UK Late Payment Index
How long do the UK's biggest buyers make small suppliers wait?
An aggregate, half-yearly trend built from every large UK business's statutory Payment Practices Reporting filing. No individual company is named or ranked.
Key findings
- Large UK businesses reported an average of 33.5 days to pay invoices in H1 2026, down from 39.1 days in H2 2017, a fall of 14.3%.
- 60.5% of invoices were paid within 30 days in the latest period, and 20.6% were paid outside the agreed contractual terms altogether.
- 3,120 large businesses filed a Payment Practices Reporting return for this period, each disclosing their own average time to pay across all supplier invoices.
Source: Payment Practices Reporting service (gov.uk), a statutory disclosure. Figures are aggregate only; no individual company is named. Free to cite with attribution to Holloway Davies.
Mean days to pay, by half-year
Average of every large business's self-reported "average time to pay" figure, aggregated by the half-year reporting period. A small number of implausible values (outside 0 to 365 days) are excluded as data-entry errors.
Note: Source: Payment Practices Reporting service, Department for Business and Trade (statutory public disclosure)
Full half-year series
| Period | Mean days | Median days | % within 30d | Companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H2 2017 | 39.1 | 36 | 49.8% | 833 |
| H1 2018 | 37.3 | 35 | 53.1% | 5,824 |
| H2 2018 | 36.8 | 35 | 53.6% | 7,183 |
| H1 2019 | 36.8 | 35 | 54.4% | 7,418 |
| H2 2019 | 35.9 | 34 | 55.5% | 7,155 |
| H1 2020 | 36.9 | 34 | 54.7% | 6,828 |
| H2 2020 | 37.7 | 35 | 55.2% | 6,669 |
| H1 2021 | 36.8 | 34 | 56.2% | 6,638 |
| H2 2021 | 35.8 | 33 | 57.3% | 6,503 |
| H1 2022 | 35.6 | 33 | 57.2% | 6,429 |
| H2 2022 | 35.5 | 33 | 57.9% | 6,330 |
| H1 2023 | 35.5 | 32 | 58.2% | 6,292 |
| H2 2023 | 34.9 | 32 | 58.6% | 6,486 |
| H1 2024 | 34.7 | 32 | 59.2% | 6,482 |
| H2 2024 | 34.3 | 32 | 59.8% | 6,450 |
| H1 2025 | 34.4 | 32 | 59.5% | 6,237 |
| H2 2025 | 34.6 | 32 | 59.5% | 6,167 |
| H1 2026 | 33.5 | 31 | 60.5% | 3,120 |
Note: Source: Payment Practices Reporting service, Department for Business and Trade (statutory public disclosure)
Methodology and sources
Data source. The full CSV export of the Payment Practices Reporting service, which contains every filing made by every large UK business since the regulations took effect in April 2017.
What is counted. Filings are bucketed into half-year periods by each company's own reporting period end date (not a fixed calendar half), then averaged. "Average time to pay" is each filer's own self-reported figure across all its supplier invoices, not isolable by sector or contract type.
Aggregation policy. This page reports only aggregate statistics. No individual company is named, ranked, or identifiable from the figures shown. The earliest half-year (regime start-up) and the most recent half-year (still filing) are shown with reduced confidence due to lower filing volume.
- Payment Practices Reporting -- full CSV export (Department for Business and Trade)
Download the late payment data (CSV)
Free to cite and republish with attribution to Holloway Davies. This page is a data summary and does not constitute financial or business advice.
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