Open the transfer in your app and copy the reference number. Then write to your bank in the app’s own message channel, right now. Say you sent to the wrong account, give the reference, and give the account number you actually meant to pay. Under UK rules, your bank has two working days from that report to start trying to recover the money. Every hour past that is time the person on the other side has to move it out.
Which of the four cases you are in
Before your bank calls back, work out which one this is.
The account number is not a live account. No one holds it. The payment cannot land and comes back to your app on its own. On a UK Faster Payment the reject is usually quick, often the same day; on an international transfer the bounce can take a week or two. Nothing to do but watch the app.
You typed a real account number belonging to someone else. The money went. It is sitting in a real account with a real person on it. The money only comes back if that person agrees to return it. Your bank cannot force them. The police cannot force them either, unless there is evidence of fraud.
Wrong sort code, correct account number, or the other way round. Behaves like the first case if the routing hits no live account, and like the second case if it does. You will not know which until your bank comes back to you.
You picked the wrong saved payee. The account number is right. The person is wrong. Same ceiling as the second case.
What your bank can actually do
Your bank writes to the receiving bank and asks it to freeze the money. The receiving bank has no fixed short deadline to reply; the whole process is meant to run within the twenty-working-day refund window. If the person on the other side agrees to return it, you should see a refund within twenty working days of your first report. Twenty working days is the best case, not a promise.
If they refuse, your bank has no lever left. Nor does the Financial Ombudsman. The one route still open is a small claims court case in England and Wales, which covers sums up to 10,000 pounds. Slow, uncertain, and worth knowing about only so you can decide whether to pursue it.
A note on Confirmation of Payee, the name check UK banks run before a transfer. If it warned you the name was only a close match, say “Tom Wood” against “Thomas Wood”, and you sent anyway, that is how the check is designed to work. It is a warning, not a block.
When to escalate
If twenty working days have passed and nothing has come back, put your complaint in writing and give your bank eight weeks. After that, take the case to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The ombudsman looks at whether your bank followed the rules and handled the case in time, and can order the bank to compensate you for poor handling. It cannot force the person on the other side to give the money back.
If you are sending from outside the UK
Inside the euro area, a bank transfer can be recalled through the sending bank. The receiving bank has fifteen working days to respond, and from 2025 only one recall attempt is allowed per transfer. In the US, reversing a bank-to-bank transfer is tightly limited by the network’s rules and usually needs the receiving bank’s cooperation. On a cross-border international wire, each bank in the chain can say no to cancelling it. The receiver can still refuse. The shape is the same everywhere. The money can be asked for. It can rarely be pulled.
While you wait
Do not send another transfer to the correct account while the wrong one is still open. Wait for the first one to bounce back or to be formally written off. A fresh transfer on top of an unresolved one muddies the trail and makes any later complaint harder to prove.
Corrections
- 2026-07-31: An earlier version said “the receiving bank has two working days to reply” after being asked to freeze a misdirected payment. No primary source supports a two-working-day response window for the receiving bank; the two-working-day figure in the UK misdirected-payments code applies to the sending bank starting recovery. The sentence has been rewritten to say the receiving bank has no fixed short deadline and that the whole process is meant to run inside the twenty-working-day refund window.
- 2026-07-31: An earlier version said a Faster Payment bounce to a non-existent account “usually takes a day”. That figure was stated as fact without a Pay.UK / FPS source. The sentence has been softened to “the reject is usually quick, often the same day” – a plainer operational estimate, without the false precision.