The week your money doesn’t come: a payment checklist for self-employed carers

Almost every carer who rings us frightened about money is in one of five situations. From where you are standing, an empty account, they look identical. They are not: one is sorted in an afternoon, another needs a different phone call altogether. The first job is not to chase harder, but to work out which one you are in.

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The chain your money travels down

Between the visit you worked and the money in your account there are about six links. The visit is recorded and accepted on the platform. The client is billed for it in that week’s run. Their payment clears. The payout run picks it up. It reaches the payment processor with your verified bank details attached. Then it lands.

Break any one of those and it looks the same from your side: no money and no explanation. It does not look the same from ours. Which link broke decides who you need to speak to and how long it will take.

Nobody explains this plumbing when you take your first booking. A carer left unpaid for weeks after her first job told our team:

“I’m just panicking. I don’t know how you work, because this was my first job I did.”

That is why carers spend a fortnight frightened instead of ten minutes diagnosing.

Five ordinary causes, and how to tell them apart

1. The visit was never accepted

The most common cause and the most fixable. A visit that was worked but never accepted or confirmed on the platform is invisible to billing. Nobody has refused to pay you. Nobody has been asked to.

Open your visits for the weeks in question and count them against what you actually worked. Anything missing or unaccepted is your answer. Send support the dates and the record can be corrected, though the money will normally come with the next scheduled run rather than that day.

It matters for cover, too. Work booked through PrimeCarers is covered by PrimeCarers’ insurance; work you arrange privately outside the platform is not, so for that you need your own public liability cover. Car insurance is separate again: business use, and hire and reward only if you charge for mileage. Our page on insurance for self-employed carers sets out what you need.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

2. The client pays manually rather than by card

Some clients have no card on file. A few prefer bank transfer; for others the care is paid from a council direct payment, which moves on its own timetable. Nothing has gone wrong, but nothing is automatic either: the payment travels at the speed of a person sitting down to pay an invoice.

One carer, unpaid since the previous week after twice being told it was in hand, said she would not attend her next shift unless it was settled that day.

“I will need my money in my account before today runs out, because I’m not happy with this. I don’t work this way.”

She was entitled to say it. But a manual payment is moved by different people: accounts and the client’s account manager, on a timescale of days rather than hours. Ask directly whether the client is on manual invoicing, when the invoice went out, and when it falls due.

3. The client’s card failed

Cards expire. Banks decline. A limit gets hit on the wrong day. From your side this is silent, and it is the cause most likely to swallow weeks, because everybody assumes the problem is elsewhere.

One carer spent most of a long, tense call making us reconcile weeks of visits and payments line by line before the shortfall was traced to a single failed card payment. We should find that before she does. When we have not, the shortcut is one question: has anything failed on the client’s account? If the failure is at their end rather than yours, ask whether we will pay you and chase the client separately. That is what happened.

4. Your payout account was never properly linked

Everything on the platform says you have been paid. Nothing has reached your bank. Nine times in ten the payout setup with our payment processor was never finished: an identity check left half done, a verification email never opened, a sort code out by one digit.

A carer found exactly this at the end of a working week with nothing in her account. She was, in her own word, “stranded”. One call and a colleague walking her through the setup fixed it.

One of our team describes the processor as a box that holds the money until it knows precisely where to send it. Until your details are verified, the box will not open. Check your email, spam folder included, for anything asking you to finish a step, and read your bank details back character by character. It is usually fixed the same day, and the money follows on the next run. If you have just signed up, recheck the setup steps for working as a self-employed carer.

5. Your first week straddled the billing cycle

This is the underpayment that is not one. Payments run on a weekly cycle with a cut-off. Start mid-week and your first payment covers only the days that fell inside that cycle, so three or four days show up where you expected seven. The rest is not missing. It is in the next one.

A carer working full time with a new client put it to us as a worry rather than a complaint: “It worries me that there’s an error. How does that happen?” It happens once, at the beginning. Cut-off and payment days do change, so check the current carer help pages rather than what you were told last year, and expect a part week first.

