The number that will get quoted is 92 percent. That is the share of subcontractors who covered payroll out of their own funds in the past year while waiting to be paid, according to The State of Subcontractor Billing in 2026, published this week by Siteline. Twenty-eight percent did it most months.
The number that should get quoted is 11 hours. That is how long two-thirds of respondents spend every month just preparing, submitting and chasing pay applications, and it is the part of the problem that sits on the subcontractor’s own side of the table.
Retainage waits split sharply between subs and GCs
Siteline surveyed 492 construction finance and operations professionals in May 2026. Forty-three percent of subcontractors reported waiting more than 90 days for final payment and retainage. Among general contractors the figure was 15 percent. Nearly one in five subs said the wait runs six months or more.
That gap is the whole argument. It isn’t that money moves slowly through construction, it’s that the same money moves at two speeds depending on where you sit in the chain, and the party with the thinnest balance sheet is the one absorbing the delay.
Pay application errors are the biggest internal driver
Here is where the report gets uncomfortable for its own audience. Asked what causes their payments to run late, respondents named pay applications submitted with errors or omissions as the single largest internal factor. Not owner funding. Not GC slow-walking. Paperwork that came back.
Fifty-six percent said they had missed a critical mechanic’s lien deadline in the past two years, which is the statutory backstop failing at the same time as the billing process.
Martin Press, founder and president of Press Mechanical Contractors and secretary/treasurer of the American Subcontractor Association, pointed to ASA’s push to expand retainage bonds as a structural fix.
How much weight the survey carries
Read the source before you cite it. This is a vendor-sponsored, self-selected online survey, not a probability sample, and Siteline sells subcontractor billing software, so it has a commercial interest in findings that show pay-app pain and lien misses. The ASA quote comes from an association actively lobbying for retainage reform. None of that makes the numbers wrong. It does mean every figure needs “according to Siteline’s survey of 492 finance and operations staff” attached to it.
What survives the caveats is the direction. On a job like the New Children’s Hospital in Dublin, where room-by-room sign-off has been running at roughly 108 rooms a week against 6,150 rooms, certification throughput is the thing standing between a trade contractor and its retainage. The billing bottleneck and the closeout bottleneck turn out to be the same bottleneck, and neither is fixed by putting more people on site.