Continuous Payment Authorities Nobody Can Cancel

If card payments are still leaving the account after the person has died — or weeks after you thought you had closed everything down — the reason is almost always the same. These are not direct debits. They are continuous payment authorities, and they behave differently from a direct debit in the one way that matters here: they do not stop when you expect them to.

A continuous payment authority, usually shortened to CPA and sometimes called a recurring card payment, is set up when someone gives a company their debit or credit card number rather than their sort code and account number. Streaming services, gym memberships, insurance paid monthly, app-store billing and a great many subscriptions all collect this way. The authority is attached to the card, not to the bank account, and that single fact explains most of what goes wrong afterwards.

So to stop card payments after someone dies you usually have to do two separate things — tell the bank, and cancel with each company individually — and, because a cancelled card does not reliably end a CPA, you may also need to put an instruction to the bank in writing. This guide explains why the payments survive a closed account, which ones keep going, and the exact wording that obliges a bank to stop them.

The short answer: why the payments keep coming

When a bank is told that someone has died, it freezes the sole accounts and stops the cards. That ends the direct debits and standing orders that were being taken from those accounts. It does not, on its own, end a continuous payment authority — because a CPA is not held by your bank. It is a standing instruction the person gave directly to the company, and the company holds it against the card number. The company keeps asking for the money.

If the card is simply stopped, some of those requests fail. But not all of them. The card networks operate quiet updater services that hand a company the replacement card number when a card is reissued or expires, so a subscription designed never to lapse can carry straight on. And where the payment was pointed at an account that has not been frozen — a joint account the survivor still uses, for instance — the money leaves cleanly, exactly as before.

That is the honest answer to "the account is closed, so why are payments still coming out". The instruction never lived in the account you closed. It lives with the company, keyed to a card, and it has to be switched off from more than one direction.

Continuous payment authority or direct debit — the difference that matters

The two look similar on a statement, but they are set up and cancelled in completely different ways.

A direct debit is created when you give a company your sort code and account number and sign a mandate. It runs on the Direct Debit scheme, it is listed among the direct debits on your account, you can cancel it in seconds through the bank or the app, and it carries the Direct Debit Guarantee. When a bank is notified of a death and freezes the account, the direct debits taken from that account stop. We set out which ones drop away and when in the guide to which direct debits stop the day the bank is told.

A continuous payment authority is created when you type a long card number into a company's website or app. It runs across the card networks rather than the Direct Debit scheme, it is not listed among your direct debits, and it is governed by different rules. This is precisely why a family that carefully asks the bank to "cancel all the direct debits" can still watch money leaving the account: the recurring card payments were never on that list to begin with.

A quick way to tell them apart: if the payment was set up by giving a sort code and account number, it is almost certainly a direct debit. If it was set up by entering card details, it is almost certainly a continuous payment authority, and it needs the extra steps below.

Why cancelling the card does not stop them

The instinctive move — cancel the card and the payments will die with it — often does not work, for two reasons.

The first is the card updater services run by the card schemes. They exist so that a subscriber's payments do not fail when a card is lost, stolen, reissued or renewed: the scheme passes the new card number to the company behind the scenes. It is a convenience in normal life and a trap in bereavement, because it means a reissued card can keep feeding the very subscriptions you are trying to end.

The second is that even a cleanly cancelled card does not always bring peace. A company whose payment fails will often try again, and again, and some treat a run of failed attempts as arrears — adding charges, sending reminders, and eventually passing the "debt" to a collections process in the name of someone who has died. Cancelling the card, on its own, can turn a tidy subscription into a messy chase. The card is simply the wrong lever to pull by itself.

The wording that obliges the bank to stop

This is the part worth getting exactly right, because it is where you have a firm legal footing.

You have the right to withdraw your consent to a continuous payment authority, and once you do, the bank must stop the payments. Financial Conduct Authority rules require a firm to end a recurring card payment when the account holder — or the person entitled to act for the account — asks it to. The bank cannot insist you sort it out with the company first, and it cannot refuse because the company would prefer the payments to continue.

