£300 a month of GoCardless fees, before VAT, says more about how many invoices you collect than about how large they are. On the Standard plan that is roughly 600 collections of £30, 250 of £100, or 75 of anything from £380 upwards, because the £4 cap holds the fee flat above that value. The arithmetic here is ours, worked from GoCardless's published rates.
In this article
The short version
- GoCardless publishes 1% + 20p capped at £4 on Standard, 1.25% + 20p capped at £5 on Advanced and 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60 on Pro, before VAT.
- Those caps are reached at £380, £384 and £385.71 on our arithmetic, so above roughly £380 your bill grows only with your collection count.
- £300 of Standard fees is about 600 collections of £30, 250 of £100, or 75 at £380 and above, and the plan can't tell those books apart.
- VAT goes on top, so £300 of fees reaches you as £360, and a £300 all-in budget is buying £250 of fees.
- The extra 0.3% above £2,000 is charged outside the cap, so about 23 collections of £5,000 land near £300 too.
- At small invoice values their rate is competitive and the cap is genuinely generous, so £300 is mostly a statement about your volume.
Whether £300 is the fee or the invoice
Start with the VAT, because it moves every number here by a sixth. GoCardless's pricing page says prices exclude VAT: "It's the VAT status of a supplier that determines whether VAT is charged, and not the VAT status of the customer."
So £300 of fees reaches you as £360, and if the £300 in your head is what left your account, the fees underneath it are £250. Everything below assumes £300 of fees before VAT. If you can't recover the VAT, take a sixth off every volume.
On the three self-serve plans, fees are "deducted from your submitted payments", so nobody in your business signs the monthly amount off and it tends to surface only when somebody reconciles a payout.
Above about £380 the fee stops growing
One percent of £380 is £3.80, the fixed 20p tops it up to exactly £4.00, and from there the Standard cap holds the fee steady. Advanced reaches its £5 cap at £384 and Pro its £5.60 cap at £385.71. Those three points are our arithmetic on their two published numbers per plan, since their page carries no worked example. How much GoCardless costs per transaction has the per-collection detail.
Once your average invoice clears about £380 the fee per collection is fixed, so your monthly total is a count and nothing else. Two businesses paying the same £300 can look nothing like each other: one's collecting £18,000 across 600 small invoices, the other £75,000 across 75 larger ones.
What £300 a month looks like on each plan
On Standard, at 1% + 20p capped at £4, domestic:
| Average invoice | Fee per collection | Collections for about £300 | Value collected that month |
|---|---|---|---|
| £30 | £0.50 | 600 | £18,000 |
| £50 | £0.70 | about 429 | about £21,450 |
| £100 | £1.20 | 250 | £25,000 |
| £150 | £1.70 | about 176 | about £26,500 |
| £250 | £2.70 | about 111 | about £27,800 |
| £380 | £4.00 | 75 | £28,500 |
| £1,000 | £4.00 capped | 75 | £75,000 |
| £2,000 | £4.00 capped | 75 | £150,000 |
Our arithmetic on GoCardless's published Standard rate and cap, VAT excluded. Counts are rounded and the collected value is derived from them.
The dearer plans get you to £300 on fewer collections, because they charge more per collection without covering more value:
| Plan | Published rate and cap | Cap reached at | Capped collections for about £300 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 1% + 20p, capped £4 | £380 | 75 |
| Advanced | 1.25% + 20p, capped £5 | £384 | 60 |
| Pro | 1.4% + 20p, capped £5.60 | £385.71 | about 54 |
Rates and caps are GoCardless's own. The cap points and the collection counts are our arithmetic on them, VAT excluded.
No independent source publishes what a typical GoCardless bill looks like, and we haven't got one either, so use these to locate your own book and not as a benchmark.
The collections the cap doesn't hold
GoCardless charges a further 0.3% on the amount above £2,000, and its support pricing article confirms that fee is outside the cap, along with international payments, described there as "not capped".
Work a £5,000 collection through: £4.00 for the capped transaction fee, plus 0.3% of the £3,000 above the threshold, giving £9.00, so £13.00 in total. GoCardless doesn't publish whether that 0.3% applies to the excess or to the whole transaction, so read this as our reading: on the other one the same collection costs £19.00 and you reach £300 on about 16 of them. About 23 collections of that size, roughly £115,000 in a month, brings you to £300. A book of large invoices gets there on very few collections, and the cap doesn't protect it above £2,000. We've worked those totals ourselves from the rates on GoCardless's own pricing pages.
Add-ons, and their size next to £300
Two published add-ons are large next to a £300 bill. "Your name on bank statements" is +£50 a month, a sixth of the total before you collect anything, and a "Fully custom checkout" is +£150 a month, half of it.
