Retail Invoicing 2026: Sainsbury's Pays in 49 Days [Data]

Key Takeaways

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets takes 49 days on average to pay a supplier invoice, 75% longer than Marks and Spencer’s 28 days and slower than Tesco’s 43 days, per each retailer’s UK government payment practices filing covering late 2025 into early 2026.
Only 7% of Sainsbury’s invoices are paid within 30 days by count, compared with 63% at Marks and Spencer and 13% at Tesco (UK Payment Practices Reporting Service).
Sainsbury’s contractual payment terms run as long as 120 days from invoice date, versus Tesco’s longest standard term of 90 days and Marks and Spencer’s 75 days.
US core retail sales hit a record $5.28 trillion in 2024 and are forecast to reach $5.6 trillion in 2026, a 4.4% increase (National Retail Federation).
Retailers expect $849.9 billion in returned merchandise in 2025, a 15.8% return rate, with online returns running even higher at 19.3% (NRF 2025 Retail Returns Landscape, with Happy Returns).
Walmart’s OTIF program deducts 3% of cost of goods sold from a supplier’s invoice for shipments that miss its 98% on-time-in-full bar, one of retail’s best-documented invoice penalty systems.

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets took an average of 49 days to pay a supplier invoice in its most recent filing with the UK government’s Payment Practices Reporting Service, 75% longer than Marks and Spencer’s 28 days and noticeably slower than Tesco’s 43 days, even though all three retailers report under the same rules over almost the same months. That spread sits inside a retail sector that generated a record $5.28 trillion in US sales in 2024, is on track to send back close to $850 billion in returned merchandise in 2025, and increasingly runs its supplier paperwork through automated EDI systems and compliance programs like Walmart’s OTIF. This report pulls together the 2026 data on how retailers pay, get paid, and process the invoices in between.

How long do major retailers actually take to pay supplier invoices?

It depends heavily on which retailer is paying, even among direct competitors filing under the same UK rules. Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd reported an average time to pay of 49 days for the period running 2 March 2025 to 28 February 2026, with only 7% of invoices settled within 30 days by count and 16% taking 61 days or more, according to its filing with the UK government’s Payment Practices Reporting Service. Tesco Stores Limited, covering 25 August 2025 to 1 March 2026, averaged 43 days, with 13% of invoices paid inside 30 days. Marks and Spencer P.L.C., for 28 September 2025 to 28 March 2026, averaged 28 days, with 63% of invoices, nearly two thirds, paid within 30 days. All three are large UK companies required by law to publish these figures twice a year, which is what makes the comparison possible in the first place.

Figure 1: Sainsbury’s suppliers wait 75% longer on average than Marks and Spencer’s for the same invoice to get paid. Source: UK Government Payment Practices Reporting Service, filings covering 2025-2026.

The gap widens further once contractual terms, not just actual payment speed, are compared. Sainsbury’s standard terms run from “end of month following” delivery up to 75 days from invoice date for goods for resale, with a stated longest term of 120 days. Tesco’s terms range from 5 days for suppliers with under £250,000 in annual turnover up to 90 days for overseas-sourced clothing and general merchandise. Marks and Spencer sits in between: 7 days for small food suppliers under £4 million in annual spend, 19 days for food generally, and 75 days for fashion, home, and beauty suppliers. A supplier negotiating terms with more than one of these three companies is, in effect, negotiating three different invoicing calendars at once.

How much money moves through retail invoicing each year?

Every one of those invoices, whether a supplier billing a retailer or a retailer billing a wholesale account, adds up against a genuinely enormous base. US core retail sales, the National Retail Federation’s benchmark that excludes automobile dealers, gasoline stations, and restaurants, hit a record $5.28 trillion in 2024, up 3.6% over 2023. NRF forecast 2025 sales to grow a further 2.7% to 3.7%, to between $5.42 trillion and $5.48 trillion, and its most recent forecast, published in March 2026, points to $5.6 trillion for 2026, a 4.4% increase over 2025. Online and non-store sales, a growing share of that total, were expected to reach between $1.57 trillion and $1.6 trillion in 2025 alone.

None of that total is one transaction. It is millions of individual purchase orders, supplier invoices, wholesale account statements, and customer receipts, each a document that has to be created, sent, matched, and eventually paid or reconciled. The scale is also why even a small percentage swing in how efficiently that paperwork moves translates into billions of dollars sitting in transit rather than in a bank account.

Figure 2: US core retail sales have grown every year since 2024 and are forecast to keep climbing through 2026. Source: National Retail Federation, press releases January 2025 and March 2026.

How many retail sales come back the other way, as returns?

A meaningful share of retail invoicing runs in reverse. NRF’s 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report, produced with Happy Returns, a UPS company, forecasts that US shoppers will return $849.9 billion in merchandise in 2025, a 15.8% return rate, down slightly from 16.9% and $890 billion in 2024. Online purchases are returned at a notably higher rate, an estimated 19.3% of online sales in 2025, and the same report puts return fraud, someone gaming the return process rather than returning a genuine item, at 9% of all returns. The findings come from a survey of 2,006 consumers and 358 ecommerce professionals at US retailers with $500 million or more in annual revenue.

Every one of those returns has an invoicing-side counterpart: a credit note, a refund, or a reversed line item that has to reconcile against the original sale. A retailer processing millions of transactions a year is also processing a meaningful fraction of that volume again, in reverse, and getting the paperwork wrong on either side, the original invoice or the return credit, is one of the more common sources of billing disputes in retail.

