Late payment in the UK is quietly improving — but your invoice still depends on who you sell to

Ask a small business owner about late payment and you'll hear that it's getting worse. The data says something more interesting: it's getting better — slowly, quietly, and very unevenly. At least across larger companies.

We analysed more than 100,000 payment-practice reports that large UK companies are legally required to publish, covering half-year periods from 2022 through to the end of 2025. Three things stand out.

1. Fewer invoices are being paid late

In the first half of 2022, the typical large company paid 20% of its invoices outside the terms it had agreed with suppliers. By the second half of 2025, that figure had fallen to 15% — a quarter fewer late invoices in three years. The share of invoices left unpaid for more than 60 days fell from 7% to 5% over the same period.

This isn't a change in who's reporting. We matched 5,445 companies against their own figures from a year earlier: slightly more of them sped up than slowed down, and the typical company's terms-compliance improved. The improvement is real, and it's broad.

The likely reason is the one this site exists for: transparency. Since large companies have been required to publish how they pay, payment behaviour has a price. A poor record is now visible to every supplier, journalist and procurement team who looks.

2. But the speed of payment hasn't moved

Here's the catch: the typical time to pay an invoice has been flat at around 32 days for four years. Companies are getting better at honouring the terms they set — but they're not paying any faster. For suppliers, "we're complying with our 60-day terms" is a very different thing from "you'll be paid promptly."

3. Who you sell to still matters more than anything else

The gap between sectors is stark, and it is not closing:

Slowest payers (median days to pay, H2 2025)	Fastest payers
Food & Drink — 50 days	Human Resources — 20 days
Manufacturing — 46 days	Financial Services — 21 days
Raw Materials — 45 days	Education — 25 days

A supplier to the food and drink industry waits, on average, two and a half times longer to be paid than a supplier to a financial services firm. That gap has persisted across every period we measured.

Geography plays a part too. Companies based in London pay in a median of 27 days; in the East Midlands and Yorkshire it's 37–38 days — a ten-day gap that has held steady for years.

One early signal worth watching

Only one sector deteriorated on both of our measures: Marketing & Sales. Among agencies and sales businesses filing in 2025, 55% paid slower than a year earlier (an average of nearly 3 days slower), and it was the only sector where the share of invoices paid outside terms got worse. It's a modest move, not a crisis — but marketing budgets are often the first thing squeezed when clients tighten their belts, which makes this a sector to watch through 2026.

What this means if you're owed money

• Check before you extend credit. Every company in the government data is searchable free on PaymentCheck — look up any UK company's payment record before you agree terms.
• Price the sector in. If your customers are in food, drink or manufacturing, a 45–50 day wait is normal — plan cashflow around the evidence, not the promise.
• Use your rights. If an invoice is late you are entitled to statutory interest and compensation — calculate what you're owed.
• Prove your own record. Prompt payers increasingly win on trust. If you pay well, get your own PaymentCheck score from Xero or QuickBooks and show it.

Methodology & caveats

This analysis covers 101,556 half-yearly payment-practice reports filed by large UK companies under the Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017, with figures to 31 December 2025. Sector and regional figures are medians; year-on-year changes use matched pairs (the same company compared with its own report a year earlier) to avoid composition effects. The data is self-reported by the companies and covers only businesses large enough to be required to file — most UK SMEs aren't in it (which is why we built ledger-verified scores). Reports with implausible values were excluded. Full scoring methodology here.

Data: UK government payment-practice reports, analysed by PaymentCheck, 2026-07.