Give the instruction in writing, and keep it plain: state that you withdraw consent to the continuous payment authority — you can call it a recurring card payment if that is clearer — in favour of the named company, and that you require the bank to refuse any further payment requests against the card and account. Ask for written confirmation, keep it, and check the next statement. If a payment slips through after you have given that instruction, the bank should refund it. Independent guidance on doing this is free from MoneyHelper and Citizens Advice.

Do the same thing with the company itself. Withdrawing consent at the bank stops the collection; cancelling with the company closes the account so it does not simply re-present the charge or, worse, pursue the estate for the "missed" payments. Belt and braces is the right approach here, not overkill.

What happens to these payments after a death

Once the bank is told of the death, the sole accounts are frozen and the cards are cancelled, and in theory the continuous payment authorities against those cards should start to fail. In practice, three situations keep money moving.

The first is a joint account. It is not frozen on one death, and if a subscription was billed to a card on that account, it carries on untouched until someone cancels it. The second is app-store and platform billing — Apple, Google and Amazon hold a card on file and renew bundles and subscriptions automatically; these usually have to be cancelled inside the account, not just at the bank. The third is the slow accrual of failed-attempt arrears, where a company treats a bounced payment as a debt and starts writing to the estate.

There is a larger point underneath all of this. When the payments leaving the account were funding a household that ran on the person's income, stopping the payments is only half the problem — the survivor also has to replace the income those bills were being paid from. Income-replacement cover, such as family income benefit, is built to pay a regular monthly amount rather than a single lump sum, which maps onto exactly this kind of ongoing outgoing. If there is nothing in place, you can get life insurance quotes through an FCA-authorised broker. And for how a survivor's own bereavement income works and the point at which it runs out, see what happens at month 19, when the bereavement payments stop.

Finding the ones that do not show up

Because continuous payment authorities are invisible on the direct debit list, you have to hunt for them, and the hunt is worth doing properly rather than once.

Read the card statements line by line, and go back at least twelve months so that annual renewals — antivirus software, a domain name, a warranty, a yearly subscription — are caught alongside the monthly ones. Search the email inbox for the words receipt, subscription, renewal and payment. Look at the phone: the installed apps and the app-store subscription list are often the only record of what was being paid for. And notify the banks efficiently at the same time using the free service that reaches several of the big providers at once, described in our guide to which banks the free Death Notification Service reaches. That service tells the banks; it does not cancel the subscriptions with the companies, so keep the two jobs separate in your mind.

This is fiddly, unglamorous work at a time when you have no appetite for it. But a subscription left running quietly for a year is money out of the estate that beneficiaries will notice, and a payment that fails and turns into a collections letter is far more distressing to deal with later than to stop now.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The right to withdraw consent to a continuous payment authority comes from Financial Conduct Authority rules that apply across the whole of the United Kingdom, so the wording above works the same in Scotland and Northern Ireland as in England and Wales. What differs is the estate machinery around it. Scotland uses confirmation rather than probate to give an executor authority over the larger sums, and the terminology on the bank's forms differs accordingly.

In Northern Ireland there is no Tell Us Once service, so more of the notifying falls to the family rather than being handled in a single government contact — our guide to notifying everyone after a death in Northern Ireland sets out who you have to tell yourself. None of these regional differences changes your ability to stop a recurring card payment, which rests on the same consumer protection wherever you live. For the wider picture, the hub on bereavement admin, assets and contracts pulls the related tasks together.

Frequently asked questions

What is a continuous payment authority?

It is a recurring payment set up by giving a company debit or credit card details rather than bank details. Subscriptions, insurance instalments and app-store billing usually work this way. The authority sits with the card rather than the account, which is why it behaves differently from a direct debit and why cancelling everything at the bank does not always stop it.

Why do payments continue after the card is cancelled?

The card schemes can pass an updated card number to a company automatically, so replacing or reporting a card does not always end the collection. Attempts can also keep failing and generating arrears and charges in the estate's name. Cancelling with the company and instructing the bank in writing are both needed to bring it to a stop.

How do I make the bank stop them?

Tell the bank in writing that consent to the continuous payment authority is withdrawn and ask it to block any further attempts. Financial Conduct Authority rules require firms to stop such payments when asked, whatever the company says. Keep the instruction and the reply, then check the next statement and ask for a refund of anything that still gets through.