Flatmate not paying bills: what to do before it turns into a cold war
Everyone pays the rent, because it is in the contract and it has a date. The trouble starts with the 180 € electricity bill someone covered three weeks ago and nobody remembers any more.
8 min read
You paid the electricity. The internet too, because the contract is in your name. The bathroom supplies last week, you again. A month goes by, then another, and one person in the flat still has not paid their share, and you walk past them in the kitchen every day and say nothing.
This is one of the most common reasons a promising flatshare ends in silence. It is not about the amount: it rarely goes over a hundred euros a head. It is that there is never a good moment to bring it up, so nobody does.
This piece is about organisation, not debt collection. There is not a word here about tenancy agreements, formal notices or small claims: at these amounts that route costs more than it is worth, and it ends the flatshare for certain. What is here is what works between people who will be back in the same kitchen tomorrow.
Why it is always the bills, never the rent
Rent is the biggest item and almost never in dispute. It has a contract, an amount and a date. Everything that happens around it has none of those three things, and that is exactly why it falls apart.
A bill has no date. The electricity invoice turns up every two months, at a random moment, and somebody just pays it so there is no late fee. There is no settling-up day, so there is no day on which anyone feels late.
The same person always fronts it. Contracts are in one name, the card is saved on one phone, and that does not change for the whole tenancy. Six months in, one person is several hundred euros down at any point in the month, and the others have nothing in front of them to show it.
Everyone remembers a different number. You remember 180 € for electricity, he remembers “about a hundred and fifty”, and in the meantime he bought light bulbs and dishwasher tablets. You are both being honest. Without a shared record, the conversation starts with establishing the facts, which is the worst possible place to start.
Bills are sometimes uneven, and nobody agreed how. Who has the bigger room, who works from home and has the heating on all day, who is away for a month. These are all fair questions, but asked after the fact they sound like an excuse. Splitting rules are set at the start, and that is a topic of its own: we covered it in our piece on how to split bills with flatmates.
Three things to check before you say anything
Five minutes here saves a week of awkward silence.
Is your figure solid, and can you show it? Not “roughly that much”, but a number you can break down: an invoice, a photo of a receipt, a transfer confirmation. If you cannot, start there. An amount quoted from memory will always be questioned, and rightly so.
Does he even know he is behind? This happens far more often than you would think, especially when money has been going both ways. If he was paying for the internet over the same period while you were paying for electricity, in his head it may be even, while in yours it is not.
Is it really about the money? If something else has been building for six months, the dishwasher or the noise at night, that amount is only a pretext and the conversation will go somewhere else anyway. In that case it is better to separate the two and start with the other one.
How to raise it: short, with the figure, with a date
Three elements, and each one does something specific.
Short, because a long explanation sounds like an indictment. Two sentences are enough, and every extra one weakens it.
With the figure broken down, not with a total. “You owe me 96 €” invites negotiation. “Electricity 180 €, internet 45 €, split three ways, minus the 30 € of shopping you did” invites nothing, because there is nothing in there to dispute.
With a date, because that is what was missing from the start. Not “whenever you can”, but a specific day, ideally one you propose yourself.
When it happens every month
A one-off arrears and arrears that keep coming back are two completely different things, and confusing them is the most common mistake.
A loan between friends has a beginning and an end: you talk about it once, you close it once, and if the other person does not pay it back, you are into a completely different conversation. Bills have no end. They will be there next month and in six months. Reminding every single time is unsustainable: after the third time you become the person who chases, and there is no getting out of that role.
Three things that actually close the subject, and none of them rely on reminders.
A fixed settling-up day. The same day every month, the first Sunday for instance. Nobody is chasing anybody, the date simply arrives. A deadline agreed in advance is never read as a lack of trust; the same deadline imposed halfway through, on the other hand, is.
Rotating who fronts the money. Where possible, contracts and shopping are shared out between the flatmates. Someone who has fronted money themselves keeps a much closer eye on settling up than someone who only ever pays back.
Splitting at the source, wherever you can. The internet in one name with a standing order from the others, the electricity in someone else's name. What is split at the point of purchase does not have to be settled later.
What not to do
Four reflexes that seem sensible and all cost more than they give.
A note on the fridge. Anonymous and addressed to everyone so as not to offend anyone, so it lands on the people who pay on time and misses the one person it was written for.
Silent tallying. Keeping the account in your head and waiting for the other person to work it out. After two months the amount is large, so is the resentment, and the conversation that would have taken a minute at the start is no longer possible.
Cutting them off. Changing the wi-fi password, hiding the shopping, taking your name off a contract. It is an escalation that brings in not one euro and spreads the conflict to everyone else.
Piling on old grievances. If an unwashed pan from last month comes up in the same conversation, the money stops existing as a subject. One conversation, one subject.
An account everyone can see
Every sentence in this piece is catching up on lost ground. They are fixing a gap that opened much earlier: nobody was keeping a shared account, yourself included.
When the accounting is kept as you go and visible to everyone, the reminder stops being necessary, and not because anyone is putting pressure on anyone. What made the situation unpleasant disappears: there is no person doing the chasing and no person being chased. There is a number that everyone sees the same way and that nobody has to defend.
That is exactly what Kotisso is for. A bill goes in in ten seconds, in the shop, one-handed. Everyone sees their own balance without having to ask anyone, and the balances in a group always add up to zero: there are not two versions of events to reconcile. You can attach a photo of the invoice or receipt to an expense, so the amount is never “from memory”. The split is set once, equally or in shares if the rooms are different sizes. At the end, the app shows the shortest route back to zero, meaning the smallest possible number of transfers.
If the matter is delicate, the whole account can be exported to a spreadsheet or a PDF and simply sent. A document with every line itemised can be discussed calmly; an amount quoted from memory has to be defended.
Common questions
How many times should you remind someone? Twice, at least two weeks apart, and the second time with an offer of instalments. A third message does not bring money, it brings conflict. If the situation comes back every month, the problem is not the reminding, it is the lack of a fixed settling-up day.
My flatmate says he has no money right now. What then? Splitting it into two or three instalments, with dates. That usually unblocks things, because it lets the other person say “I cannot right now” without losing face. An amount broken into instalments comes back far more often than the whole sum.
I use less electricity because I am away during the week. Can I pay less? Yes, and it is entirely normal, as long as you agree it in advance and write it down. A splitting rule set at the start is an agreement; the same rule proposed once the invoice has arrived sounds like an excuse, even when it is justified.
Someone is moving out and leaving an open balance. What do I do? Settle everything before they move out, including the bills that have not arrived yet, based on the last meter reading. Once they have moved out there is no shared daily life left to force the conversation, and the same balance becomes ten times harder to close.
What if it is only fifteen euros or so? The question is not about the amount, it is about how often you think about it. Fifteen euros you come back to every week deserves one sentence; fifty you have genuinely forgotten deserves none.
How do you even work out who owes what between three people? Not by adding it all up in your head: that works with two people and stops working at three. We set out how in a separate piece on who owes whom.