EU Late Payment Directive Calculator

What this calculator actually tells you

Directive 2011/7/EU gives a business a legal entitlement to charge interest and a fixed recovery sum when a commercial customer pays late. This page turns that entitlement into a figure for every overdue invoice on the account, and into line items you can paste onto the invoice you raise for them.

The directive exists because late payment across the single market was killing otherwise solvent businesses, and because a supplier who has to ask for interest usually will not ask. So the entitlement is automatic. You do not have to send a warning, and you do not have to have mentioned interest in your terms. It runs from the day after the invoice fell due.

That said, an entitlement is not cash. Three people read this number differently:

• Your finance team uses it to decide whether an overdue account is worth escalating, and what the escalation is actually worth.
• Your customer's payables clerk reads it as the price of leaving your invoice at the bottom of the pile. That is the real function of statutory interest: it moves you up the queue.
• A lawyer or a collections agency reads it as the claimable amount, because interest and the fixed sum are recoverable alongside the debt itself.

Where the rate comes from, part by part

The statutory rate has only two components, and the whole of the difficulty sits in the first one: Statutory rate = Reference rate + Statutory margin.

A worked example

A supplier in Ireland issues a 10,000 euro invoice on 1 March, due 31 March. The customer pays on 15 May, which is 45 days after the due date. The reference rate in force on 1 January that year was 3.00 percent, and Ireland applies the eight point floor.

• Statutory rate: 3.00 + 8.00 = 11.00 percent a year
• Daily rate: 11.00 / 100 / 365 = 0.0301 percent a day
• Interest per day: 10,000 x 0.000301 = 3.01 euro
• Interest for 45 days: 10,000 x 0.11 x 45 / 365 = 135.62 euro
• Fixed compensation: 40.00 euro
• Total claimable on top of the invoice: 175.62 euro

Note what happened to the reference rate. The invoice fell due on 31 March, inside the first half of the year, so the 1 January rate governs the whole period even though the payment landed in May. Had the customer paid in August instead, the calculation would split: the 1 January rate up to 30 June, then the 1 July rate from 1 July onwards.

The fixed compensation, and what else you can claim

Article 6 of the directive gives the creditor a fixed sum of at least 40 euro for the cost of recovering the debt. Three features of it are easy to miss.

It is automatic. You do not have to prove you incurred 40 euro of cost, and you do not have to send a reminder first. It becomes due at the same moment statutory interest becomes due.

It is per debt, not per customer or per relationship. A customer who is late on six invoices has triggered it six times, which is why the fixed sum tends to matter far more than the interest on a book of small invoices.

It is a minimum, not a cap. Where your actual recovery costs exceed the fixed sum, for example the fee of a collections agency or a solicitor instructed on the debt, the directive entitles you to reasonable compensation for the excess. You need evidence of the cost and it has to be reasonable relative to the debt.

How to read your number

The interest figure on a single overdue invoice is usually small, and treating it as the point is the mistake. A 10,000 euro invoice at 11 percent earns about 3 euro a day. That will not fund anything. What it does is change the customer's ranking decision, and the ranking decision is worth weeks of cash, not euros of interest.

So read the days late column first, and the interest second.

Member states, currencies and reference rates

All 27 member states implement the same directive, and every one of them sets at least the eight point margin and at least the 40 euro fixed sum. Where they differ is in three things: whether they use the ECB rate or a national one, whether they go above the eight point floor, and what currency the fixed sum is expressed in.

The eight point margin and the 40 euro fixed sum come from Directive 2011/7/EU itself. Everything in the last two columns is a prompt to check, not a sourced figure: national margins, national fixed sums and national reference rates all sit in each member state's own implementing law and are not reproduced here. Reviewed 13 August 2026. Verify against the member state's implementing legislation before you rely on any of it. The European Commission proposed replacing this directive with a regulation in 2023, so check whether the directive is still the operative instrument.

The United Kingdom is not in this table. It left the EU and its commercial debts run under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, at the Bank of England base rate plus eight percent, with a fixed recovery sum that steps up with the size of the debt. Use the UK statutory interest calculator for those. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are not EU member states either and are not covered here.

Euro area, non euro states, and the German exception

The single most damaging thing a calculator can do in this area is apply one ECB number to every country, so it is worth being precise about who uses what.

Euro area states use the ECB rate directly. The directive names the rate applied to the ECB's most recent main refinancing operation as the reference rate for any member state whose currency is the euro.

States outside the euro area use the equivalent rate set by their own national central bank. Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden all fall here. Feeding an ECB rate into a Swedish or Polish calculation gives an answer that is simply wrong, often by several percentage points, and it will be the first thing a defendant's lawyer notices.

Germany is a euro area state that still does not use the ECB rate directly. German law works from the Basiszinssatz under section 247 of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, which is adjusted every 1 January and 1 July by reference to the ECB rate but is a separately published number and is not equal to it. German commercial debts also carry a margin above the eight point floor. Both need looking up.

