Built from mandatory payment filings
Every large UK business has to publish how long it takes to pay suppliers. Group those filings by industry and you get a benchmark: what "normal" actually looks like in your sector, rather than what your customer tells you it is.
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Sections are broad. This is the same measure at four and five-digit SIC level, for any trade with enough reporting companies to be meaningful.
| Trade | Median days | Middle half | Paid late | Firms |
|---|
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If your sector's median is 45 days and you are quoting 30-day terms, you are not being unreasonable, but you are budgeting for money that will arrive two weeks after you planned. The gap is the thing to plan around, not to argue about.
The middle-half bar matters more than the median. A sector where half the companies land between 28 and 34 days is predictable, and you can run a business on it. A sector spanning 25 to 70 days is not a payment terms problem, it is a working capital problem, because you cannot forecast which kind of customer you have signed until the first invoice is already overdue.
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One further note on the median. Payment data has a long tail, and a handful of companies filing extreme figures will drag an average somewhere useless. The median is the middle company in each sector, so it describes what you should actually expect rather than what the worst filer does.
Invoice finance closes the distance between doing the work and being paid for it. Compare facilities from UK lenders against your own ledger.
Compare facilitiesSource: Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017 filings, published via the government's payment practices service, joined to Companies House company data for industry classification. Figures as filed. Built and maintained by Factor Now.