Invoice Payment Speed by Business Size [2026 Data]

Large-enterprise invoices were paid on time just 24% of the time in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from 35% a year earlier, according to Ellisphere’s Ellipro payment-behavior index. Very small businesses moved the opposite direction, hitting a 68% on-time rate in the same quarter. Invoice payment speed does not scale neatly with company size: mid-size businesses pay fastest of the four tiers tracked, small businesses hold steady, and it is the very largest companies whose payment behavior got worse in 2025.

Figure 1: Share of large-enterprise invoices paid on time, Q4 2025. Source: Ellisphere, Ellipro payment-behavior index, France.

How does invoice payment speed actually break down by business size?

It is not a straight line from small to large. Ellisphere’s Ellipro payment-behavior index, which tracks French companies across four official size tiers, TPE (very small business, fewer than 10 employees), PME (SME, 10 to 249 employees), ETI (mid-cap, 250 to 4,999 employees), and GE (large enterprise, 5,000 or more employees), found mid-cap businesses running the shortest average delay beyond agreed payment terms in Q4 2025, at 12.71 days. SMEs followed close behind at 14.87 days, very small businesses at 15.53 days, and large enterprises came in slowest at 16.24 days. The middle of the size distribution, not either extreme, currently pays fastest.

Figure 2: Average invoice payment delay by business size, Q4 2025. Source: Ellisphere, Ellipro payment-behavior index.

That 16.24-day figure for large enterprises is also a sharp jump from where it stood just one quarter earlier: 12.39 days in Q3 2025. No other size tier moved anywhere near that fast in a single quarter, which is why the story here is less “big companies are slow” as a fixed trait and more “big companies got meaningfully worse in the second half of 2025.” For the fuller picture of what late payment costs on top of the delay itself, see Late Payment Statistics 2026.

Why did large-enterprise on-time payment collapse in 2025?

It reversed a genuine improvement. Ellisphere’s data shows large enterprises paying on time 35% of the time in 2024, following a deliberate effort that year, before falling back to old habits and dropping to 24% on time in Q4 2025. Very small businesses show the mirror image: a steady, incremental climb from 66% on-time in 2024 to 68% in 2025, continuing a trend rather than reversing one.

Figure 3: On-time invoice payment rate, 2024 versus 2025, by business size. Source: Ellisphere, Ellipro payment-behavior index.

Ellisphere ties the reversal to a domino effect: major public and private contractors hold onto more favorable terms than smaller suppliers can negotiate for themselves, and when those large buyers slow down, the cash-flow pressure transfers mechanically down the supply chain to the businesses least able to absorb it. That framing matters for a small business reading this: a customer’s size is itself a signal about how much cash-flow risk that relationship carries, independent of anything the invoice itself says.

Figure 4: Invoices paid on time, very small business versus large enterprise, Q4 2025. Source: Ellisphere, Ellipro payment-behavior index.

Do smaller businesses get worse payment terms than larger ones?

Yes, consistently, across two separate countries’ data. Coface’s 2025 UK Payment Survey found micro and small businesses offering average payment terms of 46 days, compared to 56 days at large companies, a 10-day gap that reflects negotiating leverage rather than risk: large buyers can simply insist on longer terms because smaller suppliers have less ability to say no. The same survey found nearly 50% of micro and small businesses reporting more frequent payment delays, versus 39% for mid-sized companies and 42% for large ones.

Figure 5: Average payment terms offered, by business size, UK 2025. Source: Coface, 2025 UK Payment Survey.

Ellisphere’s French data points the same direction from a different angle: major contractors typically hold payment terms of 45 to 60 days, against 15 to 30 days for smaller structures, without necessarily honoring even those longer terms in full. Two different countries, two different data providers, and one consistent pattern: business size predicts negotiating power over payment terms far more reliably than it predicts payment reliability itself.

Which size of business feels late payment the hardest?

The smallest ones, by a wide margin. Coface’s 2025 France Payment Survey, fielded in July 2025 among 650 French companies, found 55% of very small businesses (TPE) rating the impact of late payment as “very important or critical” to their operations, compared to 39% of SMEs and just 26% of mid-cap and large businesses combined. The same survey put France’s overall average payment delay at 39.5 days, with very small businesses running an average delay of 44 days against just 36 days for large businesses, a gap that compounds the impact difference: smaller businesses wait longer and have less cash buffer to absorb the wait.

Figure 6: Share calling the impact of late payment critical, by business size, France 2025. Source: Coface, 2025 France Payment Survey, 650 companies.

For the broader financial toll this takes on small businesses specifically, including cash buffer days and the personal cost to owners, see Small Business Cash Flow Statistics 2026.

How does the business-size gap compare with the country-level picture?

