If you’re expecting a payment to arrive into your bank account it can sometimes be difficult to know how long you should wait before checking with the sender or speaking to your bank to find out why it hasn’t arrived.
There’s a range of payment types that you may be expecting to receive, and they all have different timescales for how long banks and payment providers expect them to process.
Processing times for different payment types
Below is a table of the different payment types and the processing time you could expect.
Payment type | Cut-off time for payment | Processing time |
|---|---|---|
Faster Payments | No cut-off time | Up to two hours |
BACS | Varies by bank, usually end of business day | Three business days |
CHAPS | Varies by bank, usually between 4pm - 5pm | Same day, if sent before cut-off time |
For an extended list of processing times for different types of payments, check out this article by GoCardless.
Faster Payments
Faster Payments are usually sent straight away from an account and are received pretty much instantly. An example of these types of payments is sending money to a friend's bank account.
The scheme that runs Faster Payments allows for up to two hours for the payment to be processed, so banks will often want to wait over two hours before checking where the payment is.. This can vary, as they may be aware of delays to Faster Payments that are impacting payments that day.
BACS
BACS payments, sometimes called bank transfers, are often slower to process than other types of payments. Examples are Direct Debits, Credit transfers and often salary payments. You may also use BACS for invoices.
These payments often take longer to process because of the way the system is designed to move the payment information from the sending bank to the recipient, which involves more checks than with other payment methods.
Therefore, it’s often best to wait more than three business days before asking your bank to check on the status of the payment or speaking to the sender.
CHAPS
CHAPS payments are guaranteed to arrive on the same day as they are sent, as long as they are started before the sender bank’s cut off time, which is usually between 4pm - 5pm.
As you won’t always know what the cut off time of the sender’s bank is, if you’re missing a CHAPS payment the day after it was due to be sent, it’s best to check what time the payment was sent with the sender first.
If it’s been more than a day since the CHAPS payment was sent, you should speak to your bank about the payment.
If you’re a Mettle customer
The type of Mettle account you have will change how we look into transactions for you.
Not sure which account you have? You can find out by checking your sort code. If your sort code starts with ‘0’ then you have the Mettle bank account, if it starts with the number ‘2’ you have an e-money account.
For all accounts, for us to look into a payment, we'll need to know the following information:
The payment amount
Whether it was an incoming or outgoing payment
Payment date
Payment reference
Details of the sender if the payment was made into your account
If you have a Mettle bank account
If you haven’t received a Faster Payment, we’ll need to wait two hours after the payment was sent to check its status. It could’ve been automatically returned to the sender if there was an issue. For BACS payments we’ll need to wait three business days.
We don’t accept CHAPS payments on the Mettle bank account.
If you're using the Mettle e-money account
For us to look into a payment, we have to wait three business days to allow the payment to be processed through our automated systems. This allows us to verify if it has reached your account or has been returned. If the payment hasn't reached your account within three business days, you should let us know and we'll investigate the issue.
Our e-money account does accept CHAPS. For CHAPS, if the payment hasn’t arrived within one business day, please reach out to our support team.
