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 |
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.
