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Before you give a customer 60 days

By Artur Vainer, Founder — YORXEN · Published 31 August 2026

Information, not financial advice.

Everyone knows big companies pay late. Across the 6,189 large UK companies whose most recent statutory filing is current, the median one settles a supplier invoice in 31 days, against median agreed terms of 60. On the average, they pay early. The trouble is that nobody trades with an average.

The risk is not spread evenly and never was. It sits in a tail, the tail is a specific list of companies, and that list is public. This is how to find out which side of it your customer is on before you agree the terms rather than after.

What the spread actually looks like

Every company inside the reporting duty files, twice a year, the share of invoices it paid later than the terms it had itself agreed. Not late against some benchmark: late against its own contract. That single number is the most useful thing on the whole filing, and it is the one nobody quotes.

PAIDLATE · where the risk sits share of firms, n = 6,189

Never pay an invoice late 8% of firms

Late on up to a quarter of invoices 67% of firms

Late on more than a quarter 33% of firms

Late more often than not 11% of firms

Late on three invoices in four 4% of firms

clean ordinary worth checking the tail

Bands overlap by design and do not sum to 100: "never late" sits inside "up to a quarter", and "more than a quarter" contains "late more often than not", which contains "three in four". Median across the pool: 15% of invoices paid late. Source: UK Payment Practices & Performance filings, latest report per company, periods ending 7 June 2025 to 31 August 2026.

Two companies in the same industry. One has never missed its own terms; the other misses them on three invoices in four. Nothing on an invoice, a website or a credit limit tells them apart. The filing does.

Roughly one large company in nine pays late more often than it pays on time. One in twenty-five misses its own terms on three invoices out of four — and those are not obscure firms, they are companies large enough to fall inside the reporting duty in the first place.

If you are about to put a month of production behind 60-day terms, the only question that matters is whether this particular customer is in the 8% or the 4%. Both exist, and the answer is free to look up.

Agreed terms are not the number to watch

Suppliers negotiate hard on terms and then never check what happens next. The terms are the worst case a company has committed to, not the case it usually delivers — and the distance between the two is itself a number you can read.

PAIDLATE · room they leave themselves n = 6,189

Median agreed terms are 60 days; the median company actually pays in 31. That gap is not slack you can count on. A quarter of them finish inside a fortnight of their own limit, or past it.

median headroom29days

427 take longer than their own terms

1,214 finish with under a fortnight to spare

1,493 keep 15 to 30 days in hand

1,366 keep 30 to 45

1,689 keep 45 or more

Headroom is a company's own maximum contractual terms minus its reported average time to pay, latest report per company. Source: UK Payment Practices & Performance filings, periods ending 7 June 2025 to 31 August 2026.

Negotiating terms optimises the wrong number. Two customers can both offer you 60 days and sit at opposite ends of this bar. What lands in your bank account is behaviour, and behaviour is on the record twice a year.

What being heavily secured does not tell you

Here is a check that sounds sensible and turns out not to work, which is worth saying because the opposite gets repeated a lot.

You can see on any UK company's Companies House file how many outstanding charges it carries — how much of the business is pledged as security to lenders. Just over half of the companies here carry none. One carries 760. The intuition is that a heavily secured company is a stretched company, and a stretched company pays its suppliers late.

It does not hold. Companies with five or more outstanding charges pay 16% of invoices late at the median. Companies with none pay 15%. That is a difference you would not act on.

A charge tells you where you would stand if the company failed. It does not tell you how it behaves while it is trading. Those are different questions, and the payment filing answers the second one directly.

Both are still worth reading, for different reasons. If you want the other half of that picture, we wrote up what a charge on a company's file actually means, including the part about entries that stay open for years after the borrowing was repaid.

The check, in about four minutes

All of it is free and none of it needs an account anywhere.

Their payment filing. Search the company here and read three numbers: average days to pay, the share of invoices paid late, and the trend across the last few filings. One bad half-year is noise. Three in a row is a policy.
Their own terms. The filing states the maximum contractual terms they use. If their standard is 90 days and you were about to agree 30, you are the exception and exceptions get paid last.
Whether they still file. A report is due within 30 days of a six-month period closing, and more than four in ten of the 9,535 companies that have ever filed are now more than seven months past the end of their last reported period with nothing new on the register. Late filing is not proof of trouble, but a company that has stopped telling the public how it pays is a company worth a phone call.
Their register entry. Active status, accounts filed on time, and any insolvency notice in the Gazette. This is the floor, not the assessment.

None of this predicts the future. What it does is replace a guess with a record: instead of assuming a large customer is safe because it is large, you know how that specific customer has behaved towards suppliers like you, in its own words, filed twice a year under a statutory duty.

That is a better basis for a terms conversation than hope, and it costs four minutes.

Sources and method

Figures computed from the UK Payment Practices and Performance filings, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, taking the latest report per company. The register's most recent period ends 31 August 2026; this article uses the 6,189 companies whose latest report covers a period ending on or after 7 June 2025 — the same fifteen-month window PaidLate's own lookup uses. 9,535 companies have filed at least once; 6,179 of the 6,189 also carry an outstanding-charge count.
Outstanding charges from the Companies House public register.
"Late" throughout means an invoice paid later than the terms the company itself agreed, as the company reported it.

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