SMS Payment Reminders 2026: 73% Paid Within 2 Weeks vs 49% by Email Alone [Data Study]

Businesses that add SMS alongside email for payment reminders get invoices paid within two weeks 73% of the time, according to Chaser’s 2026 Accounts Receivable Report, compared to just 49% for businesses relying on email alone. That 24-point gap holds up against a separate, older, and arguably more rigorous piece of evidence: a randomized government trial that found texting changes repayment behavior in a way email measurably does not.

Figure 1: 73% of invoices are paid within two weeks when a business layers SMS onto its email payment reminders, versus 49% for email alone. Source: Chaser, 2026 Accounts Receivable Report.

How much faster do SMS payment reminders actually get invoices paid?

Substantially, and the gap is wide enough to matter on its own. Chaser’s 2026 Accounts Receivable Report, based on 163 validated responses from finance professionals across the UK, Australia, and more than 20 other countries, found that businesses using both SMS and email for payment reminders get paid within two weeks of the due date 73% of the time. Businesses relying on email alone get paid within that same two-week window only 49% of the time, a 24-point gap. The report doesn’t isolate exactly how much of that gap comes from SMS’s speed versus simply having a second channel that reaches a customer who ignores email, but the outcome is the same either way: a reminder sequence that runs on more than one channel closes a meaningful share of the collection gap that email-only follow-up leaves open.

Does texting a customer really change payment behavior, or do people just read texts faster?

It changes behavior, and this is the harder claim to prove, which is exactly why a 2017 randomized controlled trial matters here. Australia’s Behavioural Economics Team (BETA), working with Treasury and Westpac bank, ran a trial from 5 June to 31 October 2017 that sent different reminder messages to credit card customers before their payment due date. Any SMS reminder, regardless of its exact wording, produced a $134 increase in the following month’s repayment compared to customers who received no message at all, a 28% lift. The trial’s report states plainly that it “was unable to detect an effect from sending email reminders.” That’s not a case of email being slightly weaker than SMS; in this trial, it showed no measurable effect at all, while text messages moved real money. The specific wording of the SMS also didn’t matter much, and repeating the message added little on top of a single reminder, which suggests the channel itself, not the copy, is doing the work.

Figure 2: An SMS reminder sent before a credit card payment was due increased the following month’s repayment by 28%, while an email reminder showed no measurable effect. Source: Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), trial with Westpac, June-October 2017.

How quickly do people actually see a text payment reminder?

Within minutes, not hours. SimpleTexting’s 2026 survey of 1,000 US consumers and 400 US businesses, fielded in January 2026, found that 74% of consumers check a text notification within 5 minutes of receiving it, and 23% check within a single minute. That’s a different order of magnitude from email’s engagement curve: on GetResponse’s 2024 Benchmarks Report, drawn from 4.4 billion tracked sends, only 21.20% of all email opens happen within the first hour after delivery, a window twelve times longer than SMS’s 5-minute mark and still short of the 74% share SMS clears in that time. None of this means email reminders don’t work; invoice follow-up emails structured as an automated sequence still average a 51.05% open rate on their own. It means a text sitting unread for hours is a rare exception, while an email sitting unread for hours is closer to the norm.

Figure 3: 23% of consumers check a text notification within 1 minute, and 74% within 5 minutes. Source: SimpleTexting, 2026 Texting and SMS Marketing Statistics survey (1,000 US consumers + 400 US businesses, January 2026).

Does personalizing a reminder text change whether it gets paid?

It appears to, at least in the one field experiment built to test it directly. A 2024 study published in Digital Health by researcher Andris Saulitis ran a randomized field experiment on 9,196 unpaid hospital bills across 16 public hospitals in Latvia, working with a debt collection agency. Because 79% of the debtors in the study had only a phone number on file and no email address, most of the personalized and generic reminder messages tested went out as SMS. Messages that included the recipient’s name produced a statistically significant increase in the payment rate versus a generic reminder, describable as roughly doubling the response, while messages built around social-norm or public-good appeals (“most patients pay their bill on time”) had no measurable effect at all. The absolute numbers are modest, since the baseline payment rate for this chronic, hard-to-collect hospital debt was only around 1%, but the relative pattern lines up with what a commercial invoicing context would predict: a message that reads as addressed to a specific person, not a template, outperforms one that doesn’t.

Figure 4: Adding the recipient’s name to a reminder message roughly doubled the payment rate on hard-to-collect hospital debt, though the underlying baseline payment rate in this population was low overall. Source: Saulitis, Digital Health (2024), field experiment on 9,196 unpaid hospital bills in Latvia.

Is SMS widely used for payment reminders yet, and what’s it costing businesses not to?

