in arrears

1. 1.

   in debt

   “he fell behind with his mortgage payments”

   “a month behind in the rent”

   “a company that has been run behindhand for years”

   “in arrears with their utility bills”

   Synonymsbehindbehindhand

Questions about in arrears

What does in arrears mean?

in arrears means "in debt".

What is another word for in arrears?

Close synonyms include behind, behindhand. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is in arrears a common word?

in arrears is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.