When the money has not arrived at the top of the chain

The five above are plumbing. Sometimes the answer is different: the money has not reached the client yet.

Council direct payments are the common version. Hours being approved and the funds landing in the account are two separate events, and with council teams under pressure they can be weeks apart. One carer working nearly full time for a young disabled client went three weeks without pay because the account was never topped up after her extra hours were agreed.

What helps, in order: ask your coordinator which stage it is at, approval or transfer, and get a date; ask them to chase, and whether a partial payment can be released meanwhile; then drop back to the hours the existing budget definitely covers until it is settled. Our guide to local authority funding for care at home explains the route the money takes, and what a funding delay does to a person is worth reading before you decide a client is messing you about. Usually they are more stuck than you are.

The other version is a client or family who is simply not paying. Stop the meter early. One carer who had covered a single client almost single handed for years told us the arrears had reached tens of thousands of pounds. “I’m tired,” she said. It accumulates one unpaid week at a time, because stopping feels like abandoning someone. Our piece on what to do when a client does not pay sets out the steps that work.

When it stopped with us

Not every delay is a client’s fault or a step you missed. Some of the worst weeks carers have had with us were ours.

When we moved the platform onto new systems, some carers went weeks without being paid correctly. A live-in carer rang with a placement ending and no way to get home. “I’ve got £10 in my bank account,” she said, and she and our agent rebuilt her hours across two clients from memory and bank statements. Our piece on the gap between placements is about planning for that cliff before it arrives.

In another case our founder went through weeks of visits with a carer on the phone, traced the cause, accepted that the company had dropped it while he was away, and paid her from company funds while chasing the client separately. That is what good looks like when the fault is ours: a named person, the amount traced, the money moved, and confirmation it has landed. One colleague transferred a missing week during a call and sent a screenshot so the carer could watch it arrive.

Emergency advances do happen: a carer worried about petrol for an overnight shift was paid one against work she had already completed, recovered from her next normal payment. Ask, but treat it as goodwill rather than a facility to plan around, and ask early. “This is out of the generosity of our hearts,” our founder told her.

What to say when you call, and what to ask for

Bring the facts: the dates you worked, the hours, which client, and the amount you expected. Reconstructing that live on the phone turns a five minute call into a forty minute one. Then ask the diagnostic question rather than the desperate one. Not “where is my money”, but “which link is it stuck at: the visits, the client’s payment, or my payout account?” Ask for a name, a figure and a date. “We’ll look into it” is none of those.

Say plainly what your deadline is. Carers apologise for this constantly and should not. One told us: “I have to pay my bills, I have to pay my rent, I have to buy the food.” Another put the whole principle in six words: “Nobody’s going to work for free.”

Two things not to do. Do not go quiet and let it build: a week is a problem, six weeks is a crisis, and the fix is the same either way. And if you are going to stop attending, tell us before you tell the client, so cover can be arranged. Keep your own record of hours and payments. You need it for your tax return anyway, and it lets you prove your side in minutes: our guide to handling tax and money as a self-employed carer covers what to keep.

What to do next

1. Count your visits for the weeks in question against what you worked, and flag anything missing or unaccepted.
2. Search your email for the payment processor, spam included, finish anything it has asked for, and check your bank details.
3. Call or message with dates, hours and amounts ready, and ask which of the five causes it is.
4. Ask for a name, a figure and a date. If the money is stuck above the client, agree a reduced but funded pattern of hours instead of working on unpaid.
5. Check the current carer help pages for this week’s cut-off and payment timings, and check your pay weekly rather than monthly.

Related reading

• When a client doesn’t pay: what self-employed carers can do
• When the money is late: what a funding delay does to a person
• How to price a live-in day: the arithmetic nobody teaches
• How to pay tax as a self-employed carer
• Addressing the underpayment of carers