Not as a dedicated, purpose-built channel, at least not by any published benchmark. No invoicing platform or industry report publishes a figure for “share of businesses using SMS specifically for payment reminders.” The closest available proxy is SimpleTexting’s 2026 survey finding that 75.3% of businesses use SMS marketing in some form, but billing or payment reminders isn’t even the top reported use case among businesses that do text customers; customer service and support (38%) and customer satisfaction surveys (36%) rank higher. That gap matters because the cost of not adding a second channel is measurable and specific: 65% of mid-sized US businesses spend an average of 14 hours a week on payment-collection admin, according to a Wakefield Research survey of 2,000 US businesses commissioned by QuickBooks, and 31% of businesses don’t manage to follow up on every overdue invoice each month at all, per Chaser’s 2026 report. A reminder text is only as useful as the phone number sitting in a business’s client records, so the same admin backlog that leaves invoices unchased tends to leave contact details stale too.

Figure 5: 65% of mid-sized US businesses spend an average of 14 hours a week on payment-collection admin, the burden a second automated reminder channel is meant to reduce. Source: Wakefield Research for QuickBooks, 2,000 US businesses with 25-200 employees, 2021.

Metric	SMS reminder	Email reminder
Paid within 2 weeks (used alongside the other channel)	73% (SMS + email combined)	49% (email alone)
Read speed	74% checked within 5 minutes	21.20% of opens within the first hour
Effect on next month’s repayment (BETA/Westpac RCT)	+28% ($134 average)	No measurable effect

Table 1: SMS outperforms email-only reminders on every measured dimension in the 2026 data, from the two-week paid rate to read speed to a randomized trial’s repayment effect. Sources: Chaser 2026 Accounts Receivable Report; SimpleTexting 2026 survey; GetResponse 2024 Benchmarks Report; BETA/Westpac trial, 2017.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 data and a nearly decade-old government trial land on the same conclusion from different directions: a text message reminder does something an email reminder measurably does not, at least on its own. Businesses running SMS alongside email get invoices paid within two weeks 73% of the time versus 49% for email alone, and the underlying mechanism, a randomized trial found, is that SMS moves real repayment behavior while email in that same trial showed no detectable effect. None of that means dropping email; it means treating a second channel as a lever rather than a nice-to-have, especially for the 31% of businesses still leaving some invoices completely unchased and the 65% losing 14 hours a week to collection admin. A BillyPaid payment reminder runs that follow-up automatically on every invoice, so a second channel doesn’t depend on someone remembering to send a text.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do SMS payment reminders actually get invoices paid faster than email? Yes. Businesses using both SMS and email for payment reminders get paid within two weeks 73% of the time, compared to 49% for businesses using email alone, a 24-point gap, according to Chaser’s 2026 Accounts Receivable Report (163 finance professionals surveyed).

Is there real evidence that texting changes payment behavior, not just that people read texts faster? Yes. In a randomized trial run by Australia’s Behavioural Economics Team with Westpac bank, sending an SMS reminder before a credit card payment was due increased the following month’s repayment by 28%, or $134 on average, and the trial could not detect any measurable effect from an email reminder sent instead.

How quickly do people actually see a text payment reminder? Fast. 74% of consumers check a text notification within 5 minutes of receiving it, and 23% check within 1 minute, according to SimpleTexting’s 2026 survey of 1,000 US consumers and 400 US businesses.

Does personalizing a reminder text change whether it gets paid? It appears to. A field experiment on 9,196 unpaid hospital bills in Latvia, most reachable only by SMS, found that including the recipient’s name in a reminder message roughly doubled the payment rate compared to a generic reminder, though the baseline payment rate in that study was low overall, around 1%.

Sources and References

1. Chaser: The 2026 Accounts Receivable Report (163 validated responses, UK/Australia-led, fielded late 2025-early 2026), two-week paid rate for email-plus-SMS versus email alone.
2. Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA): Credit When It’s Due, trial with Westpac and the Australian Treasury (5 June-31 October 2017), repayment effect of SMS versus email reminders.
3. SimpleTexting: Texting and SMS Marketing Statistics 2026 (survey of 1,000 US consumers and 400 US businesses, January 2026), notification check speed and business SMS adoption and use cases.
4. Saulitis, A.: Personalized messaging enhances hospital debt collection while prosocial appeals fail: Evidence from a field experiment, Digital Health (2024), effect of message personalization on payment rate, field experiment on 9,196 accounts.
5. GetResponse: Email Marketing Benchmarks Report (2024, 4.4 billion messages tracked), share of email opens occurring within the first hour after delivery.

Note: All figures verified as of August 2026.