GOV.UK Pay’s Payment Service Provider

GOV.UK Pay takes payments and processes them using a Payment Service Provider (PSP).

When setting up services on Pay, your PSP will depend on what type of organisation you are:

  • GOV.UK's PSP, Stripe - for local authorities, police and government-owned charitable groups
  • Government Banking's PSP, Worldpay - for central government, arm’s length bodies and NHS

Using our PSP

To get your service live, you need to accept GOV.UK Pay and Stripe contracts. Sign in to your Pay account, and you'll find them in the page footer. The negotiated transaction fees are in the contract.

If you already have a contract with Stripe, you cannot use it with GOV.UK Pay. You need to accept GOV.UK Pay's contract and terms.

Benefits of using our PSP

Speed

With our ready procured PSP, your account can be set up and ready to use immediately. With other PSPs this would normally take at least a month.

You can combine this with our payment links feature to start taking payments in a day, and you don’t need to build a full digital service.

Follow our guide to creating payment links.

Ease

Using our PSP means:

  • we’ve done the procurement for you, saving you time and money
  • account set up is simple and, once your services are live, the GOV.UK Pay team provide 24 hour support
  • you’re not tied into long-term costly contracts, you can stop using GOV.UK Pay and our PSP at any time

Our PSP is available for any public sector organisation to use.

Cost

There are no overhead costs on the account. You don’t pay a management, set up or monthly fee. You just pay the transaction charges. Nothing more.

Transaction fees are commercially sensitive. Details are available in the contract when you sign in to your account.

Setting up a Stripe test account

You can test Stripe’s reporting before your service goes live. You can access the same reports and functionality as a live account, including:

  • transaction fees
  • gross and net payments
  • payments into your bank account

Download the data as a CSV file or by integrating with our reporting API.

Request a Stripe test account from your service's dashboard in the Admin tool.

Setting up Stripe

When you’re ready to go live, select ‘request a live account’ in your test account.

You’ll then:

  • be asked to click and agree to the GOV.UK Pay contract (for non-Crown organisations) and MOU (for Crown organisations) and the Stripe Connected Account Agreement
  • be asked to submit your bank account details, your VAT and company number (if you have one) and details of the nominated responsible person for your account
  • be able to set the description you want the user to see on their bank statement

Receiving your money from Stripe

Payouts are made in a batch into your bank account 2 working days after the payments have been made. The cut-off time for a day’s payout is midnight UTC.

The minimum payout is £1.

The payout from Stripe will appear on your bank statement with a description based on your service’s name.

If you want to change this description, just contact the GOV.UK Pay team.

You can download a report showing the total amount you received from Stripe in each payout and all the transactions that make up that payout.

Paying transaction fees

GOV.UK Pay recoups transaction fees on a ‘net settlement’ basis.

This means that payouts will be made to you with transaction fees already deducted. For example, 15 Blue Badges are purchased on Monday, for £10 each. The transaction fees for each are 16p. You will receive a payout of £147.72 on Wednesday.

Transaction fees and the net amount are shown for each transaction in the CSV and using the API.

There will be an amount for ‘PSP fee’, which is the processing fee that Stripe takes, and ‘Net amount’, which is the amount paid to you with the PSP fee deducted.

If you take a payment for less than the amount of the transaction fee, you’ll have a negative balance.

Processing refunds

Refunds are processed immediately and the funds will come out of your next payout. If you have daily payouts, that will be the next day. As with other transactions, the cut-off time for refunds each day is midnight UTC.

If you have a zero balance in your Stripe account, the refund will still be processed, and you will have a negative balance. The money will come out of the next available payout. If the negative balance continues for longer than 2 months, we will contact you to make a payment to cover the cost.

The refunds may take up to 6 days to reach the user. This is due to the procedures of the user’s own bank and not GOV.UK Pay.

There is no additional charge for refunds, but the transaction fees you have paid on the original payment are not returned.

Chargebacks

If a chargeback happens, we’ll contact you to let you know and ask for evidence to submit to Stripe. The fee for a chargeback is £15 for each disputed payment. There’s no fee for disputes resolved in your favour.

Support

Support for services using Stripe is handled by the GOV.UK Pay team. Find out more about our support process.

How we procured our PSP

The PSP we’ve procured is a direct award on a Crown Commercial Service framework.

The framework follows all OJEU rules and processes. The contract was approved by the Cabinet Office’s Commercial Director.

What next

Take a look at our PSP’s contract in your test account or contact GOV.UK Pay support with any questions.