How Many Invoices Are Paid Late 2026: 47% Overdue [Data]

Key Takeaways

47% of B2B invoices in Western Europe were overdue in 2025, the highest of three regions tracked (Atradius Payment Practices Barometer, Western Europe 2025).
Asia’s overdue rate was 44% and North America’s was 43% (44% in Canada alone), per Atradius’s 2025 regional reports.
In the Netherlands, 25.3% of invoices were paid late in 2025, but only 0.3% ran more than 90 days overdue (Altares Dun & Bradstreet, 2025).
18 of 202 US industry segments had 10%+ of receivable dollars 91+ days past due in Q4 2025, up from 15 of 202 in Q3 2025 (Dun & Bradstreet).
Canadian small businesses were paid 11.3 days late in the June 2026 quarter, up from a 10.5-day average across all of 2025 (Xero Small Business Insights).
Regional bad debt write-off rates run 5% to 6% of B2B invoices, meaning the large majority of “late” invoices are still collectible (Atradius, 2025).

Just under half of all business-to-business invoices are overdue at any given time: 47% of B2B invoices in Western Europe were overdue in 2025, according to Atradius’s Payment Practices Barometer, with Asia at 44% and North America at 43%. But the regional averages hide a wide split between invoices a few days late and invoices that never get collected at all, and between countries, provinces, and industries that are nowhere close to the average.

How many B2B invoices are paid late worldwide?

Just under half of B2B invoices are overdue at any given time, and the rate barely moves between continents. In Western Europe, 47% of B2B invoices were overdue in 2025, according to Atradius’s Payment Practices Barometer for the region, the highest of the three regions surveyed. Asia followed closely at 44% of B2B credit sales overdue, per Atradius’s Asia report, and North America came in at 43%, with Canada alone running slightly higher at 44%, per Atradius’s North America report covering Canada, Mexico, and the US.

These regional averages sit alongside the country-specific numbers covered in more depth in Late Payment Statistics 2026, which breaks down the US figure of 55% of invoiced B2B sales overdue and the UK figure of 90% of companies affected by at least one late payment. The regional data here answers a slightly different question: not how many companies experienced a late payment, but what share of the dollar value of B2B invoices outstanding at any point was actually overdue, a number that tends to run lower than a company-level headline rate because it is diluted by the larger share of invoices paid on time.

The takeaway across every version of this question is the same: overdue invoices are the norm in every region tracked, not the exception, and the gap between the best and worst region, four percentage points from North America to Western Europe, is small next to the gap between individual countries.

Figure 1: Western Europe carries the highest regional overdue rate; the gap between the highest and lowest region tracked is just 4 percentage points. Source: Atradius Payment Practices Barometer, Western Europe / Asia / North America, 2025.

How many invoices are paid just a few days late versus seriously overdue?

A late invoice and a written-off invoice are not the same problem, and the data shows the two are far apart in scale. In the Netherlands, 25.3% of invoices were paid late in 2025, one in four, up from 23.9% in 2024, according to Altares Dun & Bradstreet’s annual payment-behavior research, the first deterioration the firm had recorded since 2021. But almost all of that lateness is minor: only 0.3% of Dutch invoices ran more than 90 days past due, the same research found. Most of the 25.3% is invoices paid a few days or a few weeks late, not invoices heading toward becoming bad debt.

The deterioration was not even across sectors. Hospitality businesses saw the sharpest drop: 76% of hospitality invoices were paid on time in 2025, down from 85.7% in 2024, per the same Altares report, a swing of almost 10 percentage points in a single year.

This split matters for anyone reading a single overdue-invoice percentage as a sign of a collections crisis. A rising late-payment rate driven almost entirely by invoices a week or two past due is a cash flow timing problem; a rising rate driven by 90-plus-day invoices is closer to a bad debt problem. The Dutch data is one of the few national datasets that publishes both numbers side by side, which is why it is useful even for businesses that never invoice a Dutch client: it shows what the composition of a headline late-payment rate usually looks like everywhere.

Figure 2: Only 0.3% of Dutch invoices were more than 90 days overdue in 2025, even though a full quarter were paid late overall. Source: Altares Dun & Bradstreet, 2025.

Which industries carry the most severely overdue invoices?

Industry matters more than country for how much of a business’s receivables end up severely overdue. In the US, Dun & Bradstreet’s Q4 2025 Accounts Receivable Industry Report found that 18 of the 202 industry segments it tracks had 10% or more of their aging dollars sitting 91 or more days past due, up from 15 of 202 segments in the Q3 2025 report the quarter before, a rising trend rather than a flat one.

That is a narrow slice of the overall economy, fewer than 1 in 10 tracked segments, which is a useful reminder that a severely overdue receivable is concentrated in specific industries rather than spread evenly. A business in one of the flagged sectors is dealing with a materially different collections environment than the roughly 90% of segments D&B did not flag, and which specific segments cross that 10% threshold shifts from quarter to quarter rather than staying fixed.

Company size and process maturity matter as much as industry. The Hackett Group’s 2025 US Working Capital Survey, covering the 1,000 largest US public companies, found an 18-day gap in days sales outstanding between top-quartile and median performers, with accounts receivable the single largest contributor to a $1.7 trillion working capital opportunity the survey identified across the group. DSO also degraded for a second straight year in the survey, meaning even large, well-resourced companies are collecting more slowly than they were, not less: scale alone does not fix a late-payment problem.

