Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time was between a Universal Credit claim being made and first payment being issued in each month since 5 July 2024.

The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

However, monthly Universal Credit payment timeliness statistics for new claims are published in UC Households 6 - Payment Timeliness New Claims table in the Households on Universal Credit dataset on Stat-Xplore, and are currently available to July 2025.

Users can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest and, if needed, can access guidance on how to extract information. There is also a Universal Credit Official Statistics: Stat-Xplore user guide.