Data study

How long do UK companies really take to pay? What statutory payment reports show

By Eugene Vovk, CTO, YORXEN · Published 13 July 2026 · Last updated 13 July 2026

Information, not financial advice.

The median large UK company takes 33 days to pay a supplier invoice. That figure comes from the full public register of statutory payment reports — 110,873 filings since 2017, from 10,142 companies — which we pulled in full and totalled ourselves, because gov.uk publishes the raw reports but never adds them up.

Since April 2017, any UK company or LLP above a size threshold — turnover over £54.8m, a balance sheet over £27.4m, or more than 250 employees — has been legally required to publish, twice a year, exactly how it pays suppliers: average time to pay, the share of invoices sent out within 30 days, and the share paid outside agreed terms. It's the payment practices and performance reporting duty, and every report goes straight onto a public government register. Here's what the whole of it shows.

The headline number: 33 days

Across every report in the dataset, the median "average time to pay" is 33 days. The mean is a bit higher, at 35.8 days, because a handful of companies' figures are pulled up by outliers (more on that below) — for a number you can trust, use the median.

That 33-day figure covers everything from a construction firm on 30-day terms to a retailer with 90-day terms who pays right on time. It's not a single "normal" number so much as a midpoint across a very wide spread of contractual terms and behaviour — which is exactly why looking up a specific company's own filing matters more than any national average.

It's been getting better, slowly

We grouped every report by the six-month period it covers and tracked the median time to pay and the share of invoices paid outside agreed terms from 2017 to now:

(2017-H1 and 2026-H2 are excluded from this table — the reporting duty had only just started in the first, and the second period is still open with most companies yet to file.)

Two things stand out. First, median payment time has drifted down from around 35–36 days to 31–32 days over nine years — not dramatic, but a real and fairly steady trend, not noise. Second, the share of invoices paid outside agreed terms has fallen further and faster, from a quarter of all invoices in 2017 to roughly one in six or seven today. Read together, that suggests large companies haven't necessarily shortened their payment terms much — they've gotten better at actually hitting the terms they set.

Whether that's driven by better AP systems, reputational pressure from having to publish these numbers at all, or just economic conditions is genuinely hard to say from this data alone. It's a correlation over time, not a proven cause.

The gap between the fastest and slowest payers is enormous

National averages hide a lot. Looking at the most recent complete reporting period (the six months to 31 March 2026, 1,199 reports), the spread is stark. At one end, dozens of companies report paying effectively immediately — 100% of invoices within 30 days, average time to pay in the low single digits. At the other end, a handful of companies report average payment times well over 100 days, with the majority of their invoices landing more than 60 days after they were due.

A few numbers from that period, taken directly from the statutory filings: the fastest reporting company had a 0-day average with 100% of invoices paid inside 30 days. The slowest reported a 225-day average, with two-thirds of invoices taking more than 60 days. Both figures are self-reported and neither is independently audited — but both are numbers the companies themselves chose to publish under a legal duty, which is a meaningfully different thing from a rumour or a review.

A note on data quality

This is a self-reported dataset with no independent verification layer, and it shows. In the course of this analysis we found 46 reports with an "average time to pay" figure that's obviously wrong — the most extreme being a well-known online retailer that reported an average of over four million days for one period, which is plainly a data-entry error, not a real payment time. A cluster of restaurant-group filings from the same historic ownership all show exactly "1000" days, which reads like a placeholder value that never got corrected. We excluded anything above 365 days from the averages above; you should assume similar oddities exist elsewhere in the register at a smaller scale.

None of this means the dataset is unreliable as a whole — 110,000-plus filings is a large enough sample that a few dozen bad rows don't move the median. But it's a good reason not to take any single company's self-reported figure as gospel without a sanity check, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to miss if you're pulling one company's report by hand rather than looking at the pattern across thousands of them.

Who actually has to report, and who doesn't

It's worth being clear about the scope, because it changes how you should use this data. The duty applies to UK companies and LLPs that, on their own or as part of a group, meet at least two of three thresholds: turnover above £54.8m, balance sheet total above £27.4m, or more than 250 employees. That's a high bar — it captures large corporates, well-known retailers, big infrastructure and utilities firms, large recruitment and construction groups, and so on, but it excludes the overwhelming majority of UK businesses by number. Most small and medium suppliers will never appear in this register themselves, and most of the customers a small business deals with day to day won't either.

What that means practically: this register is most useful when you're the smaller party supplying a large one — a subcontractor invoicing a national housebuilder, an agency staffing a listed company, a specialist supplier to a big retailer. If your customer is another SME, this particular register won't have anything on them, and you'd need to rely on the other free public sources (Companies House filing history, County Court Judgments, Gazette notices) instead — which we cover in a separate guide.

It's also worth knowing that reporting is mandatory but not really policed in the way you might expect. There's no independent verification of the figures before they're published, and while non-compliance is technically a criminal offence, enforcement in practice is limited. So a company appearing in the register with good numbers has told the government those are its numbers — that's more accountable than an unverified claim, but it's not the same as an audited financial statement.

Why this matters if you're the one waiting on an invoice

If you supply a large UK company, this register is the closest thing to a credit reference you'll get for free, straight from the source, with no sales call attached. Two things worth doing before you extend credit or agree terms with a new large customer:

Look up their actual filing history, not just their most recent report — a company that's been drifting slower over several periods is telling you something different from one that's had one bad quarter. And treat the headline "average time to pay" as a starting point, not the whole picture — the breakdown between invoices paid within 30 days, 31–60 days, and over 60 days tells you how consistent they are, which matters more than the average if you're trying to plan your own cash flow around them.

PaidLate does exactly this: it pulls this register, along with Companies House filing history and Gazette notices, into a single free lookup for any UK company — because doing this by hand for every customer isn't realistic for most small suppliers. It's built entirely on the same public records, just made faster to use together.

Source: UK Government "Payment practices and performance" statutory reporting register, check-payment-practices.service.gov.uk, full CSV export. Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures in this article are calculated directly from that export; methodology and full outlier list available on request. This article is informational and does not constitute financial or credit advice.