51.6% of Vendors Say Clients Pay Late. Here's What It Actually Costs.

Ask vendors what makes getting paid difficult, and more than half point to the same thing: clients paying late against the agreed terms. At 51.6%, late payment is named more than twice as often as the next biggest complaint, processing fees, at 22.1%. It isn't close. Late payment is the single biggest problem vendors report, in every segment we surveyed.

This is one of six themes from our 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report.

That number describes a symptom. What it actually costs is the real story.

The cash-flow cost

Most vendors do get paid reasonably fast. 57.1% collect within 15 days of sending an invoice. But that leaves a real group who don't: roughly 1 in 6 vendors, about 17%, wait 31 to 90 days for the same invoice.

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For a vendor with a finance team and a credit line, a 45-day wait is a line item. For the vendor that matches this survey's typical profile, 25 or fewer employees, often under $250K in annual revenue, it's a decision about whether payroll gets made on time. There's no invoicing trick that fixes this. A vendor can't force a client to pay faster. The wait is set by whoever is holding the money.

The time cost

Late payment doesn't sit still while a vendor waits. It drags related problems with it. 12.9% of vendors cite no visibility into invoice status as a top friction, and another 12.9% say reconciling payments to invoices is a problem. 12.2% point to too many manual approval steps slowing everything down. None of that shows up on a bank statement, but all of it costs hours: time spent following up, cross-checking, and re-explaining status to whoever asks.

"Simplify the multi-layered invoice approval workflows on client portals to drastically reduce payment wait times."

-Construction vendor, 26 to 50 employees

The relationship cost

Some of the friction around late payment isn't administrative. It's adversarial. 18.9% of vendors cite disputes over scope or pricing, and 18.5% cite rejected invoices that require resubmission. Both extend the wait, and both put the vendor in the position of chasing a client they still need to work with.

"I'd change payment terms so that when a job is finished, we don't end up in court."

-Construction vendor, 51 to 100 employees

It's structural, not a vendor problem

None of this is a failure on the part of the vendors surveyed. Late payment is structural: it happens on the client's timeline, inside the client's approval chain, and a vendor has limited leverage to speed it up once the invoice is already out. The fix sits further upstream, in clearer terms, faster approval routing, and real-time visibility into where an invoice actually stands, not in vendors working harder to chase what they're already owed.

Late payment is just one of six themes we found in the 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report. Want to learn more? Check out the full report.