Large UK businesses took an average of 33.5 days to pay their suppliers in the first half of 2026, the fastest figure recorded since statutory payment-practices reporting began in 2017.[1] That is real progress. It is also still, on the median measure, a month and a day.
Holloway Davies has compiled the full public Payment Practices Reporting dataset into a proprietary UK Late Payment Index, aggregated by half-year reporting period from every qualifying statutory filing.[1][2] This article works through what the 2026 figures show, what nine years of the trend line tell you about the direction of travel, and what a supplier still waiting on a large customer's invoice can actually do about it. The full underlying series is available at our UK Late Payment Index. This piece deals only in aggregate figures: no individual company is named or ranked anywhere here or on the index page.
The 2026 headline numbers
In the first half of 2026, the statutory data shows:[1]
- Mean time to pay: 33.5 days, down from 39.1 days when the regime began in H2 2017.
- Median time to pay: 31.0 days, roughly one day above the standard 30-day term.
- 60.5% of invoices paid within 30 days, up from 49.8% at the start of the series.
- 20.6% of invoices not paid on time at all, down from 30.3% at the start of the series.
Those figures are aggregated from 2,964 statutory filings covering 3,120 large UK companies in the period. The full export behind the index runs to 111,614 rows across every half-year since 2017; 2 rows with unusable dates and 47 average-time-to-pay values outside a plausible 0 to 365 day range were excluded as data-entry errors before the figures above were calculated.[1]
Nine years of gradual improvement
The trend since reporting began has moved in one direction, but slowly. The table below tracks the mean and median time to pay, and the share of invoices paid within 30 days, across selected half-years in the series:[1]
| Period | Mean days to pay | Median days to pay | Paid within 30 days | Not paid on time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 H2 | 39.1 | 36.0 | 49.8% | 30.3% |
| 2019 H1 | 36.8 | 35.0 | 54.4% | 29.3% |
| 2021 H1 | 36.8 | 34.0 | 56.2% | 27.3% |
| 2023 H1 | 35.5 | 32.0 | 58.2% | 25.5% |
| 2024 H1 | 34.7 | 32.0 | 59.2% | 23.5% |
| 2025 H1 | 34.4 | 32.0 | 59.5% | 22.4% |
| 2025 H2 | 34.6 | 32.0 | 59.5% | 21.7% |
| 2026 H1 | 33.5 | 31.0 | 60.5% | 20.6% |
Two things stand out. The first is that almost none of the improvement has come in sudden steps: the mean has drifted down by roughly half a day to a day each half-year across most of the series, not fallen off a cliff in any single period. The second is that the median has moved less proportionally than the mean, settling at 32.0 days for five consecutive half-years between 2023 H1 and 2025 H2 before easing to 31.0 in 2026 H1. That pattern is consistent with a genuine, broad shift toward faster payment across most large buyers, rather than a small number of very slow payers alone dragging the average down as they improve.
What "improving" still means for a small supplier
A national average moving from 39.1 to 33.5 days is a real trend. It is not, however, what any individual supplier experiences on any individual invoice. Two figures in the 2026 data matter more to a specific small business than the headline mean.
The first is the median: 31.0 days. Half of all large buyers in the dataset took at least that long to pay in H1 2026. For a supplier issuing invoices on standard 30-day terms, a median payment time of 31.0 days means the typical large customer is, in effect, treating the agreed term as a floor rather than a deadline.
The second is the 20.6% figure: roughly 1 invoice in 5 was not paid on time at all, measured against whatever term the buyer itself had agreed. That is an improvement on the 30.3% recorded in 2017, but it is still a meaningful share of a supplier's sales ledger sitting outside the terms it was sold on.
The practical effect on a small business is a working-capital gap: wages, rent, and its own supplier bills fall due on the calendar, regardless of when a large customer's invoice actually clears. Building that gap explicitly into a rolling cash forecast, rather than discovering it as a shortfall, is covered in our guide to cash flow management for small businesses, including how to translate a debtor-days figure into the actual pounds tied up in late payment.
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The levers a supplier controls
None of the three levers below change how fast a given large customer chooses to pay. Each reduces what that wait costs the supplier while it lasts.
1. Payment terms and the statutory rights behind them
Every B2B supplier already holds an automatic legal right to charge statutory interest and fixed compensation on an overdue invoice, without needing a clause in the contract, under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. The rate and the compensation bands, along with the exact escalation steps once an invoice passes its due date, are set out in our guide to late payment rules for UK small businesses. Stating in your terms of business, up front, that statutory interest applies to overdue invoices is a low-cost step that most suppliers in the data are entitled to but do not consistently use.
2. Credit control as a weekly discipline
A consistent weekly rhythm, chasing every invoice at a fixed number of days after issue rather than reacting only once cash is visibly tight, is the single lowest-cost lever available. It does not require new finance or new terms, only consistency. The mechanics of an aged-debtor routine, and how to translate a reduction in debtor days into an actual cash release, are covered in the cash flow management guide linked above.
3. Invoice financing for the gap itself
Where the wait itself, not the eventual payment, is the problem, invoice financing (invoice discounting or factoring) converts an unpaid invoice into available cash, usually 80% to 90% of its value within a day or two, with the remainder released once the customer pays, minus a fee. It is worth comparing the fee against the margin on the underlying work, and against tightening credit control first: a shorter debtor cycle reduces how much ever needs financing in the first place.
Data and methodology
The figures in this article come entirely from the Payment Practices Reporting service, a statutory disclosure that every large UK business, broadly one meeting at least two of turnover above £36 million, balance sheet above £18 million, or more than 250 employees, must publish twice a year under the Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017. Holloway Davies compiled the full public CSV export into the UK Late Payment Index, aggregating every qualifying filing into each half-year reporting period (bucketed by each filing's own period end date). "Average time to pay" is each filer's own self-reported figure across all its supplier invoices for the period. A small number of filings with implausible values, outside a 0 to 365 day range, are excluded as data-entry errors. This article, and the index it draws on, presents aggregate figures only: no individual company is named or ranked.[1][2]
For the full half-year series back to 2017, and further breakdowns, see the UK Late Payment Index. Related proprietary research on the UK small-business landscape is available at the UK Small Business Barometer, the UK Sector Insolvency League, and the UK Business Density Map.
Sources
- UK Late Payment Index. Holloway Davies. Data compiled from the Payment Practices Reporting service full CSV export under the Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017. Generated 2026-07-23. Available at /research/uk-late-payment-index.
- Payment Practices Reporting service. Department for Business and Trade. Statutory public disclosure. Underlying source: check-payment-practices.service.gov.uk; release page gov.uk/check-when-businesses-pay-invoices. Retrieved 2026-07-23.