Why larger vendors wait longer to get paid
We surveyed 417 small and mid-sized vendors about how fast they get paid, and company size turned out to be one of the clearest dividing lines in the data. Solo vendors, businesses of just one person, get paid within 15 days 77.8% of the time. Vendors with 51 to 100 employees get paid that fast only 41.1% of the time. Growing a business, it turns out, comes with a payment-speed cost.
The pattern by company size
The data breaks down cleanly by company size, and the trend isn't gradual. It's a cliff.
Solo vendors and small teams of 2 to 10 employees are paid within 15 days most of the time, at 77.8% and 72.2% respectively. Once a business grows past 10 employees, the share paid that fast drops by more than 20 points, to 52.6% for the 11-to-25-employee bracket. It keeps falling through the 26-to-50-employee bracket, at 41.0%, before leveling off at almost the same rate for 51-to-100-employee vendors, at 41.1%.
Why bigger vendors wait longer
The survey didn't ask vendors to explain this pattern directly, but the rest of the data points to a likely cause: larger vendors take on larger jobs, and larger jobs typically run through bigger clients with more layered approval chains. That lines up with what vendors report elsewhere in this survey. Too many manual approval steps is a named friction point for 12.2% of vendors overall, and it's reasonable to expect that number skews higher among vendors working with larger, more bureaucratic clients.
"It's a little bit of the wild west. A lot of options with similar capabilities that don't always work well together. I want things better integrated."
-Construction vendor, 51 to 100 employees
What this means
For a solo operator, the data is good news: get paid fast, most of the time. For a vendor scaling up, it's a warning. The jump from 10 employees to 25 costs real speed, and the wait doesn't recover as the business keeps growing past that point. Getting bigger doesn't come with faster payments. It comes with more approvals to get through before the money moves.
Payment speed by company size is just one of six themes we found in the 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report. Want to learn more? Check out the full report, or read the recap of all six findings.