Is "a total of 10 payments" singular or plural?

grammaticality grammatical-number verb-agreement premodifiers

Since "payment" is countable, I would go with "were" to reinforce the notion that there was more than one payment.

This thread contains more examples:

Number, majority and total are singular if preceded by the, but plural if preceded by a.

  • A number of people believe he is innocent.
  • A majority of residents want the town to reduce the recreation fee.
  • A total of 15 people were arrested for burglary last month in our town.

That being said, this is not a strict rule, and if the focus is specifically on the fact of something being a total, you would use "was".

  • "A total of five cars is impossible: you must have miscounted."

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