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Hey @Dancer - that's a good question, and one that apparently does cause some confusion with people so you're not alone! From my understanding, UC has a function that allows them to process a "faster payment" to make sure that UC is paid on time if there are bank holidays etc that might prevent payment on time. It'd make sense then that you might usually see this over the festive period when there are 3 bank holidays (Xmas Day, Boxing Day, NYD).

I had a look around for you and found that the Parliament website had the following wording in a question & response back in 2017 on this topic that included the following:

"The faster payment function in Universal Credit ensures that where there are insufficient banking days between the issuance of a UC payment via BACS and the date it is due, the service instead issues the payment using faster payment functionality automatically. This ensures that the UC award is paid to the claimant on time. This function additionally supports claimants receiving an advance payment and therefore no additional support will be required for new claimants over the festive period in respect of new claim advances."

Hope that helps to clear things up! But I'd suggest checking with Citizens Advice to be sure, they've probably seen these before and can give you a more confident answer!