SEPA address deadline delay gives UK payment firms more time

The European Payments Council (EPC) has postponed the deadline for phasing out fully unstructured postal addresses across its five payment-scheme rulebooks. The cut-off had been set for 15 November 2026. A replacement date is due in October 2026. The decision does not cancel the move to structured addresses — it gives banks, payment firms and their customers more time to get there.

This is a European scheme rule, not a UK domestic payment rule. But it reaches into the UK because the country remains within the geographical scope of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), and because UK banks, payment firms and businesses that send or process euro payments through SEPA schemes participate in, or supply data to, schemes governed by EPC rulebooks.

What the EPC has changed

The EPC's Payment Scheme Management Board decided on 9 September 2026 to delay the end date for fully unstructured postal addresses under all five of its 2025 payment-scheme rulebooks. The EPC published the decision on 10 September 2026. Unstructured addresses — address information supplied as free-text lines rather than discrete structured elements such as country and town — will keep working beyond 15 November 2026, but no new end date has been set. The Payment Scheme Management Board is due to reconvene in October 2026 to fix a replacement date using the latest market and industry information, and the EPC expects revised rulebooks, implementation guidelines and supporting guidance to follow by the end of that month at the latest.

The five affected schemes are:

The five 2025 rulebooks entered into force on 5 October 2025, and it was at that point that a "hybrid" address format — combining structured ISO 20022 fields with up to two lines of unstructured text, under the EPC's pre-delay guidance — became available alongside fully structured and fully unstructured formats. Under that same guidance, country and town name were already structured fields. The EPC still expects revised documentation to replace the guidance's superseded deadline and any related provisions once the new date is confirmed, so firms should check the October documents for changes on those specific points rather than treat the guidance as a whole as provisional.

Why the deadline moved

The EPC said its decision was based on data and views gathered from payment service providers, clearing and settlement mechanisms, technical providers and other community stakeholders. The evidence of uneven readiness for the switch came from elsewhere in the industry. Swift, the messaging network used for cross-border payments, announced on 27 August 2026 that it would extend its own structured-address migration timetable, saying readiness remained uneven across regions and that several communities had asked for more time. Separately, the European Central Bank's Advisory Group on Market Infrastructures for Payments (AMI-Pay) considered an industry request at an ad hoc meeting on 20 August 2026, with its outcome dated 26 August 2026, and most participants backed continued temporary acceptance of unstructured addresses to preserve interoperability and limit disruption to corporate customers and supply chains.

The underlying concern, as recorded in that discussion, was that uncoordinated deadlines across Swift and major payment infrastructures could disrupt cross-border payments if some parts of the system moved to structured-only addresses while others could not yet send or receive them. The AMI-Pay record and the EPC scheme deadline are not the same timetable: AMI-Pay's discussion referred to a 14 November 2026 removal date for major market infrastructures, one day before the EPC's separate 15 November 2026 scheme deadline. The two dates concern different parts of the payments chain and should not be read as a single, unified cut-off.

Swift separately reported that more than 98% of payment instructions on its network were being sent in ISO 20022 message format as of 21 September 2026. That figure measures adoption of the ISO 20022 messaging standard generally, not readiness to populate structured postal address fields within those messages, so it should not be read as evidence that the address-format problem is largely solved.

Not a UK domestic rule, but not irrelevant to UK firms

The UK left the EU on 1 February 2020, but it remained within the geographical scope of the EPC's SEPA schemes as a non-European Economic Area (EEA) SEPA country. The EPC's current list of scheme countries, version 8.0, issued on 24 December 2025, names 41 countries in total: 27 EU member states, three other EEA countries, and 11 non-EEA countries including the UK. According to that document, EU/EEA legislation such as the SEPA Regulation is assumed to apply fully and directly only to institutions based in the EU or EEA. UK-incorporated firms authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and/or the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for deposit-taking or payment services may meet the relevant non-EEA authority criterion for scheme participation, subject to the rulebooks' own eligibility and adherence requirements.

That distinction matters for how UK readers should understand this story. The address deadline is a requirement of the EPC's own scheme rulebooks for euro payments routed through SCT, SCT Inst, SDD Core, SDD B2B and OCT Inst. It is not a rule for UK domestic payment systems such as Faster Payments, Bacs or CHAPS, and it does not originate from the FCA, the PRA or any UK legislation. A UK business is affected only to the extent that its bank, payment provider or the wider payment chain it relies on, participates in one of the five affected EPC schemes and requires particular address data from customers as a result.

Structured addresses still bring the same case for migrating

The EPC has been explicit that the delay is not a reversal of direction. It continues to recommend moving directly from fully unstructured to fully structured addresses wherever possible, and says it strongly encourages scheme participants to keep current migration and customer-readiness work going rather than pause it. The EPC attributes several operational benefits to structured address data: more efficient processing, stronger compliance and sanctions screening, better reconciliation, and higher rates of straight-through processing, where a payment can be handled automatically without manual intervention. These are benefits the EPC itself claims, rather than independently measured outcomes, but they explain why the scheme's direction of travel hasn't changed even as the deadline has moved.

For a UK business, the practical risk in treating this as a full reprieve is that individual banks or payment providers may still choose to hold their own, earlier customer-facing deadlines regardless of the EPC's extension. Nothing in the EPC's announcement prevents a provider from doing so, and the packet available for this article does not establish whether UK providers generally intend to keep or relax their own timetables. This is a point firms may need to verify directly with their bank or payment provider, rather than assume the EPC's extension automatically extends any deadline they've already been given.

What to watch in October

The Payment Scheme Management Board's reconvened decision in October 2026 should settle the replacement end date, alongside revised rulebooks, implementation guidelines and supporting guidance that the EPC says will follow by the end of that month at the latest. Firms should check those documents for the EPC's treatment of hybrid addresses and any eventual end date; under the pre-delay guidance, hybrid addresses had no confirmed end date across four of the five schemes and none specified for OCT Inst. No UK-specific breakdown of readiness — by scheme, sector or participant type — has been published, so the scale of the underlying problem for UK-linked payment flows isn't currently quantifiable from public material.

The EPC urges scheme participants to keep migration and customer-readiness work going through the coming weeks rather than pause it. For firms sending or processing euro payments through SEPA schemes, that may mean confirming with banks, payment providers and technical suppliers what address data they currently require, what changes when the new deadline is published, and whether any provider-specific timetable applies regardless of the EPC's own date. The EPC's own published material, rather than any third-party summary, is the definitive source once the October decision and revised documentation are issued.