Three sources measure how long tradies wait to be paid. None of them is a DSO, and they do not agree.
No published benchmark gives days sales outstanding for Australian trade businesses. What exists is three payment-time series — Xero’s invoice data, the Payment Times Reporting Regulator’s big-business data, and the credit bureaux — measuring different things and landing between 6 and 34 days. Here they are side by side, with the Queensland legal maximum and the arithmetic for your own.
The same question, four measuring sticks. None is a days-sales-outstanding figure.
- Xero: days from invoice to payment
- 22.9, June quarter 2026
- Xero: days paid late
- 6.0, June quarter 2026
- Regulator: construction, average days to pay
- 33.5, Jan–Jun 2025
- Regulator: construction, paid within 30 days
- 54.7%, Jan–Jun 2025
- Equifax: construction days beyond terms
- 8.15, July 2025
- CreditorWatch: construction invoices 60+ days overdue
- 7.15%, April 2026
- Queensland legal maximum, subcontracts
- 25 business days
- Queensland legal maximum, commercial building
- 15 business days
Each series counts a different population of invoices. The body text says which, and what that does to the number.
Start with the absence, and with what a DSO actually is
No Australian source publishes days sales outstanding for trade businesses. Not the ABS, not the ATO, not the Payment Times Reporting Regulator, not the Small Business Ombudsman, and none of the accounting or job management vendors. We searched all of them. What every one of them publishes instead is some measure of payment time, and the measures are not interchangeable.
Days sales outstanding is a balance-sheet ratio: money owed to you, divided by what you invoiced over a period, times the days in the period. Its defining feature is that it counts the invoices not yet paid — the ones at ninety days, in dispute, or no longer chased. A DSO of 45 on 14-day terms is a business lending a month of turnover to its customers, unsecured.
None of the series below is that. Each one measures something adjacent, and the differences between them are the useful part of this page. The register of what is not published is at the bottom of the automation benchmark; this page is one entry in it, worked through.
Series one: Xero’s invoice data, and the invoices it leaves out
Australian small businesses waited an average of 22.9 days to be paid after issuing an invoice in the June quarter of 2026, down from 24.2 days in March, and were paid 6.0 days late on average, down from 6.9. Xero Small Business Insights, Australia, June quarter 2026, published 30 July 2026. The December quarter figure of 6.6 days late was the second-shortest since the series began in January 2017. Xero Small Business Insights, December quarter 2025, published 3 March 2026. Longer back, 48% of invoices in 2021 were paid late and 10% more than a month late. Xero and Accenture, Crunch: Cash Flow Challenges, 2021 data, published 7 September 2022.
Now the method, because it decides what the number means. Time to be paid "is calculated from a dataset of invoices that were marked as fully paid in the relevant month", excluding "invoices which are not yet fully paid and invoices paid more than a year after issue", weighted by invoice value. Xero Small Business Insights methodology, method revised July 2025.
Read that twice. An invoice only enters the series when it is paid. The customer who has not paid you for four months is not in the 22.9 days; he arrives the month he pays, and if he never does, he never arrives. That is a fair way to measure payment behaviour and a systematically optimistic way to measure what a business is owed. The series also describes Xero users, weighted to the industry mix, and publishes no construction split for Australia.
Series two: the regulator’s data on big businesses paying small ones, with a construction column
The Payment Times Reporting Regulator collects, from large businesses, how long they take to pay small suppliers. In the first half of 2025 the average was 27.4 days against average agreed terms of 29, with a median of 23 days. 66.5% of invoices were paid within terms and 68.2% within 30 days. The 80th percentile invoice took 39 days and the 95th took 64. Payment Times Reporting Regulator, Regulator’s Update, reporting cycle 9, 1 January – 30 June 2025, published January 2026.
Construction is worse on every line. Large construction businesses agreed average terms of 34 days and took 33.5 days on average; 64.8% of invoices were paid within terms and only 54.7% within 30 days; the 80th percentile invoice took 47 days and the slowest 5% took 68. Payment Times Reporting Regulator, Regulator’s Update, reporting cycle 9, 1 January – 30 June 2025, published January 2026. The regulator’s own gloss on cycle 9 was that the slowest payments were getting slower — the 95th percentile had been 58 days the cycle before.
The August 2026 update covering the second half of 2025 reports agreed terms stable at 29 days for a third cycle and a 6.6 percentage point improvement in the share paid within 30 days since the scheme’s first cycle. Payment Times Reporting Regulator, Regulator’s Update, reporting cycle 10, 1 July – 31 December 2025, published 24 August 2026. The full construction table for that cycle sits in the regulator’s PDF, which we have linked rather than summarised second-hand.
Two limits. This is only small businesses invoicing large ones — the head contractor paying the subbie, not the subbie’s residential customer — and it is self-reported by the payer. It is still the only Australian series with a construction column, which is why it leads this page.
| All industries | Construction | |
|---|---|---|
| Average agreed terms | Partly 29 days | No 34 days |
| Average time to pay | Partly 27.4 days, median 23 | No 33.5 days |
| Paid within agreed terms | Partly 66.5% | No 64.8% |
| Paid within 30 days | Partly 68.2% | No 54.7% |
| 80th percentile invoice | Partly 39 days | No 47 days |
| Slowest 5% of invoices | No 64 days, up from 58 | No 68 days |
Series three: the credit bureaux, which count the overdue rather than the paid
Equifax measures days beyond terms across trade credit it sees. Overall it rose to 4 days in July 2025, up 17.9% on a year earlier, while the year-to-date figure was 3.5 days. Construction sat at 8.15 days, behind only rental, hiring and real estate at 8.22; professional services were 4.75 and mining 3.84. Equifax Business Pulse, as reported by Australian Broker, July–August 2025 data, published 23 September 2025.