What the directive does not let your customer do

Most disputes about statutory interest are not really about the rate. They are about whether the invoice was late at all, and the directive has firm answers.

• Payment terms cannot run indefinitely. Between businesses, where the contract fixes no period, payment falls due 30 calendar days after receipt of the invoice or the goods. Where the contract does fix a period, it must not exceed 60 calendar days unless expressly agreed and not grossly unfair to the creditor.
• Verification periods are capped too. Where the contract provides for acceptance or verification of the goods, that procedure is limited to 30 days unless otherwise expressly agreed and not grossly unfair. A buyer cannot park an invoice indefinitely in "pending approval".
• Public authorities get less latitude, not more. Their payment period is 30 days, extendable to 60 only in the narrow cases the directive names.
• Interest cannot be contracted away. A term or practice excluding statutory interest is treated as grossly unfair, and so is a term excluding compensation for recovery costs. A waiver clause in a customer's standard purchase terms is weak ground for them to stand on.

What stops you actually collecting it

The entitlement is strong. Collection is where it falls apart, and it usually falls apart for one of these reasons.

• Nobody raised it. The commonest outcome by far. Interest that is never invoiced is never paid, and after the debt is settled it is awkward to go back for it.
• The due date is disputed. If the invoice never carried a due date, or the terms are silent, you are arguing about when the clock started before you can argue about interest.
• The rate used is wrong. An ECB rate applied to a Swedish invoice, or a current rate applied to an invoice that fell due two half years ago, hands the customer an easy objection.
• The relationship is worth more than the interest. A real commercial judgment, and often the right one. It is still worth calculating the number before you waive it, because waiving something you have quantified is a decision and waiving something you never worked out is an accident.
• It is applied inconsistently. Charging interest to one customer and not another turns it into a negotiating position instead of a policy, and customers compare notes.

How to actually charge it

Statutory interest works when it is predictable, automatic and impersonal. Every step below is aimed at removing the moment where someone has to decide whether to charge it.

1. Put the due date on the invoice as a date. Not "30 days". A printed date removes the most common precondition for a dispute. The Net 30 calculator works out the date for any term.
2. State your interest position in your terms. You do not legally need to, because the entitlement is statutory, but a customer who was told in advance argues less.
3. Send a reminder before the due date. Most late payment is a missed payment run, not a refusal. Automated email and SMS reminders catch it before interest is even in play.
4. Apply the interest on a schedule, not by judgment. Decide once what happens at 7, 14 and 30 days past due, then let it run. Automated late fees keep the timing and the arithmetic consistent across every customer.
5. Show it on a statement. Interest presented as a line on a statement of account reads as bookkeeping. The same figure in an email reads as a threat. Automated customer statements do the first version.
6. Record the reference rate you used, and the half year it came from. If the debt is ever litigated or assigned, that one note is the difference between a claim that stands up and a claim that gets re-worked.
7. Offer a payment plan before you write it off. A large invoice that will never be paid at once is often collectable in installments, with interest running. Model it in the payment plan calculator.

Calculating it in Excel

With the invoice amount in A2, the due date in B2, the payment date in C2, the reference rate in D2 and the margin in E2:

• Days late: =MAX(0,C2-B2)
• Statutory rate: =D2+E2
• Interest per day: =A2*(D2+E2)/100/365
• Statutory interest: =A2*(D2+E2)/100*MAX(0,C2-B2)/365
• Total claimable, with the fixed sum in F2: =IF(C2>B2,A2*(D2+E2)/100*(C2-B2)/365+F2,0)
• Look up the right half year rate, with half year start dates in H2:H30 and rates in I2:I30: =LOOKUP(B2,$H$2:$H$30,$I$2:$I$30)

That last formula is the one worth building. Keep one small table of half year start dates, 1 January and 1 July of each year, against the reference rate that applied, and every invoice picks up the right rate automatically instead of picking up today's.

This against the other interest calculators

Four tools cover overdue invoices, and they answer different questions.

If a customer is regularly triggering statutory interest, the interest is a symptom. The pairing worth running is this calculator against DSO: one tells you what a single late invoice is worth, the other tells you whether late is now your normal.

Common mistakes

• Using today's reference rate. The rate is fixed by half year. Today's rate is the right one only if the invoice fell due in the current half year.
• Using one rate across a 1 January or 1 July boundary. Split the period at the boundary and add the two figures. The calculator above flags when your dates cross one.
• Applying the ECB rate outside the euro area. Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden each use their own national reference rate.
• Assuming eight points everywhere. Eight is the floor, not the rule. Several states legislated more, so check before you invoice.
• Charging the fixed sum on an invoice that was not late. Nothing is due until the payment period has passed. Interest and the fixed sum start together.
• Converting 40 euro into local currency and calling that the statutory sum. Where a member state sets the amount in its own currency, that amount is the statutory sum, not the conversion.
• Treating a waiver clause as the end of it. A term excluding statutory interest is treated as grossly unfair under the directive, so it is worth challenging rather than accepting.