Mobile Invoicing 2026: 95% Would Go Mobile [Data]

95% of small business owners would consider turning their own phone into a payment terminal, according to NMI’s 2025 research into tap-to-mobile payments. That number captures where invoicing is heading: away from desks and paper, toward whatever device is already in a business owner’s pocket. Smartphone ownership is now close to saturation in most markets, and mobile payment adoption is accelerating on top of that base. The data below covers how far that shift has actually gone, and whether it’s changing how fast anyone gets paid.

How many small business owners would use their phone to get paid?

Most of them, at least in principle. NMI surveyed 300 small business owners and 1,000 consumers across the US and UK in 2025 and found that 95% of those SMB owners would consider using tap-to-mobile technology, turning a standard smartphone into a contactless card reader with no extra hardware required. The appetite is strongest among businesses that currently have no card-payment option at all: 26% of the surveyed owners described their business as cash-only, and 92% of that cash-only group said they were open to tap-to-mobile as a way to finally accept cards without buying a separate terminal. The commercial stakes behind that openness are concrete rather than theoretical. NMI found that 78% of cash-only owners in its survey had lost a sale in the past month specifically because a customer had no cash on hand, and 84% had received a negative review that mentioned their cash-only policy directly.

Figure 1: 95% of small business owners would consider turning their phone into a payment terminal. Source: NMI, 2025 (300 SMB owners surveyed, US and UK).

Is mobile payment adoption actually growing, or just talked about?

It’s growing, and quickly, well beyond stated intent alone. Visa reported in March 2025 that global adoption of Tap to Phone, its term for turning a smartphone or tablet into a payment terminal, grew 200% year-over-year, with a combined growth rate of 234% across its three most active markets: the US, UK, and Brazil. Small businesses are a meaningful share of that growth rather than a footnote to it: nearly 30% of the sellers newly using Tap to Phone were small businesses that hadn’t previously had any way to accept contactless payments at all. Visa also rolled out a companion Tap to Add Card feature with Apple Pay in September 2024, enabling millions of card tokens across more than 100 card issuers within its first several months, which matters because it means the customer’s side of a mobile transaction is getting faster to set up too, not just the merchant’s.

Figure 2: Global Tap to Phone payment volume roughly tripled year-over-year. Source: Visa, March 2025 press release.

Where’s the mobile payment gap that this growth is closing?

Mostly in the US, relative to other markets that adopted contactless earlier. The same NMI research found that 34% of surveyed US small business owners still don’t offer any contactless payment option at all, compared to just 9% in the UK, where tap-to-mobile and contactless terminals reached small merchants sooner. That gap lines up closely with the Tap to Phone adoption growth described above: nearly 30% of new Tap to Phone sellers being small businesses suggests a meaningful share of that 34% is exactly who’s closing the gap, one smartphone at a time rather than one new card terminal purchase at a time. For a business that still turns away cardholders, that unclosed gap is a live cost, not a hypothetical one, given how directly NMI ties cash-only status to lost sales and negative reviews in the same dataset.

Figure 3: US small businesses still lag the UK on offering any contactless payment option at all. Source: NMI, 2025.

How many people are actually carrying a smartphone that could invoice or pay on the spot?

Nearly everyone in the markets that matter most for this data. 91% of US adults own a smartphone as of 2025, according to Pew Research Center’s survey of 5,022 US adults conducted between February and June that year, up from just 35% when Pew first measured smartphone ownership in 2011. Ownership is close to universal for adults under 30 (about 97%) and still high even among adults 65 and older (about 78%). Notably, 16% of US adults are “smartphone-only” internet users, meaning the phone isn’t a secondary device for them; it’s the only one connected to the internet at all, which matters for any business assuming a client will eventually open an invoice on a laptop instead.

Figure 4: 91% of US adults now own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011. Source: Pew Research Center, 2025.

How much is the shift to mobile-first invoicing actually worth?

The dollar evidence points the same direction as the adoption data above. The billing and invoicing software market, the category BillyPaid and its competitors sit inside, is forecast to grow from $12.06 billion in 2025 to $23.69 billion by 2035, a 6.98% compound annual growth rate, according to Market Research Future, with mobile-first, cloud-native tools cited directly as a driver of that growth. For a business still invoicing through a desktop-only tool, that’s a signal about where the category as a whole is heading: the software capturing a growing share of that market is increasingly the kind built around a phone rather than a desk.

Metric	Figure	Source, year
SMB owners open to phone-as-payment-terminal	95%	NMI, 2025
US adults who own a smartphone	91%	Pew Research Center, 2025
Billing and invoicing software market, 2025 to 2035	$12.06B to $23.69B	Market Research Future
US small businesses with no contactless option	34%	NMI, 2025

Table 1: Mobile and smartphone adoption figures relevant to invoicing and getting paid. Each row is a separate named dataset, not one unified metric.

Figure 5: The billing and invoicing software market is forecast to nearly double between 2025 and 2035. Source: Market Research Future.

Does invoicing or getting paid from a phone actually get you paid faster?

The data leans that direction, though the two studies below measure different pieces of the same problem. QuickBooks found that invoices sent through its Online Invoice feature, which includes a mobile-friendly Pay Now link, were paid 1.4 times faster on average than invoices from customers who didn’t use the feature, based on the average days to payment across the 90 days ending April 2025. On the other side of the transaction, PYMNTS Intelligence’s September 2025 Accounts Payable Tracker found that 68% of businesses still key invoice data in by hand rather than capturing it automatically, which is precisely the manual step that a mobile-captured, mobile-sent invoice skips entirely, and precisely the friction the growing market described above is being built to remove. Late payment remains a widespread problem in its own right, and shifting invoicing and payment onto a device the customer already has open in their hand is one of the more concrete, measurable ways businesses are shortening that gap.

The Bottom Line

The pattern across every dataset here points the same direction: smartphones are no longer a side channel for invoicing, they’re close to the default one. 95% of small business owners are open to using their own phone as a payment terminal, smartphone ownership is at or near saturation in every market that matters, and the businesses moving fastest on mobile payment adoption are seeing measurably quicker payment cycles as a result. A BillyPaid invoice is built mobile-first from the start, with a payable link that works the same whether a client opens it on a laptop or a phone, so the mobile behavior the data describes doesn’t require a separate app or a second setup step.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many small business owners would use their phone as a payment terminal? 95% of small business owners say they would consider using their phone as a payment terminal, according to NMI’s 2025 research, which surveyed 300 small business owners and 1,000 consumers in the US and UK. Roughly 26% of those SMB owners describe their business as cash-only today, and 92% of that group said they were open to tap-to-mobile.

Has mobile payment adoption for small businesses actually grown? Yes. Global Tap to Phone adoption, turning an ordinary smartphone into a contactless payment terminal, grew 200% year-over-year as of March 2025, per Visa, with a combined growth rate of 234% across the US, UK, and Brazil. Nearly 30% of Tap to Phone sellers were new small businesses.

How many people actually own a smartphone? 91% of US adults own a smartphone, up from just 35% when Pew Research Center first measured it in 2011, per a 2025 survey of 5,022 US adults. Ownership is close to universal among adults under 30 (about 97%) and still high among adults 65 and older (about 78%).

Does invoicing or getting paid from a phone actually speed up payment? The available data points that way. QuickBooks found that invoices sent through its Online Invoice feature were paid 1.4 times faster on average than invoices from businesses not using it, based on the 90 days ending April 2025. Meanwhile, 68% of businesses still key invoices in by hand rather than through any automated capture, per PYMNTS Intelligence’s September 2025 Accounts Payable Tracker, which is exactly the friction mobile invoicing removes.