How long does a bank transfer take?
When you make a bank transfer, you want to know exactly how long it will take for the recipient to see your money in their account. Fortunately, its relatively easy to get the inside track on UK bank transfer times. Find out everything you need to know about making a bank transfer to domestic and international accounts. Before you make the transfer, youll need to ensure you have access to a couple of key pieces of information. These include:  The date that you want payment to be made  The name of the business/organisation/individual that you are paying  The six-digit sort code  The eight-digit account number  A payment reference (so that the recipient knows what the payment is for)  Once youve got all of this information ready to go, you can begin the process of making a bank transfer. Bank transfers in the UK are powered by Faster Payments. As you may expect from the name, Faster Payments was introduced to improve the speed of normal bank transfers. As a result, most bank transfers are instantaneous, although in some cases, payment can take up to two hours. Its important to remember that while Faster Payments aims to provide you with these types of bank transfer times, theres no guarantee that your payment will be cleared on the same day. You should also remember that the upper transaction limit for Faster Payments is around 250,000. If youre sending a larger sum, you may need to use CHAPS payment instead (a bank-to-bank payment system intended for high-value transfers). CHAPS guarantees same-day payment, provided that the payment is processed before the daily cut-off point. Then, theres Bacs payments, which take a little longer  generally speaking, Bacs requires three days to process a payment. In most cases, yes, bank transfer times are instantaneous. However, banks will occasionally hold onto your funds for several days. There are a wide range of reasons that this could be the case, but its most likely to happen to anomalous or especially large transactions. So, if youve made a transfer thats noticeably larger than the amounts you usually transfer, its no reason to panic. In most cases, the bank is simply doing their due diligence. To find out exactly whats happening to your money, give the bank a call and they should be able to explain whats going on. If youre making an international bank transfer, your bank transfer time is likely to be a little longer. This is because, unlike the UK, international transfers are processed by SWIFT or SEPA. Your specific bank transfer time will vary depending on a range of factors, including fraud prevention, different currencies, different time zones, and bank holidays/weekends. In general, the bank transfer time will be around one to five working days. Final word on bank transfer times  As weve demonstrated, the standard UK bank transfer time varies depending on the location of the recipient. While domestic transfers are likely to be processed within two hours  and in most cases, considerably less time than that  international transfers may take a little longer. We can help  GoCardless helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of admin your team needs to deal with when chasing invoices. Find out how GoCardless can help you with ad hoc payments or recurring payments.