Barclaycard's own repayment estimator sits in small type near the bottom of every statement, and it will tell you, in plain figures, how many years a balance clears if you only ever pay the minimum. Most cardholders never scroll that far down the page. They see the number the issuer has already worked out for them, pay it, and assume the debt is under control simply because the payment went through on time.
How the minimum payment is actually worked out
There is no single UK-wide formula, but the pattern across the big issuers is close enough to call a standard. Most cards set the minimum at somewhere between 1% and 2.5% of the outstanding balance, plus that month's interest and any fees, with a flat floor of roughly £5 to £25 whichever figure is higher. Bank of Scotland, for example, quotes 2.5% of the balance or £5 plus interest and charges, whichever is more. Halifax and NatWest use near-identical structures. The floor matters more than people expect: on a small balance, say under £500, you can end up paying almost nothing off the principal for months because the flat minimum barely covers the interest that's accruing underneath it. A £400 balance at a typical 25% APR generates roughly £8 of interest in a single month, which means a £25 flat minimum only chips about £17 off the actual debt — and that's before any late-payment or over-limit fee gets added to the same statement.
The number also recalculates every statement, which is the part that quietly works against you. As the balance falls, the 1–2.5% slice falls with it, so the minimum payment shrinks month by month even while the debt is still very much alive. It feels like progress because the number on the direct debit gets smaller. It isn't progress in any meaningful sense — the shrinking payment is simply the formula tracking a shrinking balance, and at the rates most UK cards charge in 2026, that balance shrinks at a crawl.
What paying only the floor really costs
Take £3,000 on a card charging 24.65% APR, which is roughly the Bank of England's estimate of the average UK credit card rate as of late 2025 and holding close to that through 2026. Model it with a minimum set at 1% of the balance plus interest, floored at £25 — a fairly typical structure — and the balance takes just over fifteen years to clear. Total interest paid along the way comes to around £5,000, considerably more than the original £3,000 borrowed. The person making those payments isn't doing anything reckless. They're following the number printed on their statement every single month, on time, without missing a payment once.
That gap between "paying as instructed" and "actually clearing the debt" is exactly why UK credit card debt is forecast to reach roughly £79 billion by December 2026, with the country paying out something like £19.3 billion in credit card interest over the year — about £342 for every adult in the UK, according to Updraft's 2026 analysis of Bank of England lending data. None of that money touches the principal. It just services it.
The FCA's persistent debt rules, and why they exist
Making only the minimum payment is not, by itself, a sign of financial difficulty under the Financial Conduct Authority's rules — CONC 6.7.3AR is explicit on that point. What the regulator does track is a specific definition of persistent debt: a customer who, over an 18-month period, has paid more in interest, fees and charges than they've repaid of the actual borrowing. Those rules came out of the FCA's 2016 Credit Card Market Study and took effect from 1 March 2018, with full compliance required by September that year.
Once a firm identifies that pattern, a clock starts. None of it requires a phone call or a branch visit to trigger — most issuers action it automatically once an account crosses the threshold, flagged by the same back-office system that already tracks minimum payments every month. At 18 months, the lender has to contact the customer and prompt a change in repayment, warning that the card could eventually be suspended if nothing changes. At the 12-month mark specifically, persistent-debt accounts stop being offered automatic credit limit increases — the FCA estimates that alone affects around 1.4 million accounts a year. The harder deadline sits at 36 months: by then, the provider must offer a realistic route to clear the balance, and if the customer genuinely can't afford it, the firm is required to show forbearance, which can mean reducing, waiving or cancelling interest and fees outright. That forbearance option matters more than it sounds, since it converts a debt that's technically still growing under interest into one shrinking against an actual repayment plan, often for the first time since the account was opened.
It's a slower, quieter form of consumer protection than most people picture when they hear "regulation" — no fines splashed across headlines, just a set of trip-wires built into the back office of every UK card issuer. The 18-month letter itself tends to follow a near-identical template across providers: it names the persistent-debt trigger directly, states what happens if nothing changes, and — this is the part worth actually reading rather than filing away — usually includes a suggested higher monthly payment figure calculated to clear the balance within a set number of years. Ignore that letter twice in a row and the account moves closer to suspension, not further away from it.
The moves that actually change the outcome
A 0% balance transfer card is the better option here, not grinding away at 24–30% APR while telling yourself you'll deal with it later. Cards from the likes of MBNA, Barclaycard and Virgin Money regularly offer 0% periods stretching well past a year, usually for a transfer fee somewhere between 2.5% and 3.5% of the amount moved. On a £3,000 balance, that's roughly £75–£105 upfront against thousands in interest saved if you use the interest-free window to actually pay the balance down rather than just parking it there.
Two habits matter more than any card choice, though: pay above the calculated minimum by a fixed amount every month, and pick a specific date to review the balance rather than letting the direct debit run on autopilot indefinitely.
- Round every minimum payment up to a fixed number — £50, £75, whatever fits — rather than letting it drift down as the issuer's formula recalculates each statement
- If you're juggling more than one card, the avalanche method (paying the highest-APR card first while holding the rest at minimums) saves the most money, though some people stick with the snowball method — clearing the smallest balance first — because the psychological win of closing an account keeps them consistent, and that's a legitimate trade-off, not a mistake
- Check whether a credit builder card or a store card is quietly running a higher APR than your main card, since retailers routinely price these at 30–40%, well above the mainstream average
For balances too large to fit inside a typical transfer limit — most 0% deals cap the amount you can move at whatever your new credit limit turns out to be, which is rarely more than the card you're leaving — a fixed-rate debt consolidation loan from a mainstream lender is usually cheaper than continuing to revolve credit card debt at 24%-plus. The loan rate won't always beat a card's introductory 0% period, but it will almost always beat what that same card reverts to once the promotional window closes, and a fixed term forces an actual end date onto the debt instead of leaving it open-ended.
When sticking with the minimum genuinely makes sense
None of this means minimum payments are always the wrong call. If cash flow is tight in a given month and the alternative is missing a payment entirely, paying the minimum on time protects your credit file far more than skipping it does — a missed payment shows up as a default marker and does real, lasting damage, whereas an on-time minimum payment, even a small one, keeps the account in good standing. The mistake isn't paying the minimum occasionally. It's treating the minimum as a repayment strategy rather than what it actually is: the smallest amount that keeps the lender from marking you in arrears.
Getting off the treadmill
Start with the number your provider isn't advertising: ask for, or calculate, how long your specific balance takes to clear at your specific APR under minimum-only payments. Most banking apps now show this front and centre precisely because the FCA pushed issuers to make the cost visible rather than buried in a footnote. Once you've seen the real timeline — fifteen years on a modest balance is not unusual — a £50 or £75 top-up on top of the minimum stops looking optional and starts looking like the only sensible response to what the number is actually telling you.