Payment Behavior 2026: Four in Five Invoices Are Paid on Time, and Short Payment Terms Don't Bring the Money Sooner

Late payment is a constant complaint, yet it is rarely measured, and when it is, it is usually through surveys in which businesses estimate how long their clients take to pay. We did not ask. We looked at when the money for an invoice actually arrives in the account.

The basis is invoices of self-employed people and small businesses in Germany with invoice dates from January 2024 to June 2026 whose payment came in through a connected bank account and was matched to the invoice. The payment day is the value date booked by the bank, not a date someone typed in. So we do not estimate when clients pay; we read it off the account.

Half are paid within a week

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From the invoice date to the incoming payment takes a median of eight days. After one week almost half of all invoices are paid, after two weeks about three in four, after 30 days nine in ten. After that, little is left: after 60 days, 98 percent of invoices are settled.

This picture does not depend on a few businesses with many invoices. Weighting every business equally gives almost the same shares, and the typical business also waits eight days for its money.

Four in five invoices arrive on time

Measured against the due date stated on the invoice, about four in five invoices are paid on time (78.5 percent). Almost half of all invoices are even settled more than a week before the deadline.

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One in five invoices is paid late, but mostly only just: almost half of the late payments arrive within a week of the due date. About one in ten invoices goes more than a week past the deadline, and only about 2 percent more than a month.

For the individual business, late payments are still part of everyday life. Six in ten businesses had at least one invoice in the period that was paid after the deadline, and more than one in four had at least one that was more than two weeks overdue.

Short payment terms don't bring the money sooner

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So does a shorter term help? We compared invoices with a payment term of up to 14 days with invoices that allow 15 days or more. The money arrives almost equally fast in both groups: after a median of eight and seven and a half days respectively. The difference lies elsewhere. With a short term, almost one in three invoices is paid after the due date (31 percent); with a longer term, about one in eight (13 percent).

This suggests that clients pay on their own schedule, not according to the deadline on the invoice. A short term does not make an invoice more urgent. It only makes it overdue sooner. The finding also holds when every business is weighted equally. It describes a correlation, though, not an experiment: businesses that set short terms may also have different clients.

Large invoices are hardly paid later

The amount changes little, too. Invoices of 1,000 euros or more are paid after a median of eight days, smaller ones after seven. Large invoices are paid late slightly more often (25 versus 21 percent), but the overall picture stays the same.

What this means

Clients pay better than their reputation suggests. Most invoices are paid on time, many long before the deadline. The problem is the few invoices that stall, and they can be spotted early: whatever is still open a week after the due date belongs to the small group that takes much longer. A friendly reminder at that point therefore hits exactly the invoices that would otherwise stay open for a long time.

A shorter payment term, on the other hand, is no lever for faster money. Above all, it creates more overdue invoices and with them more reminders.

The legal side in Germany: if no payment term is agreed, an invoice is due immediately (Section 271 BGB). A client goes into default through a reminder sent after the payment is due, and at the latest 30 days after the due date and receipt of the invoice; for private clients, this 30-day rule only applies if the invoice points it out (Section 286 BGB). A payment date that only appears on the invoice does not replace the reminder. How to send a proper reminder and what you may charge for it is explained in our guide to payment reminders in Germany.

The limits of the data, stated plainly: we only see invoices whose payment arrived in the account. Invoices that are never paid are missing from this analysis. And businesses that match their incoming payments digitally tend to be the well-organized ones. For them, though, the money comes, mostly on time, after a median of eight days.

This analysis will be updated annually at this address; changes are documented in the log at the end of the page. All analyses in this section: Data & Analysis.

Methodology

The basis is invoices that self-employed people and small businesses in Germany wrote in Norman between January 2024 and June 2026 and whose payment came in through a connected bank account and was matched to the invoice. The payment day is the value date booked by the bank. Invoices that were only marked as paid by hand do not count: their date is often the day of the entry, not the day of the payment. Payments are included up to early October 2026, so every invoice had at least three months to be paid.

We count invoices, not quotes, drafts, cancellations or credit notes. Payments before the invoice date, for example prepayments, and payments more than a year after the invoice date are left out. For partial payments, the first incoming payment counts. On time means paid on or before the due date stated on the invoice. The payment-term groups separate invoices with up to 14 days and with 15 or more days between invoice date and due date; the amount groups separate invoices below and from 1,000 euros (euro invoices only). Internal and test accounts are excluded.

Invoice-level figures weight every invoice equally. So that a few businesses with many invoices do not shape the picture, we also calculated the figures with equal weight per business; the results are close. Statements about the typical business refer to businesses with at least three invoices in the period. The result is almost the same in both halves of the period.

All values are shares or medians; no published figure is based on fewer than 40 businesses. We do not publish absolute numbers. The data shows paid invoices of digitally working self-employed people and small businesses, not official statistics. How we work with data in general is documented in Methodology & data basis.

About this data

Norman is an accounting platform for self-employed people and small businesses in Germany; the anonymized usage data analyzed here originates there. Charts and figures on this page may be used freely with attribution to "Norman". Press inquiries and data requests: press@norman.finance.