Late payment statistics: how long big UK firms take to pay

How long do big UK companies take to pay an invoice?

About a month. Across the 5,623 large UK companies that reported for periods ending in the first half of 2026, the typical one took 31 days on average to pay a supplier’s invoice, and paid 64% of its invoices within 30 days.

Those are the companies’ own figures. Every company over the size limit has to publish how it paid its suppliers, every six months, and the government keeps all of the reports in one public register. We downloaded every one of them, 115,384 reports going back to 2017, on 8 October 2026.

“The typical company” here is the median: half did better and half did worse. The plain average across all of them is 34.5 days, pulled up by a long tail of slow payers.

Just over half, 52%, took longer than 30 days on average, and 48% took 30 days or less. 8% took longer than 60 days, which is as long as agreed terms between businesses usually run.

How many invoices do big companies pay late?

The typical big company paid 15% of its invoices later than the terms it had agreed, roughly one invoice in 7. And 12% of companies paid half or more of their invoices late.

“Late” is measured against the company’s own terms: an invoice is late if it was paid after the date the agreed terms set. That makes it a fair measure of whether a company keeps its word, and a poor measure of how long you wait.

An invoice paid on day 55 of 60 day terms counts as paid on time.

So a supplier on long terms can be paid slowly and never show up as paid late. If you want to know how long a customer will really take, its average time to pay and its standard terms tell you more than its late figure does. Both are in every company’s report.

Are big firms paying faster than they used to?

Yes, slowly. For periods ending in the first half of 2018, soon after reporting began, the typical company paid 27% of its invoices late and 54% within 30 days. By the first half of 2026, those were 15% and 64%.

The typical average time to pay came down too, from 35 days to 31. None of it happened at once. The change came half a year at a time, with a setback in 2020.

Reports from 2025 onwards ask for some extra figures, such as the value of the invoices paid and the construction questions below. The three figures charted here have been asked the same way since the first report.

Do companies with construction contracts pay differently?

Hardly. Of the 5,326 companies whose reports asked the question, 1,355 had construction contracts in the period. The typical one took 32 days to pay, paid 63% of its invoices within 30 days and 14% late. Every one of those is within two days or two points of the figure for all companies.

Two things to know before you lean on that. A construction contract here is any contract for construction work, so the list holds supermarkets, phone networks and water companies alongside the contractors and housebuilders. And the figures cover all of a company’s invoices, not only its construction ones.

So this is not how fast your main contractor pays its subcontractors. For that, look the company up: every report, with its standard terms written out, is in the government’s register, and every company’s latest figures are in our download.

If you are paid under the Construction Industry Scheme, what goes on the invoice is in the CIS invoice guide.

How many big companies hold back retentions?

Just over half of those with construction contracts: 751 of 1,355, or 55%, said their construction contracts include retention clauses. Where a company gave a standard rate, it was 5% in 248 cases out of 392, and 3% in 120.

A retention is a slice of each payment that the customer keeps back until the job is finished, and often until a defects period after it, as security for putting things right. On a £20,000 subcontract held at 5%, that is £1,000 you have earned and will wait months for.

Nobody had to say any of this before. The retention questions arrived for financial years starting on or after 1 April 2025, so the first answers are only now coming in.

Most of them, 76%, release the money in stages rather than all at once. Fewer than half, 38%, said they hold their suppliers to the same retention terms their own client holds them to.

What do these numbers mean for your invoices?

Expect a big customer to take about a month unless you agree otherwise, and agree it before the job. The average is counted from the day an invoice arrives, so the clock starts when you send it, not when you finish.

Three habits follow from that.

Invoice the day the job is done. Every day between finishing and sending is a day nobody is counting, least of all the customer.

Agree terms up front. A company’s standard terms are in its report. If they say 60 days and you cannot wait 60 days, the quote is the place to say so. What Net 14 and Net 30 mean, and the 30 day default when nothing was agreed, are in the payment terms guide.

Print the due date. “Due 20 October” is harder to miss than “Net 14”.

When a business does pay late, GOV.UK sets out statutory interest and a fixed sum you can claim; the payment terms guide has both. Whether to claim them from a particular customer is a question for whoever does your books.

How were these figures worked out?

From the government’s own register, downloaded on 8 October 2026, using each company’s latest report for a period that ended between 1 January 2026 and 30 June 2026. Every figure is a median of the companies’ own numbers.

The register held 115,384 reports. 6,020 companies reported for a period ending in the first half of 2026, and we left out 397 of them: reports that gave no figures, whose three payment bands did not add up to between 97% and 103%, or whose average was more than a year. Those are filing slips rather than slow payers.

We did not use the invoice values that newer reports include, because some are plainly in the wrong units. Every figure here is a number of days or a share of invoices, which the register records well.

Which companies have to report, and what each question means, is in the government’s guidance: in short, those over two of £54 million turnover, £27 million on the balance sheet and 250 staff.

The data, to download

payment-times-2026-h1.csv: 5,623 rows, one per company, with its average days to pay, the three payment bands, the share paid late, its standard terms, its construction and retention answers, and a link to its full report.

It is free to reuse. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Department for Business and Trade, payment practices reporting.

To cite this page: Invoice Koi, “Late payment statistics: how long big UK firms take to pay”, www.invoicekoi.com/uk/late-payment-statistics/, figures for the first half of 2026, downloaded 8 October 2026.

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