Direct debits and standing orders

Direct debits and standing orders are both ways to manage regular payments, such as bills.

• A standing order is an instruction you give your bank to pay an amount to a person or organisation at regular intervals. You can change or cancel it at any time by contacting your bank.
• To set up a direct debit, you give permission to a business or organisation to collect money from your account, usually for bills or subscriptions. The business will tell your bank, and the amount or payment date can vary. But the business must always notify you before making any changes to payments.

Direct debits are covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee. If the bank, or an organisation you’re paying, makes a mistake your bank must refund the payment to you. Your bank may ask for information to support your claim.

The Direct Debit Guarantee only covers payment mistakes and therefore won't cover a dispute between you and a business or organisation. Most payment mistakes are where the payment date, amount or frequency has changed without you knowing. 

More about standing orders and direct debits on the MoneyHelper website

People come to us when they’re unhappy because their bank or building society:

• made the wrong payment, for example, it was the wrong amount or went out on wrong date
• made a payment without their permission
• continued to make payments after they had cancelled the direct debit or standing order
• missed a payment, which meant bills or subscriptions weren’t paid.

 If this has happened to you, we may be able to help.

Our service is free and easy to use. 

1. Before bringing your complaint to us, you should complain to the company involved.
2. They must look into things and get back to you within 15 days – either with a response to your complaint, or to explain why they can’t yet give you a response. They then have to send you a response within 35 days. If you’re not happy with this response – or they don’t reply in time – you can bring your complaint to us.
3. Our complaint checker will tell you more about some of the things we need to know to get started and help you make sure you’re ready to send us your complaint.
4. Fill in our online complaint form. Your case will be assigned to a case handler who will contact you when they start to investigate.
5. To help us consider a complaint fairly, we may ask you for more information later.

Use our complaint checker

We’ll assess what happened using evidence from you, the financial business and any relevant third parties. We'll also consider:  

• the relevant law, and any regulations and industry codes of conduct that applied at the time 

• your bank’s electronic records to check if there has been an error 
• your account’s terms and conditions
• any discussions you had with your bank about the payments
• the money (or credit facility) available, in the account at the time
• the terms of the direct debit guarantee, if relevant
• what your bank has already done to put things right

Once we’ve investigated, we'll tell you whether we believe you've been treated unfairly or not. And we’ll explain how we reached our decision. 

If we think your bank has done something wrong or treated you unfairly, we'll tell them to put things right.

This will depend on what happened and how it affected you, but could include: 

• refunding any payments you didn’t authorise
• refunding charges and interest your bank has applied to your account because of unauthorised payments or a mistake with a direct debit payment
• compensating you for any money you lost, for example, like charges for late or missed payments
• compensating you for any distress or inconvenience you’ve experienced.

What to expect