozone countries, with the UK excluded. PayPal's consumer help centre does use "direct debit" for a shopper funding a PayPal balance, which is money moving into PayPal instead of you collecting from a client.
Does PayPal charge extra for invoicing? No. "PayPal Invoicing has no setup or monthly fees", and there's no invoicing row on the fee page because your invoice is charged at the ordinary commercial transaction rate, published as 2.9% + 30p. Stripe adds 0.4% or 0.5% per paid invoice on top of its processing fee.
Which PayPal alternative is cheapest for UK invoices? That depends on your average invoice value, and any answer skipping it is guesswork. Above roughly £400, a capped 1% provider such as Adfin or GoCardless Standard charges £4 where an uncapped percentage keeps climbing. Below about £8 a collection, Access PaySuite's pence pricing works out lower.
Do I need my own Service User Number to collect direct debit? Not with all of them. GoCardless collects Standard merchants on a single shared SUN, London & Zurich will obtain one for you through its sponsor bank, and Access PaySuite offers a bureau SUN, your own, or direct submission. Modulr publishes no shared option.
What does PayPal charge when a payment is disputed? On its UK fee page, £14.00 per chargeback and £12.00 per dispute claim in sterling, rising to £24.00 on the high-volume tariff. Stripe publishes a "Dispute received fee £20.00 for each dispute you receive", and GoCardless publishes that UK chargeback fees don't apply.
How current is the pricing on these pages? PayPal's fee page says "Last Updated: 15 July 2026" and its Braintree page "Last Updated: 29, June 2026". No other provider here publishes an effective date, so every figure here is a snapshot. Re-check your rate before you commit.
Sources
- Access PaySuite — direct debit pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Adfin — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- London & Zurich — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Modulr — pricing for business (accurate as of August 2026)
- PayPal — Braintree SEPA Direct Debit overview (accurate as of August 2026)
- PayPal — UK merchant fees (accurate as of August 2026)
- Stripe — invoicing pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Stripe — UK pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
Adfin is one of the providers compared here and publishes this article, so weigh our entry accordingly. Competitor pricing is each provider's own published figure; providers change prices and only PayPal dates its page, so check before you commit. Review scores are third-party and user-reported. Capability described as not published means it didn't appear on the pages we read. Last updated August 2026.