They are separate variables, and it is easy to conflate them. Australian small businesses, tracked by Xero Small Business Insights, are paid in an average of 24.1 days as of the March 2026 quarter, a figure driven by country-level payment culture and invoicing habits rather than by where that business sits in a size hierarchy. Meanwhile, among the 1,000 largest US publicly traded nonfinancial companies, the Hackett Group’s 2025 US Working Capital Survey found an 18-day gap in days sales outstanding between top-quartile and median performers, showing that even within the “large enterprise” tier alone, payment collection performance varies enormously based on process discipline, not just size. A business evaluating a new customer relationship needs both lenses: what country is this customer in, and what size tier does it sit in, because either one alone tells an incomplete story. For the country-by-country version of this data, see Average Invoice Payment Time by Country.

What can a smaller business do about the size gap?

Shorten the loop it actually controls. A BillyPaid invoice puts a payable link and a clear due date on every document by default, which shortens the collection loop regardless of how large or slow the customer on the other end happens to be. For customers that sit in the slow-paying large-enterprise tier this data describes, a structured follow-up sequence matters even more than usual. A scheduled payment reminder does not change what a large buyer’s internal approval process looks like, but it does make sure an overdue invoice does not simply sit unnoticed inside it.

Invoice Payment Speed by Business Size: Comparison Tables

Business size	Avg. days beyond payment term, Q4 2025	Trend vs prior period	Source
Mid-cap (ETI)	12.71 days	Down 1 point vs Q4 2024	Ellisphere, Q4 2025
SME (PME)	14.87 days	Up 1 point over 12 months	Ellisphere, Q4 2025
Very small business (TPE)	15.53 days	Continued improvement	Ellisphere, Q4 2025
Large enterprise (GE)	16.24 days	Up from 12.39 days in Q3 2025	Ellisphere, Q4 2025

Table 1: Average invoice payment delay by business size, France, Q4 2025. All four size tiers from the same source and methodology.

Business size	2024 on-time rate	2025 on-time rate	Change
Very small business (TPE)	66%	68%	+2 points
Large enterprise (GE)	35%	24%	-11 points

Table 2: On-time invoice payment rate by business size, France, full-year comparison. Source: Ellisphere, Ellipro payment-behavior index.

The Bottom Line

Invoice payment speed by business size does not run in a straight line from fast small businesses to slow big ones, or the reverse. In France’s most current data, mid-size businesses currently pay fastest, very small businesses are the most reliable and improving payers, and it is large enterprises whose on-time rate collapsed from 35% to 24% in a single year. What holds steady across both France and the UK is the terms gap: larger buyers consistently negotiate longer payment terms than smaller suppliers can, whether or not they actually honor them. For a small business, the practical response is the same either way: build a structure into the invoice itself, a payable link, a clear due date, a scheduled reminder cadence, that does not depend on the customer’s size or good faith to get paid close to on time. A BillyPaid invoice builds that structure in by default.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do large businesses pay invoices faster than small businesses? No, in 2025 large enterprises were actually the least reliable payers of any size tier: only 24% of their invoices were paid on time in Q4 2025, down from 35% a year earlier, versus 68% for very small businesses, according to Ellisphere’s Ellipro payment-behavior index. Mid-cap businesses ran the shortest average delay of any size tier, at 12.71 days.

Why do larger companies get longer payment terms than smaller ones? Bargaining power. Micro and small UK businesses offered average payment terms of 46 days in 2025, compared to 56 days at large companies, according to Coface’s 2025 UK Payment Survey, because large buyers can set the terms their smaller suppliers have to accept.

Which size of business feels late payment the hardest? The smallest ones. 55% of very small businesses in France called the impact of late payment critical to their cash flow in 2025, more than double the 26% share among mid-cap and large businesses, per Coface’s 2025 France Payment Survey of 650 companies.

Is the business-size payment gap the same in every country? The direction is consistent, larger buyers extract longer terms and, in 2025, paid less reliably, but the exact day counts vary a lot by country and methodology. Australian small businesses, for comparison, are paid in an average of 24.1 days according to Xero Small Business Insights, a different measurement entirely from the European size-tier data in this report.

Sources and References

1. Ellisphere - Comportements de paiement des entreprises: 2025 n’est pas une bonne annee (27 January 2026), Ellipro payment-behavior index, average payment delay and on-time rate by business size (TPE, PME, ETI, GE), France.
2. Coface - 2025 United Kingdom Payment Survey (October 2025), average payment terms and delay frequency by business size, UK.
3. Coface - 2025 France Payment Survey (October 2025, fieldwork July 2025, 650 companies), average payment delay and impact severity by business size, France.
4. Xero - Small Business Insights, March-quarter 2026, Australian small business average days to pay, cited for country-versus-size comparison.
5. The Hackett Group - 2025 US Working Capital Survey (18 August 2025), DSO performance gap among the 1,000 largest US publicly traded nonfinancial companies.

Note: All figures verified as of August 2026.