How long do clients actually take to pay? Payment data from 3.7 million contractor invoices

You did the work. You sent the invoice. Now you're checking your phone, wondering if this client is slow or if this is just how it goes.

Here's the honest answer, from real numbers. We analyzed 3.75 million invoices that 442,894 US home-service businesses sent through Tofu: how long clients really take, how many never pay, and what invoice payment terms like net 30 mean in practice. Not a survey, not opinions. What clients actually did.

Let's break it down so you can see where your own numbers stand. If you want the fine print on how we counted, the full methodology is at the end of the article.

How long do clients take to pay an invoice?

Half of contractor invoices are paid within 13 days of being sent. That's the median across 1.29 million paid invoices, and if anything it's an upper bound: manually recorded payment dates run a few days late, so the money tends to arrive a bit sooner than the books say.

But the spread matters more than the middle:

Put another way:

So if a client pays you in a week and a half, that's normal. And if an invoice is sitting unpaid at day 40, that's not unusual either. Every tenth invoice waits more than 71 days. The tail is long.

Online payments are a different story

When a client pays through a link in the invoice, we have an exact timestamp. And the picture changes completely:

Card payments land in a day and a half, against 13 days overall. ACH is the outlier, and that's not the client's fault: the transfer itself takes several days to clear.

Days to payment by trade

Nobody's clients are equally patient. According to Tofu's data, payment speed ranges from 3 days for locksmiths to 24 days for painters:

The pattern is simple. Small, urgent jobs get paid fast: locksmith (3 days), home theater (6), appliance repair (7). The client is standing right there, the problem just got fixed, they pay.

Project work waits: painting (24 days), general contracting and renovations (18 each). Bigger tickets, more decision-makers, more "I'll get to it this weekend."

Ticket size explains a lot of the gap, and it swings by trade just as hard. We broke down the pricing side in how much contractors charge by trade.

One caveat: the trade is assigned by automatic business classification, not by the contractor. Trades with fewer than 3,000 invoices didn't make the table.

Bigger invoices wait longer

Same story inside every trade: the size of the check drives how long you wait.

The relationship runs one way, with no exceptions: the bigger the invoice, the longer the wait and the more often it's never paid at all. Between the smallest and largest bucket the gap is 13 days and 24 percentage points.

If most of your work is $5,000+ jobs, don't compare yourself to a benchmark built on lawn-mowing invoices. Your normal is 21 days. And this is exactly where progress payments and deposits earn their keep (more on those below).

Net 30 payment terms vs. what actually happens

Here's the number that surprised us most: 84.5% of contractor invoices don't state payment terms at all. No net 30, no due date, nothing. The default move in this industry is to send the invoice and hope.

Quick refresher before the data:

What is net 30? Net 30 means the client has 30 days from the invoice date to pay the full amount. Net 10 and net 15 work the same way with shorter windows. "Due on receipt" means payment is expected as soon as the client gets the invoice.

Now what those terms mean in practice:

Three things jump out:

Net 30 is a guideline, not a deadline. The median invoice with net 30 terms is paid in 34 days. More than half of clients (55.8%) blow past the limit. If you offer net 30, plan your cash around 5 weeks, not 30 days.

Shorter terms get broken more often, and still win. "Due on receipt" gets ignored by 73.9% of clients. But the median payment still lands in 9 days, against 34 for net 30. Clients treat your deadline as a starting point, so a closer deadline means an earlier start.

Invoices with terms get paid more often. 57–68% of invoices with stated terms end up paid, against 43.9% without. That's a correlation, not proof that terms cause payment: contractors who set terms tend to run tighter paperwork all around. But there's no version of this data where leaving the due date blank looks like a good idea. If you need a starting point, our free invoice templates have a terms line built in.

How many invoices are paid late, and how many are never paid

Now the uncomfortable part. Among invoices that were emailed to the client and had at least five months to get paid:

Read that again: one in three small invoices sent to a client is never paid. For invoices over $5,000, it's one in two.

And late payments are the norm, not the exception: among invoices with a stated due date, 56–74% miss it, depending on the terms.

One more number that stings. Out of 85,875 invoices where the client actually opened the online payment page, 16,507, or 19.2%, were abandoned before completing payment. These aren't clients who never saw the invoice or forgot about it. They got as far as the payment form and closed it.

The takeaway isn't "clients are terrible." It's that an invoice isn't a collection system. Sent doesn't mean seen, seen doesn't mean started, and started doesn't mean finished. Each of those steps leaks money, and each one can be patched.

What actually gets invoices paid faster

We compared invoices inside the same time window to see what separates the ones that get paid from the ones that don't. Three things stand out.

Put a payment link on the invoice

When card payments are switched on, the invoice email and the PDF carry a pay-online link and a QR code. Here's how those invoices perform:

Emailed invoices with a payment link get paid 79.6% of the time, against 56.1% for emailed invoices without one. That's a 23-point gap, and the money arrives twice as fast.

To be straight with you: this is a correlation. Businesses that turn on online payments tend to have their act together in other ways too. We can't prove the link alone causes the gap. But a 23-point difference is hard to ignore, whatever share of it the link itself is responsible for.

