Late payment beats every other complaint among small contractors and service vendors, and it isn’t close. In a survey of 417 small and midsized vendors, 51.6% named clients paying late as their biggest payment problem, more than double the 22.1% who picked processing fees.
The numbers come from the 2026 Vendor Payment and Portal Report by VendorAccess, a vendor-management platform from property software company Entrata. ForConstructionPros covered it Oct. 19. Construction and contracting firms made up 71.9% of respondents, and 64% had 25 or fewer employees. The rest work in property improvement, janitorial, security and facility maintenance.
Construction payment delays by the numbers
Most vendors do get paid reasonably fast. About 57% said cash arrives within 15 days of invoicing. The tail is the problem: 17% wait 31 to 90 days. For a 10-person sub carrying payroll every week, a 60-day receivable on a $40,000 job is a line-of-credit draw, not an inconvenience.
Scope and pricing disputes slow payment for 18.9% of respondents, and 18.5% cited rejected invoices. Those two often travel together. An invoice kicked back for a missing lien waiver or a mismatched PO number resets the clock without anyone disputing the work.
VendorAccess also found that 83.7% pay some kind of administrative fee just to receive payment, through card surcharges, portal fees or payment-app charges.
Portal work and compliance paperwork
The survey’s second theme is time. Nearly half of respondents, 45.6%, log into only one or two client payment portals a month. Even so, more than 60% spend two to 10 hours a week on portal tasks. Among vendors juggling six or more portals, 16.6% spend 11 hours or more each week.
Compliance paperwork adds more. Nearly 12% spend nine or more hours a month on certificates of insurance, W-9s, licenses and renewals. Only 26% keep it under an hour.
The back office often isn’t built for it. QuickBooks is the most common accounting system at 58.5%, but 26.1% still rely on paper, spreadsheets or other manual methods. On AI, 26.9% use it for invoicing and 23.3% for scheduling, while 24.9% have no plans to adopt it.
Read the source before you quote it
This is a vendor’s survey, and VendorAccess says plainly that the results point to problems it believes better tooling can fix. It didn’t publish fielding dates or a margin of error, and its respondents skew toward firms serving property managers rather than general contractors. Treat the percentages as directional.
The direction still matches what GCs are building on their side. Procore just made COMPASS its default subcontractor prequalification tool, another login and another document set for the sub. Each new portal promises to save the owner or GC time. The survey suggests some of that time simply moves down the chain to the smallest firm on the job.