Payday Loans Online

Getting you through to payday

The washing machine breaks down, the car won't start, or something in the house needs fixing – and payday is still a couple of weeks away. Everyday problems like these are exactly what a payday loan is for: a small amount, borrowed for a short time, to cover a cost you couldn't plan for.

Payday loans are usually for smaller amounts, often £100 to £1,000. Today most are spread over up to three months rather than repaid in one go, and you can normally pay early if you're able to.

What it could cost, in plain English

Payday loans can be an expensive way to borrow, so almost all of them come under the Financial Conduct Authority's price cap for high-cost short-term credit. Your lender will show you the exact cost before you agree to anything, and it may well be less than these limits. But on a loan covered by the cap, it's worth knowing the most you could ever pay:

An example

Say you borrow £200. At the very most:

Who can apply

You can apply if you:

• are aged 18 or older
• are a UK resident
• have an income of some kind coming in
• have a UK bank account.

Applying and getting your money

• Apply online, 24 hours a day. The application only takes a few minutes, and you'll get an instant decision online.
• Confirm it's you. If a lender approves your loan, they'll send a security code to your phone or email.
• Get your money. Once you reply with the code, the money is usually sent straight away – often within 15 minutes of approval.

Our team is here Monday to Saturday, 9am to 6pm, if you need help. Applications are handled automatically around the clock, so you don't have to wait for us to be open.

A short history of payday loans in the UK

Payday lending arrived in Britain in the mid-1990s through cheque-cashing shops. The first loans worked by "deferred presentment": you wrote a cheque dated for your payday, walked out with the cash, and the shop held on to your cheque until the money was in your account.

Cheque Centre started lending in 1996 – the earliest of the 11 major UK payday lenders looked at by the Competition and Markets Authority in its 2015 investigation into payday lending.

• Mid-1990s Cheque cashers begin holding post-dated cheques in return for cash – the first UK payday loans.
• 1996 Cheque Centre starts lending from its stores.
• 2000s Payday loans grow on the high street and then move online, with decisions made in minutes.
• 2008 The financial crisis hits and banks become far more cautious about lending. Many people turn to lenders outside the banks instead, and payday lending grows rapidly – by 2012, around 10.2 million payday loans worth £2.8 billion were being made each year.
• 2012–2014 As part of its response to the crisis, the Government overhauls financial regulation. The Financial Conduct Authority is created, and takes over consumer credit in 2014.
• 2014 The FCA limits how often a loan can be rolled over. Cheque Centre stops offering single-repayment payday loans and moves to instalments.
• 2015 The FCA's price cap comes in: never more than 80p a day per £100, a £15 limit on late fees, and never more than double back.
• Today Most payday loans are spread over up to three months, can usually be repaid early, and are arranged online in minutes.

Why payday loans got such a bad name

Before the Financial Conduct Authority took over in 2014, payday loans were rarely out of the headlines – and some of the criticism was deserved. Some lenders lent to people who couldn't afford it, rolled loans over again and again, and piled on late charges. That's exactly why the rules changed. But two things also made the picture look worse than it really was.

APRs that look enormous on short loans

An APR shows the cost of borrowing as a yearly rate. That works well for a loan that lasts a year or more, but on a loan of a few weeks it produces some startling numbers.

Here's why. Paying £24 to borrow £100 for 30 days works out at an APR of about 1,270%. Paying the same £24 to borrow £100 for a whole year is an APR of 24%. It's the same £24 either way – the APR is so much higher on the short loan because it treats the cost as if you were borrowing at that rate for a full year.

None of this makes a payday loan cheap. It's still an expensive way to borrow, and the APR is an important way to compare loans of the same length. Just make sure you also look at the total you'll repay in pounds.

The 5,853% APR

The figure that came to sum up the pre-FCA payday years belonged to Wonga, then the UK's best-known payday lender. In 2013, while payday lending was still overseen by the Office of Fair Trading, its representative APR reached 5,853%. Soon after the FCA took over in 2014, the Advertising Standards Authority banned one of its TV adverts for suggesting that the APR wasn't relevant to a short-term loan. Wonga went into administration in 2018.

Impossible to miss

Payday lenders were everywhere. Ofcom found that 397,000 payday loan adverts were shown on UK TV in 2012, up from just 17,000 in 2008 – the average adult saw 152 of them that year. The biggest online lenders spent heavily: we know first-hand that in 2013 QuickQuid, then run by CashEuroNet UK LLC, was spending more than £1 million a month on UK TV advertising alone. With adverts on that scale alongside Wonga's, payday loans were never far from the public eye – or the headlines.

Being there at the end isn't the same as causing it

For many people, a payday loan was the last credit they could get before their money problems became serious. So when someone ended up insolvent, a payday loan was often among their debts – and it was easy to present it as the cause, rather than one of the last places people turned when other debts had already built up.

Need to borrow more, or spread the cost for longer? Take a look at our 12 month loans, or compare all our loans.