Ninety-two percent. That’s the share of subcontractors who covered payroll out of their own working capital in the past year while waiting to get paid on work they’d already put in place. Twenty-eight percent do it most months.
Siteline published The State of Subcontractor Billing in 2026 on August 13, drawing on a survey of 492 construction finance and operations professionals fielded in May.
Retainage isn’t shared, it’s transferred
The sharpest number in the report is a comparison. Forty-three percent of subcontractors wait more than 90 days for final payment and retainage. Fifteen percent of general contractors do. Nearly one in five subs waits six months or more.
That gap says retainage risk doesn’t flow proportionally down the chain. It concentrates at the bottom, where the firms have the thinnest balance sheets and the least ability to price it.
“Retainage puts subcontractors in a difficult position,” said Martin Press, founder and president of Press Mechanical Contractors and secretary-treasurer of the American Subcontractor Association. “It keeps us from money we’ve already earned while we still have employees, suppliers, and vendors to pay.” Press pointed to the policy lever that’s actually moving: “ASA is working to expand options such as retainage bonds that give subcontractors access to those funds sooner, while still providing appropriate protection for the project.”
Siteline co-founder and CEO Claire Wilson put it more bluntly. “Subcontractors have become the construction industry’s bank, and it’s a role no one asked for.”
The part subs control, and don’t
Here’s where the report stops being a grievance and starts being useful. Asked what most drives their own late payments, subcontractors named erroneous or incomplete pay applications. Not GC float. Not owner delay. Their own paperwork.
Sixty-seven percent spend 11 or more hours a month on pay-app prep and tracking, which is most of a workweek every quarter spent on billing administration. And 56% missed a mechanic’s lien deadline in the past two years. That last figure is the one to sit with, because a lien is the strongest leverage a subcontractor has, and more than half of them let it expire.
Two different problems live in this data. One requires legislation or a bonding market. The other requires a calendar.
Seventy-three percent report optimism about their financial outlook anyway, which tells you something about the temperament of the trade.
Some jobs carry more of this risk than others. A student housing build with a hard pre-semester delivery date, like Hub Athens Dougherty, compresses every billing cycle on the job.