Late payment statistics: United Kingdom

Each row uses a single publisher and that publisher's own regional aggregate or ranking, so the bars within a row are directly comparable. Rows are not comparable with one another: Intrum surveys 20 European markets, Atradius surveys 14 Western European markets and CRIBIS D&B measures settled payment records rather than survey responses. Bar lengths are drawn proportional to the percentage shown; no figure has been rescaled, imputed or harmonised across sources.

The CRIBIS row shows the United Kingdom against its nearest European markets by value on either side — Germany, tied with Czechia at 63.8%, and Slovakia at 60.2% — plus Sweden, rather than the best-known European punctuality leaders such as Denmark, because those sit far from the UK's own 60.5% figure. The United States (60.3%) sits numerically closer still but is excluded from this row to keep the comparison within Europe.

The score is an editorial comparison index built from four public, independently published sources. For each country we take whichever of the four are available, map each onto a common 1–10 scale using a fixed linear mapping, and take the simple average. A country needs at least two of the four to receive a score. Scores run 1 to 10, where 10 is the highest collection risk, and display in four bands: Low below 3.5, Moderate 3.5–4.9, Elevated 5.0–6.4, High 6.5 and above.

Mappings: Coface Country Risk Assessment A1=1.0, A2=2.3, A3=3.6, A4=4.9, B=6.1, C=7.4, D=8.7, E=10.0 (160 countries). Allianz Collection Complexity Score max(1, score ÷ 10) (52 economies). World Bank B-READY max(1, (100 − the average of the Dispute Resolution and Business Insolvency topic scores) ÷ 10) (101 economies). WJP Rule of Law Index Civil Justice factor max(1, (1 − score) × 10) (143 countries). The United Kingdom draws on all four of the four.

This is not a credit rating. It is an editorial comparison index for a statistics and journalism product — not a credit rating, not a probability of default, not a measure of any individual company's creditworthiness, and not legal or financial advice. It is not produced by a regulated rating agency and must not be used as a substitute for one.

Every figure on this page is drawn from one of the twelve primary sources listed below, extracted with an exact page, chart or dataset locator, and published only where that locator was verified in the source file itself. Figures from different publishers are reported side by side rather than merged: Coface, Atradius, Intrum, Sidetrade, CRIBIS D&B, Xero and the EU Payment Observatory each survey different samples with different definitions, and their numbers are not interchangeable.

The EU Payment Observatory's non-EU thematic report states that the UK's 57% late-payment share applied to "a total value of EUR 802 million" (footnote: GBP 684 million). That monetary figure is implausible by roughly three orders of magnitude for a national economy and is treated as a defect in the source, not in our transcription — it is excluded from this page, and only the 57% share is used.

Known gaps for the United Kingdom. Eurostat's bankruptcy series (sts_rb_a) does not include a UK geo code since Brexit, so Allianz Trade's Global Insolvency Outlook is the only insolvency source on this page. The OECD's Scoreboard for the United Kingdom omits a "Payment delays, B2B" indicator entirely, so this page does not compare UK payment delay against the OECD panel used on some other country pages. The EOS European Payment Practices 2025 survey covers 11 countries and does not include the UK. There is no standalone Atradius UK payment-practices barometer; the UK figures used here come from the Atradius Western Europe regional report and its statistical appendix. This page also does not include an impact/cascade module: Coface has not published a UK corporate payment survey, so there is no receivable-ageing figure of the kind that anchors the equivalent module on some other country pages, and constructing one from unrelated figures would not be honest. The incidence and consequence figures that would otherwise feed it are covered in the payment-behaviour module instead.

14 August 2026 — first publication of the United Kingdom country report. 15 figures from 12 primary sources, plus the four Collection Risk Score components, all of which cover the United Kingdom. This page is updated in place; new editions replace the content at this URL rather than creating a new year-specific page.