How Long AU Businesses Wait to Get Paid [2026 Data]

Australian small businesses waited an average of 22.9 days to get paid in the June 2026 quarter, according to Xero’s Small Business Insights, down from 24.2 days in March. That improvement followed a slower stretch: the wait had climbed from a record-fast 23.9 days in December 2025. Here is the full quarterly trend, how Australia’s wait compares with the rest of the world, and why the country’s largest businesses are still taking longer to pay their smallest suppliers.

How long are Australian businesses actually waiting to get paid?

As of the most recent data, 22.9 days. That is the average time an Australian small business waited between issuing an invoice and receiving payment in the June 2026 quarter, according to Xero’s Small Business Insights, which tracks payment behavior across small businesses using its platform. On top of that base wait, those invoices ran an average of 6.0 days late against their agreed terms, also down from the March quarter’s 6.9 days. Xero’s own commentary attributed most of the June improvement to a seasonal effect: businesses settling accounts ahead of the end of the Australian financial year on 30 June, and it cautioned that quarter-end figures like this one are often revised as more data comes in.

Figure 1: Average days Australian small businesses waited to get paid, by quarter. Source: Xero Small Business Insights, Australia (December 2025, March 2026, and June 2026 quarters).

Is the wait getting longer or shorter?

It depends on which quarter you compare against. December 2025’s 23.9-day average was the fastest Xero had recorded since Small Business Insights began tracking Australian payment times back in 2017, with days-late also easing to 6.6 days that quarter. The wait then ticked up slightly in March 2026, to 24.2 days and 6.9 days late, before June’s seasonal pullback brought it back down. Three quarters is a short run to call a firm trend from, but the shape is a record low followed by a small step backward, not a clean, uninterrupted improvement.

Figure 2: Average days Australian small-business invoices ran late, by quarter. Source: Xero Small Business Insights, Australia (December 2025, March 2026, and June 2026 quarters).

A separate, survey-based measure points to more persistent pressure underneath that quarterly wobble. Asked whether the wait to get paid felt longer or shorter than a year earlier, 48% of Australian businesses told GoCardless’s 2025 Pursuing Payments survey, a nationally representative sample of 500 Australian business owners and decision-makers, that it felt longer, against a background where 63% said they had lost money to late payments altogether. That gap between an improving quarterly average and a majority of business owners feeling the wait has grown is the same tension the wider Australian late-payment picture shows globally: the average can move in the right direction while the businesses living it still feel the pressure rising.

Figure 3: Share of Australian businesses who say the wait to get paid is longer than it was 12 months ago. Source: GoCardless, Pursuing Payments 2025, YouGov survey of 500 Australian business owners/decision-makers, August 2025.

How does Australia compare with the rest of the world?

Faster than most of the major markets tracked elsewhere, on the numbers available. Australia’s 22.9-day small-business average sits below the Netherlands’ 40-day average, the 51-day global average, and India’s 77-day average, according to Sidetrade’s Data Lake, a dataset built from 285 million invoices worth $1.7 trillion. The full country-by-country breakdown behind those global figures, including why Europe alone spans a wide range, is covered in Average Invoice Payment Time by Country.

Figure 4: Average time to get paid, Australia versus other markets. Australia’s figure is Xero Small Business Insights’ small-business average days to pay; the other three are Sidetrade Data Lake’s invoice-level averages, a different methodology measuring a different population of invoices, so this is a directional comparison rather than a single unified metric.

That caveat matters more than it might look. Xero’s number is a small-business self-reported average drawn from its own accounting platform, while Sidetrade’s figures come from invoice-level transaction data across a much broader mix of business sizes and industries. The two are close enough in shape, and far enough apart from India’s 77-day outlier, that Australia reads as a comparatively fast-paying market either way, but neither figure should be read as measuring exactly the same thing.

Do large businesses take longer to pay small Australian suppliers?

Yes, and the slowest payers are getting slower, according to a different, government-run data source. The Payment Times Reporting Scheme requires large businesses with annual turnover over $100 million to report twice a year on how they pay their small-business suppliers. Its regulator’s most recent update, covering the reporting period from January to June 2025 and published in February 2026, found that the 95th-percentile payment time, how long it takes a large business to pay 95% of its small-business invoices, rose to 64 days, up from 58 days in the previous reporting cycle. The regulator noted that average payment times stayed relatively stable over the same period, meaning the deterioration is concentrated specifically in the slowest-paying tail rather than showing up in the headline average at all.

Figure 5: 95th-percentile payment time from large businesses to small-business suppliers, prior reporting cycle versus the period to June 2025. Source: Payment Times Reporting Scheme regulator, Media Release, Regulator’s Update, January 2026.