Figure 3: The count of severely-overdue-flagged US industry segments rose from Q3 to Q4 2025; which specific segments cross the threshold shifts quarter to quarter. Source: Dun & Bradstreet, U.S. Accounts Receivable Industry Report, Q3 2025 and Q4 2025.

How many invoices are paid late in Canada, and does it vary by province?

Canada is one of the few countries with both a national late-payment trend and a provincial breakdown published quarterly, and both show a country under sustained cash flow pressure. Canadian small businesses were paid an average of 11.3 days late in the June 2026 quarter, per Xero’s Small Business Insights, almost a full day worse than the 10.5-day average recorded across all of 2025 and roughly in line with the 11.4-day figure from the March 2026 quarter.

The provincial split shows the pressure is not distributed evenly. British Columbia had the best result in the June 2026 quarter, with invoices paid in an average of 25.7 total days, itself an improvement on the 26.5-day figure from the March quarter. Alberta followed at 28.4 days, Ontario at 30.0 days, and the Maritime provinces at 31.8 days, a gap of more than six days between the fastest and slowest region tracked, per the same Xero data.

It is worth separating the two numbers here: the 11.3-day figure measures how many days past the agreed due date an invoice runs, while the provincial figures measure the total number of days from invoice issue to payment, a related but different metric. Both point the same direction: a Canadian small business’s odds of getting paid on time depend meaningfully on where in the country its customers are based, not just on its own invoicing process.

Figure 4: British Columbia small businesses are paid nearly a week faster, on average, than those in the Maritime provinces. Source: Xero Small Business Insights, Canada, June 2026 quarter.

How many overdue invoices are eventually written off as bad debt?

Most overdue invoices do eventually get collected, just late. What actually gets written off as uncollectable is a much smaller number, and it tracks each region’s overdue rate only loosely. Western Europe, the region with the highest overdue rate in this data at 47%, also has the highest bad debt rate: 6% of B2B invoices, per Atradius. Asia, at 44% overdue, has a bad debt rate of 5%. North America’s bad debt rate sits at 5% regionally, rising to 6% specifically in Canada, per Atradius’s North America report, even though North America has the lowest overdue rate of the three regions at 43%.

That loose relationship, a higher overdue rate does not automatically mean a proportionally higher bad debt rate, matters for how a business should read its own numbers. The regional data above suggests something on the order of 5% to 6% of B2B invoices end up as bad debt in every region tracked, which means the other roughly 94% to 95% are collectible with the right process, the same conclusion the Netherlands data on 90-plus-day invoices, 0.3% of the total, pointed to in a different market.

Western Europe ranks highest on both measures among the three regions tracked, while Asia’s bad debt rate sits low relative to its overdue rate, and North America runs lowest on both. See the comparison table below for the exact figures behind that ranking.

Comparison: Overdue and Bad Debt Rates by Region

Region / Country	Share of B2B invoices overdue	Bad debt / write-off rate	Source
Western Europe	47%	6%	Atradius, Western Europe 2025
Asia	44%	5%	Atradius, Asia 2025
North America (Canada)	43% (44% in Canada)	5% (6% in Canada)	Atradius, North America 2025
Netherlands	25.3% (1 in 4)	0.3% ran 90+ days overdue	Altares Dun & Bradstreet, 2025

Table 1: Figures are not a single unified metric across sources, each row measures a different, named national or regional dataset.

The Bottom Line

Across every region, country, and industry in this data, the pattern holds: somewhere between 4 in 10 and 9 in 10 B2B invoices run late depending on how “late” is measured, but only a small fraction, roughly 5% to 6% regionally and closer to 0.3% for invoices genuinely abandoned past 90 days, ever become a real loss rather than a timing problem. That gap between “late” and “unrecoverable” is where a better invoicing process pays for itself: shorter terms, a payable link, and a scheduled reminder cadence move invoices out of the late bucket before they have a chance to drift into the write-off bucket. A BillyPaid invoice builds a payable link and automated reminders into every document by default, the same levers the collections data across Invoice Statistics 2026 identifies as the ones that actually move the needle.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many invoices are paid late worldwide? 47% of B2B invoices in Western Europe were overdue in 2025, the highest of the three regions tracked, according to Atradius’s Payment Practices Barometer. Asia’s overdue rate was 44% and North America’s was 43% (44% in Canada specifically), per Atradius’s 2025 regional reports.

What percentage of invoices are more than 90 days overdue? In the Netherlands, only 0.3% of invoices ran more than 90 days past due in 2025, even though 25.3% were paid late overall, according to Altares Dun & Bradstreet. In the US, 18 of 202 industry segments had 10% or more of their receivable dollars 91 or more days past due in Q4 2025, per Dun & Bradstreet’s Accounts Receivable Industry Report, up from 15 of 202 segments in Q3 2025.

Are late payments getting worse in Canada? Yes. Canadian small businesses were paid an average of 11.3 days late in the June 2026 quarter, according to Xero’s Small Business Insights, almost a full day worse than the 10.5-day average recorded across all of 2025. The result varies by province, from 25.7 total days to get paid in British Columbia to 31.8 days in the Maritime provinces.

How many overdue invoices are eventually written off as bad debt? Roughly 5% to 6% of B2B invoices end up as bad debt, depending on region, per Atradius’s 2025 reports: 6% in Western Europe, 5% in Asia, and 5% in North America overall (6% in Canada specifically). The large majority of invoices counted as overdue are still collectible.