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