How much does a credit controller earn in the UK?

Recruiter salary guides published in 2026 put a UK credit controller at roughly £28,000 to £35,000, with London and senior roles at the top of that band and above it. The salary is not the cost of the hire, though — employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, equipment and recruitment fees add materially on top, and the fully loaded first-year figure is typically well north of £40,000.

At what size does an agency need a credit controller?

Less about headcount than about the number of open invoices and how concentrated they are. A rough test — if more than about twenty invoices are open at once, or the founder is doing credit control on Sundays, or a single client is more than 30% of what you are owed — the job already exists and somebody is doing it badly rather than nobody doing it at all.

Can a bookkeeper do credit control?

Partly. A bookkeeper who comes in one day a week can send a chase run and reconcile payments, and that is much better than nothing. What one day a week cannot do is notice on the morning a promised payment fails to arrive, which is where most of the value in credit control actually sits.

What do debt collection agencies charge?

Commercial collection is normally quoted as a percentage of what is recovered, with the rate rising steeply with the age and difficulty of the debt, and some agencies charging a placement fee as well. Get written quotes rather than working from a published rate. The important structural point is that collectors are paid to recover old debt, not to stop debt getting old — a different job from credit control.

What a credit controller costs a UK agency, and when you need one

The question usually arrives in the same shape: the founder has spent another Sunday evening in Xero, and wants to know what it would cost to make that somebody else's job.

Here is the arithmetic, with the assumptions stated so you can put your own numbers in, and an honest read on the four options.

What the salary figure leaves out

Recruiter salary guides published in 2026 — Robert Walters and Morgan McKinley among them — put a UK credit controller at roughly £28,000 to £35,000, with London and senior roles at the upper end and beyond.

That is the number people plan with, and it is not the cost. Take a £30,000 salary and add the things that always come with it:

Line	Assumption	Year one
Salary	Mid of the cited range	£30,000
Employer on-costs	20% — NI, pension, holiday cover	£6,000
Recruitment	One agency fee at ~17% of salary	£5,100
Laptop, desk, software seat, phone		£1,500
Total, year one		£42,600
Total, year two onward	No recruitment fee	£37,500

That is £3,550 a month in year one and about £3,125 a month thereafter, before anybody has managed them.

Check the on-costs percentage against current employer National Insurance and pension rates rather than taking 20% on trust — it is a stated assumption here, not a fact, and it moves with fiscal policy. The structure of the sum is the point: the salary is roughly 70% of the true cost of the hire.

What you get for it

A good credit controller is worth considerably more than they cost, and it is worth being precise about why, because the reasons are not the obvious ones.

They look at the whole book every day, which is the thing nobody else in a small agency can do.
They pick up the phone, which is where the real reason for non-payment almost always emerges.
They hold the relationship separately from the account manager, so the person chasing the money is not the person protecting the client.
They exercise judgment: which client gets a gentle nudge and which gets a formal letter, when a dispute is real, when to accept an instalment plan.

The last one is the actual job. Everything else is administration.

What you get for it that you did not want

They need managing. At a twelve-person agency, that is the founder.
Fifteen hours a week of real work, forty hours of salary. The book at a £1M agency does not fill a full-time role, which is why this hire so often becomes an office-manager-plus-credit-control hybrid — and credit control is the half that gets dropped when something urgent happens.
They go on holiday. The book does not.
They leave. And the relationships, the knowledge of who actually pays invoices at each client, and the informal escalation ladder walk out with them, because none of it was ever written down.

The alternatives, honestly

The founder keeps doing it. Free, and the most expensive option on the list. Not because of the hourly rate — because of when it happens. Credit control done in a Sunday-night burst, six weeks after the due date, recovers a fraction of what the same effort recovers spread thinly and on time. The value of a chase is almost entirely in its timing.

A bookkeeper, one day a week. Genuinely useful and cheap. They will run a chase list and reconcile the payments. What one day a week structurally cannot do is notice on the morning a promised payment does not arrive — which is the single highest-value event in credit control, and it happens on the other four days.

A collections agency. Normally priced as a percentage of what they recover, rising steeply with the age of the debt. Get written quotes. Two structural things to understand before you engage one: they are paid to recover old debt rather than to stop debt getting old, and once an account is placed, the relationship with that client is generally over. Right for a genuinely bad debt; wrong as a standing arrangement.

Software. Cheaper than all of the above, and the honest question is what it actually does. Most invoice reminder tools send scheduled emails, which automates the least valuable part of the job — the typing — and none of the judgment. That is a real distinction and it is worth being clear-eyed about.

When the job exists whether or not you fill it

Three tests, any one of which means somebody at your agency is already doing credit control badly rather than nobody doing it:

More than about twenty invoices open at once. Below that a founder can hold the whole picture in their head. Above it, they cannot, and things get missed by default rather than by neglect.
The founder is in the accounting system at the weekend. That is the symptom that predicts everything else.
A single client is more than about 30% of what you are owed. At that level the risk is no longer diversified, and the position needs watching deliberately rather than noticing.

Putting the numbers together

Set the options against each other on annual cost, with the caveat that they do not do the same job:

Option	Approximate annual cost	Watches the book daily	Exercises judgment
Full-time credit controller	£37,500–£42,600	Yes	Yes
Bookkeeper, one day a week	£5,000–£8,000	No	Some
Collections agency	% of recoveries	No	On old debt only
Founder's Sundays	"Free"	No	Yes, too late

The reason a flat monthly subscription can be defensible against a £37,500 salary is not that it is cheaper. It is that the two things being compared do the same job on the same schedule — every invoice looked at every day, chased at the right moment, in your voice, with the promise written down and the broken promise noticed the next morning. A tool that sends reminders on a timer is not in this comparison at all; it is a cheaper way of doing the part that was never the hard part.

That is the test to apply to anything you are quoted, including us: does it do the job every day without being asked, and does it use judgment about tone and disputes? If not, it is administration with a subscription attached.

What that looks like on a real book, with a real agency's numbers: what changed at Aventus.

Every figure here is either cited or a stated assumption you can change. Salary guides move, employer on-costs move with policy, and collection rates are negotiated rather than published — get your own quotes before deciding.