The first matters more than it sounds: on the entry plan you collect under a shared Service User Number, so your customer sees GoCardless on their statement unless you've bought the add-on, and that's where the "who is this?" calls come from.
What the entry plan leaves out
The cheapest rate here comes with the least recovery tooling. Standard covers collection, payment management, international payments, mandate setup, "350+ integrations", a customisable checkout and 24/7 support. Advanced adds Success+, described as reducing failed payments, plus Verified Mandates. Pro adds Protect+ and the ability to challenge chargebacks. So retrying a failed collection intelligently starts above the entry plan, and challenging a chargeback starts on the top one. GoCardless also charges no UK failure fee and no UK chargeback fee on its published record. That's a real advantage over most of this market, so a failure costs you the collection itself with no penalty on top.
Negotiating is gated too. The Custom plan is described as "For businesses with £1m+ annual revenue or bespoke needs", so below that the published card is your price and the arithmetic above is the whole of it.
If you do decide to move
Credit where it belongs: on published exit terms GoCardless is the best in this market. Its self-serve general terms carry no fixed minimum and let you end the agreement for convenience on written notice, and clause 7.1 of its bank debit terms commits it to helping you move to another supplier, including entering into "a bulk change deed" and providing "a machine-readable list of each of your Customers and their Payment Scheme Mandate details". Neither document carries an effective date.
Two routes exist for the mandates, and both are worth knowing before anyone quotes you a timescale. Above a provider's own operational minimum, existing mandates move through the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process and your customers sign nothing new. Below it, they sign a new mandate with the incoming provider. That minimum is each provider's own commercial choice and never a scheme rule, so ask where theirs falls.
Their own guidance on leaving quotes "between 3-5 weeks" for the Bacs side and asks you to "stop collecting payments 5-7 days prior to the bulk change date". A bulk change doesn't require a gap in your billing cycle, though every provider builds in a quiet window of several working days around the change date.
The sum to do on your own numbers
Four figures give you your own version of this page:
- Your fee total for last month, and whether it includes VAT.
- The number of collections behind it.
- Divide one by the other for your cost per collection.
- Compare that with your average invoice, and check how much of your book is above £2,000.
A cost per collection near your plan's cap means you're buying volume. Well below it, the 20p is doing more work than the percentage. Either way your answer falls out of two published numbers and one cap, on a page carrying no effective date, so check it on the day.
Common questions
What does £300 a month of GoCardless fees mean in volume terms? On the Standard plan, before VAT, roughly 600 collections of £30, 250 of £100 or 75 of anything from £380 upwards. On Advanced about 60 capped collections, on Pro about 54. Our arithmetic on their published rates.
Is £300 a month a lot to pay for direct debit collection? That depends on the book underneath it, and nobody publishes a benchmark. At £30 an invoice you're paying 50p a collection; at £1,000 the £4 cap puts you on 0.4%. The arithmetic tells you which of those you're in, and we've no evidence about what other businesses your size pay.
Does the £4 cap mean my GoCardless fees stop growing? Per collection, above £380, yes on Standard. Your monthly total keeps growing with your collection count, and the 0.3% on amounts above £2,000 is charged outside the cap, as are international payments.
Is VAT included in GoCardless's prices? No. The pricing page states that prices exclude VAT, so £300 of fees is invoiced at £360, and a business that can't recover VAT pays 1.2% + 24p on the Standard plan.
Why do my largest collections cost more than the cap? Because of the high value fee. Anything above £2,000 carries a further 0.3% on the excess, charged on top of the capped fee. On a £5,000 collection that is £4.00 plus £9.00, so £13.00 in total, which is our arithmetic on their published rates.
What does it cost to leave GoCardless? No exit fee is published and no minimum term applies to the three self-serve plans. GoCardless publishes a documented bulk change process, quotes three to five weeks for the Bacs side, and commits contractually to providing a machine-readable list of your customers and their mandate details.
Sources
- GoCardless — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — bank debit terms (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — bulk changing away from GoCardless (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — pricing and fees support article (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — service user numbers (accurate as of August 2026)
This article is information, not advice. All GoCardless rates, plan features, add-on prices, the VAT wording and the Custom plan eligibility come from its own pricing page and its support pricing article, and the exit terms from its published terms. None of those pages carries an effective date, so check before you rely on a figure. Every collection count, cap point, monthly value and worked example is our own arithmetic on those rates, VAT excluded, and none of it is published or endorsed by GoCardless. Adfin publishes this article and competes with GoCardless. Last updated August 2026.