That is a meaningfully different data set than Xero’s small-business-reported averages above: the Payment Times Reporting Scheme measures what large corporates report about paying their own small suppliers, not what small businesses experience across all their customers. Read together, the two sources suggest the typical wait for an Australian small business has been improving or holding roughly steady, while the worst-case wait, sitting behind a large customer that pays slowly, has been getting longer.

What does a slow wait actually cost a small business?

More than the delay itself. Only 22% of Australian SME invoices are paid strictly on time, according to Airwallex’s 2025 survey of 500 SME owners and leaders conducted with Censuswide, and the average business in that survey put the monthly cost of late payments at roughly AU$2,408, close to AU$29,000 a year once compounded across twelve months. That cost climbs with revenue: businesses turning over AU$250,000 or more a month reported an average monthly loss of AU$3,055, higher than the AU$2,569 reported by mid-revenue businesses in the same survey. A slow-paying customer does not just delay revenue on paper, it forces a business to fund that gap out of its own working capital in the meantime, which is the direct link between the wait times in this post and the wider question of Australian SME cash flow.

How Long AU Businesses Wait to Get Paid: 2026 Snapshot

Measure	Figure	Source
AU small-business average wait (latest quarter)	22.9 days	Xero Small Business Insights, Jun-Q 2026
AU small-business average days late (latest quarter)	6.0 days	Xero Small Business Insights, Jun-Q 2026
Fastest AU quarter on record since 2017	23.9 days	Xero Small Business Insights, Dec-Q 2025
Global average B2B wait	51 days	Sidetrade Data Lake, 2026
Large-business 95th-percentile payment time to small suppliers	64 days	Payment Times Reporting Scheme regulator, Jan-Jun 2025

Table 1: How long Australian businesses wait to get paid, by measure. Figures are drawn from separately named surveys and schemes with their own samples and methodologies, not one unified metric.

The Bottom Line

The honest answer to “how long do Australian businesses wait to get paid” depends on which business you ask. The small-business average, per Xero, is 22.9 days as of the June 2026 quarter, among the faster figures in any global comparison, and it just posted its fastest reading on record only two quarters earlier. But that average sits on top of a slower-moving problem: large businesses are taking longer, not shorter, to pay the slowest 5% of their small-supplier invoices, and 48% of Australian business owners say the wait feels worse than it did a year ago even while the quarterly average improves. Both things are true at once, which is exactly why a business waiting on a single large customer should not assume the national average describes its own experience. Sending every job through a BillyPaid invoice with a clear due date and a payable link, backed by an automated reminder that goes out the moment a due date passes, targets the part of that wait a business can actually influence, regardless of which side of the average it happens to sit on.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long do Australian small businesses currently wait to get paid? 22.9 days on average, as of the June 2026 quarter, down from 24.2 days in March, according to Xero’s Small Business Insights. On top of that, small businesses were paid an average of 6.0 days late in June, down from 6.9 days in March.

Is the wait to get paid in Australia improving or getting worse? Both, depending on the window. The June 2026 quarter improved sharply on March, largely a seasonal end-of-financial-year effect, but December 2025’s 23.9-day average was the fastest Xero had recorded since it started tracking in 2017, and 48% of Australian businesses told GoCardless in 2025 that the wait feels longer than it did 12 months earlier.

How does Australia compare with other countries for invoice payment time? Australia’s small-business average of 22.9 days runs faster than the Netherlands’ 40-day average and well ahead of the 51-day global average and India’s 77-day average, per Sidetrade’s Data Lake, though the two data sets are built from different methodologies and are not a single unified metric.

Do large businesses take longer to pay small Australian suppliers? The slowest payers are getting slower. Under the government’s Payment Times Reporting Scheme, the 95th-percentile payment time, how long it takes a large business to pay 95% of its small-business invoices, rose to 64 days in the period to June 2025, up from 58 days the cycle before, even though average payment times stayed roughly stable.

Sources and References

1. Xero - Small Business Insights, Australia, quarterly average days-to-pay and days-late data (December 2025, March 2026, June 2026 quarters).
2. Payment Times Reporting Scheme - Regulator’s Update (January 2026), 95th-percentile large-to-small-business payment time, reporting period January-June 2025.
3. GoCardless - Pursuing Payments 2025, YouGov survey of 500 Australian business owners and decision-makers, August 2025.
4. Airwallex - The Cost of Late Payments Revealed, Censuswide survey of 500 Australian SME owners/leaders, July 2025.
5. Sidetrade - Sidetrade Data Lake report (10 February 2026), global and country-level average days-to-pay data, based on 285 million invoices worth $1.7 trillion.

Note: All figures verified as of October 2026.