Age-based fee surcharges are additional percentage points added to the base success fee for debts that exceed certain age thresholds. These surcharges are defined in the Standard Debt Collection Agreement (SDCA), which all clients sign before submitting cases to the platform.

The surcharges are:

These surcharges are not cumulative with each other. A debt older than 24 months receives the 15-point surcharge only, not 23 points (8 + 15). The highest applicable bracket applies.

The 8 and 15 point figures come from the version of the Standard Debt Collection Agreement your case is pinned to, and they are what current agreements use. A small number of long-standing relationships are still on the previous agreement version, which carries a higher schedule: 10 points for 12-24 months and 20 points for over 24 months. If your own contract states those figures, or any others, your contract is the one that applies - to the surcharge, to the worked examples below, and to the blended calculation for multi-invoice cases. Your signed agreement is linked at the end of this article.

Debt age significantly affects the likelihood of successful recovery. As debts age, debtors may relocate, change contact information, experience further financial decline, or dispute the validity of older claims. Older debts typically require more intensive collection efforts, including additional skip tracing, debtor research, and outreach attempts.

The age-based surcharges compensate for the increased effort and resources required to recover older debts. This pricing structure maintains Debitura's no cure, no pay model while ensuring that collection partners are appropriately compensated for working on more challenging cases.

The age of a debt is calculated from the original due date of the claim to the date of submission to Debitura.

Your agreement expresses the brackets in calendar months, but the platform measures them in whole days. A case must be more than 365 days overdue for the first surcharge and more than 730 days for the second.

The two do not always land on the same date. A debt due on 15 January becomes more than 365 days overdue around 16 January the following year, and a leap day inside that span moves it again - while a bracket boundary that a strict calendar-month reading would place at the end of a short month can fall a day either side. If a case sits within a day or two of a boundary and the surcharge is not what you expected, boundary arithmetic can explain the difference - though so can the contract version your case is pinned to, and which pricing source applies to it.

The age threshold is evaluated against the moment of submission. A debt submitted at 364 days overdue carries no surcharge; the same debt submitted two days later, at 366 days, carries the first surcharge - 8 points on a current agreement, 10 on the older schedule, and none at all where age-based increases are switched off for the relationship. Waiting after that does not add one - the clock is not still running on a case you have already submitted.

That is not the same as the figure being fixed forever. Recalculation happens when a fact the price was based on changes. For example, correcting the due date: on a single-date claim the age is measured from the due date to the submission date, so a corrected due date gives a different age. Merging cases recomputes a blended uplift across the combined claim and writes it onto the surviving case. And a Debitura admin correcting the age breakdown on a multi-invoice case re-ages it from the corrected mix, because correcting the mix is correcting the submitted facts. What does not move it is the calendar: none of these happen simply because time has passed on a case you already submitted.

Age-based surcharges are added on top of the standard success fee, which is determined by claim amount and jurisdiction (European or International). The final success fee is the sum of the base rate plus any applicable age surcharge.

Example calculation

The standard age calculation described above uses the due date from a single invoice. A blended age uplift, which produces one proportional surcharge across several invoices of different ages, applies in two situations: when a case is submitted through one of Debitura's APIs with age-bucket data supplied alongside the claim, or when an assigned collection partner merges two or more existing cases into one. Age buckets are accepted on all of Debitura's case-creation APIs - the client API, the referral partner API, and the collection partner API's managed-case route. They are not available in the case-creation forms in the portals, so a case created through the web interface always prices from its single due date.

When a creditor submits multiple invoices against the same debtor directly, each invoice becomes an independent case with its own lifecycle, pricing, and communication thread. Each case is priced on its own principal amount and its own due date, so the standard single-invoice age calculation applies to each one.

The blended uplift is a weighted average based on the principal amounts that fall into each age bucket. The formula is:

The result is a proportional surcharge rather than a fixed tier - between 0 and 15 percentage points on the current agreement. When a blended uplift is provided, the platform uses that value directly as the age surcharge instead of calculating age from the due date.

The 8 and 15 in the formula are the surcharge figures from the version of the Standard Debt Collection Agreement your case is pinned to, as described above. If your own agreement states different figures, the formula uses those instead and the upper bound moves with them.

A case with €10,000 total principal has €5,000 from invoices in the 12–24 month range and €5,000 from invoices over 24 months old. The blended uplift is ((5,000 × 8) + (5,000 × 15)) / 10,000 = 11.5 percentage points. This produces a proportional surcharge that fairly represents the mixed ages, rather than applying a single fixed tier.

A case is priced this way only when it reached the platform through one of the two paths described above: an API submission that supplied the age bucket data, or a partner-side merge that recalculated pricing across the merged cases. When no age bucket data is provided and no merge has taken place, the standard single-invoice age calculation applies.

Client

Collection Partner

Referral Partner

API integrators (clients, referral partners, and managing partners)

Debitura

The age-based fee surcharges described on this page are defined in the Standard Debt Collection Agreement. If anything on this page conflicts with the Standard Debt Collection Agreement, the SDCA is the legally binding source of truth.

On the case itself. When the age of a claim changed what the case costs, an Age of claim section appears in the sidebar of the case page - in the Client Portal, in the Partner Portal, and for Debitura staff. Expand it to see:

Reading the "Effect on pricing" number. The section writes the surcharge as a plain percentage, so a 15-point surcharge reads Adds 15% to the success fee. That is the same 15 percentage points described above: it is added to your base rate, not multiplied by it. On a 15% base rate, Adds 15% means a final success fee of 30%, not 17.25%. On a 9.5% base rate, Adds 8% means 17.5%, not 10.26%. The same reading applies to the wording in the pricing tooltip below: Claim age adds 15% to this price means 15 percentage points added to the fee rate, not 15% of the fee itself.

On a claim built from invoices of several different ages the section also draws a band bar with one line per age band, showing each band's amount and its share of the claim. Those shares are a percentage of the claim amount, not of the fee, and they are rounded individually, so they can add up to 99% or 101%.

The section is shown only when the age actually changed the price. It does not appear where age-based fee increases are switched off for that client-partner relationship, or on a claim whose age had no effect on the fee - which under the standard rates above means any claim under 12 months old at submission.

One exception. Some accounts are on an agreed country-specific pricing arrangement instead of the standard rates. Where such an arrangement applies and the claim matches one of its tiers, the age of the claim decides which tier applies rather than adding a surcharge on top - the Effect on pricing row then reads No percentage added - the age chose the price tier instead, and the standard surcharges above do not apply to that case. This is account-specific rather than something that applies to everyone with a debtor in a given country, and a claim that falls outside the arrangement's tiers is priced on the standard rates above, surcharge included. If your case shows that wording and you are unsure what it means for your fee, ask in your support conversation.

In the pricing tooltip. The information icon on the Pricing row of the case sidebar ends with Claim age adds 15% to this price. (or Claim age selected this pricing tier.) and carries a View age details link through to the Age of claim section.

In your signed agreement. Clients and collection partners can review the full terms of age-based surcharges in their signed agreements: