What the EU Evidence Shows—and What It Cannot Prove

The EU Payment Observatory's 2025 report gives the customer-supplier payment problem several different measurements. This chapter reads those measurements together to answer two questions: how widespread are late-payment problems, and how much do the data actually establish about the chain from a late customer receipt to a late supplier payment? The distinction matters because a survey can show what firms experienced, while transaction data can show when invoices were settled; neither one alone is a complete map of every commercial relationship.

A problem measured three ways

The broadest EU indicator is based on companies reporting that they faced problems due to late payments. In 2024, 52% of European companies reported such problems. The share was five percentage points higher than in 2023 and ten points higher than in 2021, when the situation began to worsen. This is a measure of reported difficulty, not a claim that 52% of every invoice was late. A company may have faced a serious problem from one large customer, several smaller delays, or a long payment period that strained its cash flow without producing a formal breach.

The same analysis separates the type of customer. Forty-seven percent of companies reported problems with payments from other businesses, while 16% reported problems with public authorities. The two figures answer different questions about exposure. Almost all companies engage in business-to-business relationships, while fewer companies sell to public authorities. A lower government-related percentage may therefore partly reflect who has a government customer, not better payment behavior by public entities.

A second measurement asks how long suppliers say they waited. In 2024, the average reported payment period was 60.3 days for B2B transactions and 69.8 days for government-to-business transactions. Public authorities therefore paid, on average, 9.5 days later than businesses. These are averages across surveyed suppliers and covered countries, not a timetable that describes every invoice. They are useful because they show how long cash can remain outside the supplier's business, but an average cannot identify the particular customer or payable that created a downstream problem.

A third measurement separates the agreed term from the actual period. Suppliers reported average B2B payment terms of 43.0 days and G2B terms of 55.9 days. The gap between a term and a payment period helps distinguish two situations. A customer paying on day 60 under a 60-day term may not be late, but the supplier has still financed the customer for 60 days. A customer paying on day 75 under the same term has created an additional 15-day delay. The first situation raises a question about the fairness and affordability of the term; the second adds a failure to respect it.

The Observatory finds that longer payment terms were associated with longer payment periods in 87% of the available country-year-source observations. Its aggregate estimate associated a one-day increase in an agreed term with a little more than one additional day in the actual payment period.