The Late & The Slow Payment Watchlist Autumn 2024

In February 2023, Good Business Pays published the first version of our Late & Slow Watchlist to provide a list of companies who are reporting the worst payment performance figures as part of the Government’s Payment Practices & Performance Regulations. 

Since then, we have updated our Late & Slow Watchlist every six months. Why six months? Because the regulations state that large companies must report their payment times every six months. In this way we can track over time who the Serial Late Payers are, and indeed the Serial Fast Payers. 

We feel it is important to make this information available for anyone to see and have been delighted that a growing number of large companies are responding to calls for improvement and making big and positive changes to their payment performance. Please check our Achievements page to find out more.

Analysing data from every company that reported payment performance between 1 January 2024 and 31 August 2024, Good Business Pays identified:

• The Late Payers: Who report paying more than 50% of their invoices later than agreed terms as well as report taking more than 50 days (average) to pay their invoices.
• The Slow Payers: Who report an average time to pay of more than 80 days.
• Serial Late Payers: Who have reported paying more than 50% of invoices late every year since reporting began in 2018, demonstrating the culture of late and slow payment is engrained. 

Key Insights

• Compared to the Autumn 2023 Watchlist Report in September 2024, the number of companies reporting average payment times over 80, 90 and 100 days has stayed almost the same
• The same company names appear on the Watchists every year, suggesting a hard-core of companies with a slow or/and late payment culture
• Six companies have dropped off the Serial Late Payer list – meaning a significant change in a payment culture that had become engrained over many years.
• Calling out poor payment performance leads to a positive effect. Since we began our campaign, 1,500 of the UKs largest companies with poor payment performance who have made big improvements to their payment culture, which in turn will benefit hundreds of thousands of supplier companies.

Companies Who Are Slow Payers

We define ‘Slow Payers’ as the companies who report an average time to pay of more than 80 days.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.

Companies Who Are Late Payers

We define ‘Late Payers’ as the companies who report paying more than 50% of their invoices later than agreed terms as well as report taking more than 50 days to pay their invoices.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.

The Serial Late Payers

We define serial late payers as the companies who have reported paying more than 50% of invoices late every year since reporting began in 2018, demonstrating the culture of late and slow payment appears to be engrained.

Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column title.