Article
Late payment: the seven day rule, and what you can charge when they miss it
Ask most UK commercials crew when their invoice is due and you'll get the same answer: thirty days. Maybe sixty, if it's that production company.
Now look at the APA Recommended Crew Terms, the agreement most commercials work is booked under. Section 1 says production companies will pay invoices from crew they contract directly within seven days of receipt.
Seven. Not thirty.
Somewhere between the agreement and the accounts department, that number quietly grew by a factor of four, and almost nobody in the industry knows it was ever seven in the first place.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Late payment is not an administrative annoyance. It is freelancers lending money, interest free, to companies with better cash flow than they have. You do the work, you carry the cost, and the production earns interest on your fee while you wait for it.
It is serious enough that it has reached Parliament. Bectu members have raised late payment in the creative industries directly with MPs, and the government has committed to appointing a Freelance Champion to represent freelance workers in policy. That campaign is about fixing the problem at the root, which is where it should be fixed.
This article is about the other half: what you are entitled to right now, today, while that fight goes on.
You can charge interest, and it is not a favour
If you are a sole trader or a limited company invoicing another business, you are covered by the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. Film and television freelancing is business to business. This applies to you.
Under the Act, when a commercial invoice is paid late you are entitled to:
Statutory interest at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, calculated daily from the day after payment was due until the day it is paid.
A fixed recovery fee, on top of the interest, based on the size of the debt:
| Invoice value | Fixed fee |
|---|---|
| Up to £999.99 | £40 |
| £1,000 to £9,999.99 | £70 |
| £10,000 or more | £100 |
That fee is per invoice, not per chase. It exists to cover the cost of you having to go and get your own money.
You do not need the client's permission. You do not need it written into your contract. It is a statutory entitlement, and it applies automatically once payment is late.
When does "late" start?
If you agreed payment terms, late begins the day after those terms expire. If you agreed nothing, the default under the Act is 30 days from whichever is later: receipt of your invoice, or delivery of the work.
So if your call sheet or booking says nothing about payment terms, and the APA terms apply, you have a reasonable argument that seven days is the agreed term. If the production imposed thirty days, that is the term, and interest runs from day thirty-one.
Either way, the clock starts without you doing anything.
Why almost nobody claims it
Three reasons, and none of them are good ones.
They don't know it exists. Most crew have never been told they can charge interest on a late invoice.
They think it will cost them work. It might, with a bad production company. It won't with a good one, and a company that blacklists you for claiming a statutory entitlement has told you something useful about itself.
The maths is a faff. Working out daily interest at base plus eight percent, across an arbitrary number of days, on top of tracking which invoices are even overdue, is exactly the sort of admin nobody does at the end of a twelve hour day.
The third one is the real reason. The entitlement is useless if claiming it is harder than absorbing the loss.
What we built
TimeMachine tracks your invoices from draft to sent to paid, and flags them as overdue automatically from the due date. When one goes past, it works out the statutory interest and the correct fixed recovery fee for you, and adds them to the invoice in one tap. It also drafts the chase email with the invoice attached, because the second job after being paid late is asking to be paid.
You don't have to use an app to claim any of this. You can do it with a calculator and a strongly worded email. But the reason most people don't is that it's a faff, so we made it not a faff.
If the job was called off rather than paid late, there's a separate scale for that: what a cancelled shoot owes you.
The short version
- The APA Recommended Crew Terms say seven days. The industry standard drifted to thirty. Those are not the same thing.
- Late payment on a commercial invoice entitles you to 8% plus the Bank of England base rate in interest, calculated daily.
- Plus a fixed recovery fee of £40, £70 or £100 depending on the invoice size.
- You don't need permission, and it doesn't need to be in your contract.
- Bectu is campaigning to fix this properly. Support that. In the meantime, charge what you're owed.
TimeMachine is an independent tool for UK film and television crew. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Advertising Producers Association (APA) or Bectu. It references the publicly available APA Recommended Crew Terms as a rate reference only. This article is general information, not legal or financial advice.