You have worked out your debtor days and got 47. The obvious next question is whether that is good. Search for an answer and you will find tables of industry averages with no source attached to any of them. This piece takes a different route, because the honest answer turns out to be more useful than the invented one.

The one UK figure that is actually published

Xero publishes a time to be paid figure for UK small businesses every quarter, drawn from anonymised ledger data. The June quarter 2026 release states that UK small businesses waited an average of 29.1 days to be paid after issuing an invoice, 8.3 days later than the terms they had agreed (Xero Small Business Insights, 2026).

Two things are worth noticing before you measure yourself against it. It covers UK small businesses across all industries, with no sector split. And the more interesting number is not the 29.1, it is the 8.3. The average small business is not waiting because it offered long terms. It is waiting because the terms it offered are being ignored.

Why nobody publishes it by industry

There is no official UK source that splits debtor days by sector for small businesses. The quarterly figure above is published UK wide, and the government statistics below cover large companies only. If you find a neat table of small business debtor days by industry, check who produced it and from what. A figure with no source, no year and no stated population cannot be checked, so it cannot tell you anything about your own business.

The figure that is published by sector, and why it matters more

Large UK businesses above a certain size must report how quickly they pay their suppliers. The 2025 commentary on those reports states that large businesses paid suppliers in 32 days on average, and that 15% of invoices were paid late (GOV.UK large businesses' payment practices and performance statistics, 2025). It names figures for several sectors:

• Manufacturing: 45 days
• Wholesale and retail: 37 days
• Accommodation and food service: 35 days
• Transportation and storage: 35 days
• Construction: 33 days

Read that list as a description of your customers, not of you. If you invoice large manufacturers, 45 days is what firms in that sector do, and your 47 is a reasonable outcome rather than a collections failure. If you sell to consumers who pay by card and your debtor days is 47, something has gone badly wrong, because the money should be arriving in days.

That is the reframe worth taking away. Your debtor days figure is decided far more by who you sell to than by what you sell.

A worked example

The figures here are invented to show the mechanics. They are not a claim about any real business.

Two firms in the same trade, both invoicing £40,000 a month, both offering 30 day terms.

• Firm A sells to three large manufacturers, who pay in about 45 days in line with their sector. Money owed to Firm A at any moment is roughly £59,000.
• Firm B sells to forty small local customers who pay in about 20 days. Money owed to Firm B is roughly £26,000.

Same trade, same sales, and £33,000 more of Firm A's cash sitting in someone else's bank account. No industry average explains that gap. The customer mix explains all of it.

Work out your own figure without the VAT trap

The arithmetic is: money owed to you by customers, divided by what you invoiced over a period, multiplied by the number of days in that period.

One mistake quietly inflates the answer. Your sales ledger includes VAT. Your profit and loss account does not. Take the top of the sum from one and the bottom from the other and you overstate debtor days by about a fifth on a standard rated business, turning a genuine 40 days into a reported 48. Take both sides from the invoice ledger, both including VAT, and the two halves sit on the same basis.

What to do if your number is high

• Compare against yourself first. Your own figure three months ago is a better benchmark than any sector average, because everything else about the business is held constant.
• Find the customers, not the average. An average of 47 days can be twenty customers paying in 25 days and two paying in 120. Only the second group is a problem, and only the second group is worth a phone call.
• Look at the gap to your terms, not the raw number. That is what the 8.3 days figure above measures. Forty five days on 45 day terms is a working arrangement. Forty five days on 14 day terms is a customer who has decided your terms do not apply to them.
• Check the basics before blaming anyone. The invoice reaching the right person, a purchase order number where one is required, and bank details on the document itself account for a good share of late payments. The invoice overdue calculator puts a cash figure on what the delay is costing you.

Related reading

• debtor days
• creditor days
• working capital
• industry benchmarking