Figure 3: Close to one in six dollars of US retail sales is expected to come back as a return in 2025. Source: National Retail Federation, 2025 Retail Returns Landscape, with Happy Returns.

How exposed is retail invoicing to compliance deductions and penalties?

Large retailers do not just pay invoices late or on time; some also deduct from them directly. Walmart’s On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) program, one of the most publicly documented examples in retail, requires suppliers to hit a 98% compliance threshold on scheduled deliveries and automatically deducts 3% of the cost of goods sold from a supplier’s invoice for shipments that miss it, whether the shipment arrives late, early, or incomplete. Walmart introduced the program in 2017 and tightened it in 2019 to 97.5% for food and consumables and 95% for general merchandise, after reporting that food and consumables shipments were still hitting the requirement only 40% of the time that March, according to trade coverage from the period. It tightened again in September 2020, replacing the tiered thresholds with the single 98% bar and 3% cost-of-goods-sold deduction that applies today. The penalty applies to the specific non-compliant shipment rather than an entire purchase order, but it comes straight off what the supplier is paid, turning an operational miss into an invoicing line item.

Figure 4: Walmart’s OTIF program deducts 3% of cost of goods sold for a shipment that misses its on-time-in-full bar. Source: Talk Business & Politics, reporting on Walmart’s supplier requirements, 2020.

Walmart’s program is the best documented because it is the largest and most publicly reported, but similar on-time and in-full compliance clauses, along with markdown, chargeback, and shortage deductions, are standard practice across large-format retail vendor agreements. For a supplier, that means the invoice a retailer eventually pays is frequently not the invoice the supplier originally sent.

How much retail invoicing runs through electronic systems instead of paper?

A large and growing share of the purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices moving between retailers and suppliers travels through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) rather than email attachments or paper. The global EDI software market, which retail and consumer goods companies use heavily to exchange these documents in a standardized, machine-readable format, was valued at roughly $40.9 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow to about $127 billion by 2035, a 12% compound annual growth rate, according to Expert Market Research’s market forecast. That is a projection, not a completed fact, but the direction matches the payment-terms and returns data above: retail invoicing is a high-volume, document-heavy process that keeps pushing toward more automated handling on both ends.

For a retail supplier too small to justify a dedicated EDI integration, the practical version of the same idea is a structured invoice with consistent numbering, clear terms, and an online payment option, the same fundamentals a large retailer’s EDI feed enforces automatically.

Figure 5: The global EDI market, which carries most retail purchase orders and invoices, is forecast to roughly triple by 2035. Source: Expert Market Research, EDI Market Size and Analysis, 2025.

Retail Invoicing at a Glance

Measure	Stat	Source	Year
Slowest of the three major UK grocers	Sainsbury’s, 49 days average	UK Payment Practices Reporting Service	2025-2026 filing
Fastest of the three major UK grocers	Marks and Spencer, 28 days average	UK Payment Practices Reporting Service	2025-2026 filing
US core retail sales	$5.28 trillion (2024 actual), $5.6 trillion (2026 forecast)	National Retail Federation	2024-2026
Merchandise returned	$849.9 billion, a 15.8% return rate	NRF 2025 Retail Returns Landscape	2025

Table 1: Four independently sourced measures spanning how retailers pay, how much they sell, and how much comes back. Sources: UK Payment Practices Reporting Service; National Retail Federation.

The Bottom Line

Retail invoicing is not one process; it is at least three running at once: a retailer paying its own suppliers on a schedule that, as the UK filings above show, can stretch past 100 days; the retailer issuing its own invoices and receipts against trillions of dollars in sales; and a reverse flow of returns and credit notes running back against a meaningful share of that same volume. The one thing all three share is that they are only as reliable as the paperwork behind them. A supplier invoice with a wrong PO reference, a missing SKU, or an unclear due date is exactly the kind of document that ends up parked in a 120-day payment cycle rather than a 30-day one. A BillyPaid invoice with consistent numbering, itemized line references, and a built-in due date gives a retail supplier the cleanest possible starting point for getting paid on whatever schedule the retailer on the other end actually runs. For the wider picture on how slowly invoices get paid across every sector, see Late Payment Statistics 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take a major retailer to pay a supplier invoice? It varies widely even among direct competitors. Sainsbury’s Supermarkets averaged 49 days in its most recent UK government payment practices filing (2 March 2025 to 28 February 2026), Tesco Stores Limited averaged 43 days, and Marks and Spencer P.L.C. averaged 28 days, all reporting under the same UK legal disclosure requirement.

How big is the retail sector’s invoicing volume? US core retail sales, which exclude automobile dealers, gasoline stations, and restaurants, reached a record $5.28 trillion in 2024 and were forecast to grow to between $5.42 trillion and $5.48 trillion in 2025, according to the National Retail Federation. NRF’s 2026 forecast points to $5.6 trillion, a further 4.4% increase.

How much retail merchandise gets returned, and what does that mean for invoicing? US retailers expect $849.9 billion in returned merchandise in 2025, a 15.8% return rate, according to NRF’s 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report produced with Happy Returns. Each return generates a credit note or refund that has to reconcile against the original invoice, adding a second document to track for a meaningful share of retail sales.

What is a retail compliance deduction, and how common is it? A compliance deduction is a retailer reducing what it pays a supplier, directly on the invoice, for missing a delivery requirement such as an on-time or in-full shipment. Walmart’s OTIF program is the most publicly documented example: it deducts 3% of the cost of goods sold for shipments that miss its 98% compliance threshold, and similar clauses are standard practice in large-format retail vendor agreements more broadly.