GOV.UK Pay
UK government digital payment service providing a REST API for accepting card payments, managing payment links, and processing refunds for government digital services. Built and operated by the Government Digital Service (GDS), GOV.UK Pay enables over 1,500 public sector organisations to take payments securely without managing their own PCI DSS compliance.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles GOV.UK Pay the way a machine reads it — 60 machine-readable artifacts across 5 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — GOV.UK Pay scores 45.1/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 41/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile GOV.UK Pay
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for GOV.UK Pay. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 5
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
GOV.UK Pay Agreements API
The Agreements API from GOV.UK Pay — 3 operation(s) for agreements.
GOV.UK Pay Authorise card payments API
The Authorise card payments API from GOV.UK Pay — 1 operation(s) for authorise card payments.
GOV.UK Pay Card payments API
The Card payments API from GOV.UK Pay — 5 operation(s) for card payments.
GOV.UK Pay Disputes API
The Disputes API from GOV.UK Pay — 1 operation(s) for disputes.
GOV.UK Pay Refunding card payments API
The Refunding card payments API from GOV.UK Pay — 3 operation(s) for refunding card payments.
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Plans
PLANSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 2
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Api Context
JSON-LDcontext Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
GOV.UK Pay API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 46
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
Address
JSON SCHEMAAgreement
JSON SCHEMAAgreementSearchResults
JSON SCHEMAAuthorisationRequest
JSON SCHEMAAuthorisationSummary
JSON SCHEMACardDetails
JSON SCHEMACardDetailsFromResponse
JSON SCHEMACreateAgreementRequest
JSON SCHEMACreateCardPaymentRequest
JSON SCHEMACreatePaymentResult
JSON SCHEMADisputeDetailForSearch
JSON SCHEMADisputeLinksForSearch
JSON SCHEMADisputesSearchResults
JSON SCHEMAEmbeddedRefunds
JSON SCHEMAErrorResponse
JSON SCHEMAExemption
JSON SCHEMAExternalMetadata
JSON SCHEMALink
JSON SCHEMAOutcome
JSON SCHEMAPaymentDetailForSearch
JSON SCHEMAPaymentEvent
JSON SCHEMAPaymentEventLink
JSON SCHEMAPaymentEvents
JSON SCHEMAPaymentInstrument
JSON SCHEMAPaymentLinks
JSON SCHEMAPaymentLinksForEvents
JSON SCHEMAPaymentLinksForSearch
JSON SCHEMAPaymentRefundRequest
JSON SCHEMAPaymentSearchResults
JSON SCHEMAPaymentSettlementSummary
JSON SCHEMAPaymentState
JSON SCHEMAPaymentWithAllLinks
JSON SCHEMAPostLink
JSON SCHEMAPrefilledCardholderDetails
JSON SCHEMARefund
JSON SCHEMARefundDetailForSearch
JSON SCHEMARefundForSearchResult
JSON SCHEMARefundLinksForSearch
JSON SCHEMARefundSearchResults
JSON SCHEMARefundSettlementSummary
JSON SCHEMARefundSummary
JSON SCHEMARefundsResponse
JSON SCHEMARequestError
JSON SCHEMASearchNavigationLinks
JSON SCHEMASettlementSummary
JSON SCHEMAThreeDSecure
JSON SCHEMAScroll within the panel for all 46 ·
Security Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for GOV.UK Pay — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/gov-uk-pay · machine-readable index on apis.io