CreditorWatch counts the share of invoices more than 60 days overdue, and in April 2026 that measure was at its highest since January 2020. Construction had 7.15% of invoices more than 60 days overdue and a rolling annual insolvency rate of 1.18%; food and beverage services were worst at 11.37%, transport 7.09% and retail 6.59%. CreditorWatch Business Risk Index, April 2026 data, published 20 May 2026.
The Ombudsman’s caseload points the same way. Of 6,254 requests for help in 2023–24, 42% involved payment disputes, against a historical average of 26% since 2016. ASBFEO annual figures, as reported by SmartCompany, 2023–24, published 2 September 2024.
Notice the shape. Xero says late payments are near their shortest on record; CreditorWatch says severely overdue invoices are at a six-year high. Both can be true: one measures the average of what got paid, the other the tail of what did not. A trade business feels the tail, and its DSO would be dominated by it.
The legal ceiling in Queensland, and how far above it the measured numbers sit
Under the Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act, a progress payment in Queensland is due on the date the contract says or, if the contract is silent, within 10 business days of the payment claim. A contract term longer than 15 business days is void for commercial building contracts, and longer than 25 business days for subcontracts. QBCC, Request payment — Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017, page reviewed 31 August 2021.
Put the regulator’s construction figures beside that. An average of 33.5 calendar days is roughly 23 to 24 business days — inside the subcontract ceiling on average, well outside the 15-day head-contract ceiling, and the average is not the problem. The 80th percentile at 47 calendar days and the 95th at 68 are past both ceilings by weeks, and the Act’s remedy for that is a payment claim and adjudication, which a small subbie has to choose to start.
We are not lawyers and this is not advice on your contract; the QBCC page linked above is the place to start, and the other states run their own security of payment legislation with their own timeframes. The point for this page is narrower: the law sets a ceiling in business days, the measured behaviour is reported in calendar days, and nobody publishes the two together. Now they are.
How to work out your own DSO in fifteen minutes
Open the aged receivables report. In Xero it is under Reports, in MYOB under Sales; the Xero page and the MYOB page document where the underlying invoice data sits if you want it out of the system rather than on a screen. Take the total owed to you today. Take the total you invoiced in the last 90 days. Divide the first by the second and multiply by 90.
An illustration with round numbers, not data: $60,000 owed against $180,000 invoiced in the quarter is 60,000 ÷ 180,000 × 90, which is 30 days. If your terms are 14 days, that is 16 days of your own money you are lending. Run the same sum with the 90-plus bucket excluded and you will see how much of the number is the tail — which is the part that chasing fixes and the part a Xero average would never show you.
Then do it again next quarter. One DSO is a snapshot; two are a direction. Debtor chasing describes a reminder sequence built rather than remembered, and the leak calculator puts a cost of money against the days you shave off, on your figures.
- KNDR·01Receivables ÷ invoiced × daysTotal owed today, over total invoiced in the last 90 days, times 90. That is the whole formula.
- KNDR·02Run it twiceOnce with everything, once without the 90-plus bucket. The gap is the tail. The tail is what chasing fixes.
- KNDR·03Compare to terms, not to averagesYour DSO minus your stated terms is the loan you are making. The published series above cannot tell you that; only your file can.
- KNDR·04Next quarter, againOne number is a snapshot. Two are a direction. Direction is what you manage.
What we have not measured, and what would change this page
Nothing above is a Kindra measurement. This page was specced as one — first-party data on days sales outstanding across Australian trade businesses by size and trade, licensed for anyone to reuse with attribution. We have not collected it, so the page publishes what is published instead, with the dates on.
What would change it is not a survey. It is receivables and invoicing totals pulled from the accounting file itself, at quarter end, across enough businesses to publish a distribution rather than an average, on real Australian businesses, for long enough that the numbers stop moving. When that exists it gets published here with the sample size, the method and the cases where it failed, and the borrowed figures above come out.
If our own numbers turn out smaller than the ones vendors quote, they still get published. That is the point of measuring instead of asserting. Until then, the arithmetic section above runs on your figures, which are worth more than anybody’s average.
The questions people actually ask.
01Why is there no Kindra figure on a page filed under research?
Because we have not measured one, and a number you cannot show the working for is a marketing claim with a chart. What we could do honestly was find everything that is published, date it, put the sources that disagree next to each other and mark where the data stops. That turned out to be more useful than the page we set out to write.
02Xero says payments are near their fastest on record. Why does this page sound gloomy?
Because Xero is measuring the invoices that got paid, and this page is about the ones that have not been. Both are real. If most of your customers pay in three weeks and two of them have not paid since March, Xero’s series sees the three weeks and your DSO sees March. The credit bureau figures — 60-plus-day arrears at a six-year high in April 2026 — are the tail Xero’s average cannot show, and the tail is what a small business feels.
03The regulator’s data is about big companies paying small ones. My customers are homeowners.
Then it does not describe you, and we have said so. The regulator’s series is the only Australian one with a construction column, which is why it is here, but it measures head contractors and large clients, not residential work. For a residential trade the closest published figure is Xero’s 22.9 days to be paid and 6.0 days late, which describes all small businesses rather than yours. Your own aged receivables report describes yours, in fifteen minutes, and nothing on this page is a substitute for running it.
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