When a client doesn’t pay: what self-employed carers can do
James Bowdler
2 September, 2026
2 min read
The most expensive decision a self-employed carer makes after an invoice goes unpaid is usually the decision to wait. Waiting feels reasonable and polite, and it is the thing that most often turns a debt that could have been recovered into one that never is. This is what carers who have been through it tell us they wish they had done in the first fortnight.
Waiting is the decision that costs the most
Two carers contacted us within hours of each other about the same client. Each was owed somewhere between £3,000 and £4,000 for weeks of night shifts. Both had been asked to hold off from taking the client to court, on the basis that the company was chasing the money on their behalf and might get a better result for everyone at once. Two years later, neither had been paid.
I don’t see the reason why I should lose all that money for nothing.
That advice came from our founder, and it was wrong. Chasing a client on a carer’s behalf is worth doing, and we still do it. It is not a substitute for the carer’s own claim, and it should never be the reason a carer delays one. A company can ask a client to pay. Only the person who is owed the money can make a client answer to a court.
The second cost is the one nobody sees coming. Both stopped taking work through the platform, hurt and no longer trusting it. One could not afford to renew her DBS, so she could not accept new bookings, so she could not earn the money that would have replaced what she had lost. A debt of a few thousand pounds turned into the better part of a year out of the profession. As another carer with more than twenty years behind her told us, it only takes one:
I’ve worked in this industry for over 20 years. This is the first time it’s happened.
Ask for an itemised statement in the first fortnight
The carers who get paid ask early, they ask in writing, and they ask for something specific. Not “when am I getting paid”, which invites a vague reply and buys the client another week. Ask for an itemised statement covering:
- every date worked, with the hours on each date
- the agreed rate for each type of shift: daytime, waking night, sleeping night, live-in day
- the total for the period
- what has been paid, and on what date
- what is outstanding, and the date it will be paid by
Send it as routine admin rather than as an accusation. A client who intends to pay will produce one, or will ask you to. A client who does not intend to pay will avoid it, and the avoidance is itself useful: you now hold a dated written request and a non-answer, which is exactly what a court wants to see later. If your rates are not written down clearly enough to be itemised, fix that before the next booking rather than after: our guide to pricing a live-in day sets out the arithmetic that makes an invoice hard to argue with.
If the money comes from a council
Some of the longest waits we hear about are not refusals at all. They are delays in a stretched system. One carer had been waiting years on a very large sum for council funded work; another was three weeks without pay because a direct payments account had not been topped up after extra hours were approved. In both cases the money was owed and eventually moved, but the carer carried the gap.
Ask at the start of any placement which pot the money comes from, and if it is a direct payment or a council contract, ask the client or their social worker how the payment cycle runs and how much notice a change of hours needs. Keep a dated log of hours and of every chase, ask politely how a request should be worded to move quickly, and agree a realistic date rather than an open one. Our guides to local authority funding for care at home and to what a funding delay actually does to a person explain what is happening on the other side of the wait.
Keep the work where there is a record
Every so often a carer rings us about money owed on a private arrangement made off the platform, agreed at a kitchen table with no paperwork. There is no timesheet, no invoice trail, no independent record of which nights were worked, and often no written rate. We cannot chase what we have no record of, and neither, realistically, can a court.
Booking the visits through the platform is not about loyalty. It is about the fact that the hours, the rate and the invoice exist somewhere other than in your phone. It also matters for cover: work booked through PrimeCarers is covered by PrimeCarers’ insurance, while work arranged outside the platform is not, so for private arrangements a carer needs their own public liability cover. Car insurance is a separate question again, since you need business use, and hire and reward only if you charge for mileage.
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.
What a platform can do, and what it cannot
It is worth being straight about the limits. A carer on her very first booking went almost two months without payment from one client. She rang us while her own child asked about dinner in the background.
Going to two months now without getting paid. They’re not protecting us. This is unfair.
What had happened was mundane and expensive: the client had never set up automatic payment and was being invoiced by hand, so every payment depended on him choosing to act. In cases like that we have sometimes already paid the carer money we have not recovered from the client. We chase, we call, we message, and none of that is the same as having the money.
The change we made after these cases is one carers sometimes find frustrating. A client with unpaid invoices is now blocked from taking on new carers until the balance is dealt with. One carer rang, genuinely angry, because a prospective client had contacted her directly, clearly distressed and needing care that morning, and she could not be sent. The reason was an outstanding balance owed to previous carers. As the account manager put it to her:
We can’t pay you unless they pay us. That’s not a situation we want you guys in.
That is a real cost, and it falls on someone who needs care. We think it is still the right call, because the alternative is another carer working three weeks for nothing.
The small claims route, concretely
Most carers we speak to have never used the county court and assume it is expensive and adversarial. For an unpaid invoice it is usually neither.
- A letter before action. A short letter setting out the dates worked, the rate, the total owed, what you have already asked for, and a deadline (commonly fourteen days) after which you will start a claim. Send it by email and by post, and keep both.
- An online money claim. Claims can be started online through the official money claims service. Anything under £10,000 is normally dealt with on the small claims track, which is designed for people without solicitors. Hearings are informal and the losing side does not usually face large legal costs.
- The court fee. The fee is a proportion of the amount claimed, and you can normally ask for it back as part of the claim, along with interest.
Two things carers often do not know. First, someone saying they cannot pay today does not extinguish the debt: circumstances change, and a claim that has been properly filed is still there when they do. Second, there is a time limit on chasing a debt through the courts, commonly around six years, and shorter in some parts of the UK than others. A debt you have sat on for two years is not one to leave much longer. If you are near that point, or the sums are large, take advice from a solicitor or a free advice service rather than guessing.
One more thing that worries carers unnecessarily. If a council team asks you for your billing information because there are questions about how an older person’s money has been handled, send it promptly. Carers assume this makes them look like part of the problem. It does the opposite: an itemised statement of hours worked and money owed is evidence, and it is evidence in your favour.
When the debt and the paperwork collide
This is the compounding effect that makes an unpaid invoice so much worse for a self-employed carer than for an employee. Your DBS expires. Your training certificates expire. Renewals cost money, and the money you would have used is sitting in a client’s account. You cannot work, so you cannot earn, so you cannot renew.
Three practical defences. Put your DBS on the update service as soon as you get it, so renewal is an annual subscription rather than a lump sum at the worst possible moment. Keep a small float for compliance costs and treat it as a business expense, alongside the rest of your tax and money admin as a self-employed carer. And if you are close to a renewal date and short because a client has not paid, tell us before you let anything lapse. A lapsed document is far harder to unwind than a late one, and it is the point at which a payment problem quietly becomes a career problem.
What to do next
- Send the itemised statement request today, in writing, for every unpaid period, however awkward it feels. Keep the sent copy.
- Get a date in writing. Not “soon”, not “after the weekend”. A date. If you are given one and it passes, that is your signal to escalate, not to give it another fortnight.
- Send a letter before action when the date passes, with a fourteen day deadline, and then start the online claim if it is ignored. Take advice first if the sum is large or the situation is complicated.
- Do not agree to wait without a date, whoever is asking, including us. Someone chasing on your behalf is helpful. It is not a reason to give up your own claim.
- Protect your compliance paperwork first, before anything else in your budget. Everything else can be rebuilt if you can still take work.
If you are rebuilding after a bad debt, the become a carer section has the practical groundwork, and there is no shame in leaving a placement well rather than working on unpaid out of loyalty. Nobody should be asked to work for free.
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James Bowdler
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