Two details worth knowing:

• Even when a link is there, only 29.1% of those payments go through by card. The rest still arrive as checks, cash, and transfers. The link doesn't force anyone; it just removes the excuse.
• Worried about processing fees? In 66.5% of successful online payments, the client covered the card fee. Passing the fee on is the norm in this industry, and those invoices still get paid more often than invoices with no link at all.

If your invoices go out bare, online payments are the single biggest gap in this entire dataset.

The payment method sets the speed limit

Among paid invoices where the method was recorded:

The check is both the most popular way contractors get paid and the slowest: 18 days at the median. Instant transfers like Zelle and Venmo run two to three times faster, and card payments settle in 2 days.

You don't have to ban checks. But every client you move from "I'll mail you a check" to anything electronic cuts your wait roughly in half.

Some invoices never even arrive

Out of 148,180 invoices with a tracked email send, 2.8% of the emails never reached the client at all: wrong address, full inbox, server bounce. That's pure loss. The client isn't slow, isn't dodging you, they just never got the invoice.

A few more findings from the same subset:

• 13.7% of emailed invoices had to be sent again.
• Among invoices where the client opened the email, 39.7% still went unpaid. Opened is not paid.
• The median time from first send to payment is 13 days, which tells you when a follow-up is due (see the playbook below).

An invoicing tool that shows delivery and opens, like Tofu's invoicing, takes the guessing out of it: you know whether to fix the email address or start nudging. And automatic payment reminders handle the nudging part without you having to remember anybody.

Do contractors take deposits?

Short answer from the data: rarely.

There's no dedicated deposit button in the product, so we measured it two indirect ways. Only 1.03% of invoices (38,553) were paid in more than one installment. And 16,419 invoices contain a line item named something like "deposit," "down payment," or "retainer." Both numbers are lower bounds, since a deposit invoiced separately doesn't show up in either count. But even so: deposits in home services are single-digit territory, an exception rather than the rule.

Is it normal to ask a client for money upfront, then? Yes, especially on big jobs, and the never-paid table above is the argument. When one in two $5,000+ invoices goes unpaid, collecting even part of the money before the work starts moves you from "hoping" to "covered." If most contractors aren't doing it, that's an edge, not a problem.

What to do when a client doesn't pay

The data can't chase your money, but it does suggest a sequence. Half of the clients who are going to pay have paid by day 13. After that, silence usually isn't "busy," it's "stuck." Here's a playbook:

1. Check the invoice actually arrived. 2.8% of invoice emails never land. Confirm delivery before assuming the worst.
2. Resend with a payment link, around day 7. A friendly one-liner is enough: "Resending in case it got buried. You can pay online here." No apology needed, no drama. 13.7% of invoices needed a resend, so you're in normal territory.
3. Follow up by day 14 with a phone call or text. Past the median, past politeness-by-email. A call resolves in two minutes what five emails won't.
4. Apply your late fee, if your terms state one. This is why terms belong on the invoice: a late fee you never announced is a fight, a late fee printed on the invoice is a policy.
5. Send a final notice with a deadline. State the amount, the original due date, and what happens next.
6. Escalate. Depending on the size, that's small claims court, a collections agency, or, for construction work, a mechanics lien where your state allows it. This is the expensive lane, which is exactly why steps 1–5 are worth systemizing.

The bottom line

The short version of 3.75 million invoices:

• A normal client pays in about two weeks. A quarter of paid invoices take longer than a month, and that's before you get to the 30–53% of emailed invoices that are never paid at all.
• Deadlines get treated as suggestions. Among invoices with a stated due date, 56–74% miss it. Stating terms still beats not stating them: invoices with terms get paid noticeably more often.
• The fastest-paid invoices share three habits: terms on the invoice, a payment link, and a follow-up that actually happens.

The first two habits are one-time setup. The third one eats your evenings, because "follow up on Thursday" only works if you remember every Thursday, for every client. That's a job for software, not memory: automatic payment reminders in Tofu nudge the client about an unpaid invoice for you, on a schedule you set. The reminder goes out whether or not you thought about it, and you stop chasing clients for your own money.

Methodology

• Dataset: 3,750,978 invoices from 442,894 US field-service businesses, issued between January 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026. USD invoices only. Median invoice amount: $600. Computed August 2026.
• What counts as paid: the contractor marked the invoice paid, or the payment went through the built-in card payment service. That's 1,742,870 invoices, or 46.5% of the sample.
• Payment timing is computed on 1,286,649 paid invoices with a reliable payment date. Invoices where the payment date equals the invoice date are excluded: that's usually the default date in the interface, not a real same-day payment.
• The 13-day median is an upper bound. Manually recorded payment dates tend to be entered days after the money actually arrived. We measured this directly on invoices that had both a real payment timestamp and a manual mark.
• Never-paid rates are calculated only on invoices with a confirmed email send, issued before February 28, 2026, so every invoice had at least five months to get paid. Drafts and duplicates are excluded.
• Hour-level timing is reported only for online payments, where an exact server timestamp exists.
• Percentages in each section are computed on the subset described in that section.