Invoice Payment Terms: 7, 14 or 30 Days?
What the default legal terms are if you say nothing, how shorter terms change payment behaviour, and how to move a customer from 30 days to 14 without an argument.
If you don't state terms, the law picks for you
Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, if you supply another business and your contract says nothing about payment timing, the default is 30 days from the later of: the date the customer receives the invoice, or the date the goods or services were supplied.
For consumers, there's no equivalent statutory default. You're relying on whatever you agreed, which is why writing terms on the quote matters more than writing them on the invoice.
The practical point: saying nothing is a choice, and it's the slowest one.
What to actually use
On receipt — for small domestic jobs, call-outs and repairs. The customer is standing there, the job is done, they can pay by card or transfer before you've packed up. Anything you don't collect on the day takes longer and sometimes takes chasing.
7 days — for domestic work where you invoiced afterwards. Short enough to stay top of the pile, long enough not to feel aggressive.
14 days — the sensible default for small commercial customers and letting agents. Most will pay it. It's a defensible ask.
30 days — for main contractors and larger businesses whose payment runs you won't change. Fighting a monthly payment run with a 14-day term achieves nothing except making you look inexperienced.
Shorter terms genuinely do get paid faster
Not because customers respect the number, but because of how payment runs work. A business paying weekly will pick up a 7-day invoice in the next run. A 30-day invoice sits in a pile until it's near due, and anything that sits gets forgotten, queried, or lost behind a change of bookkeeper.
The other effect is psychological. An invoice marked "due in 7 days" reads as a business that watches its money. An invoice with no terms reads as one that doesn't.
How to shorten terms without a row
Don't announce it on the invoice. By then it's a surprise and an argument.
Put it on the quote. "Payment terms: 14 days from completion" as a line on every quote means the customer agreed to it before work started. There's nothing to negotiate at invoice stage.
Offer the alternative. For bigger jobs, staged payments beat arguing about terms: a deposit for materials, a payment at first fix, the balance on completion. Most customers find that more reasonable than one large bill, and your exposure drops enormously.
Make paying instant. The fastest terms in the world don't help if paying you takes a laptop and a bank login. A pay-by-card link on the invoice removes the friction, and cards get paid at the kitchen table.
What you can charge when they're late
For business-to-business debts, statutory late payment rules give you:
• Interest at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, running from the day after payment was due
• A fixed compensation sum based on the size of the debt, on top of the interest
• Reasonable recovery costs above that fixed sum, where they exceed it
You don't need it written into the contract; it's statutory. Whether you use it is a commercial judgement. Many tradespeople never invoice the interest but mention its existence in a second chase, which is often enough on its own.
For consumers, you're relying on your agreed terms rather than this Act.
Put the terms where they get read
Three places, every time:
• On the quote, so the customer agrees up front
• On the invoice, with the actual due date spelled out, not just "14 days"
• In the email that carries the invoice, in one short line
"Due 28 August" is harder to ignore than "Terms: 14 days". Make the person read a date, not do arithmetic.
And make the payment details impossible to miss
The most common reason a small invoice goes unpaid for a week isn't reluctance. It's that the account details were somewhere in the body of a PDF and the customer meant to come back to it.
Account name, sort code, account number, and the invoice number as the reference. Every time, in the same place.
When it's already late
Terms are prevention. If an invoice has already gone past due, the approach is different, and we've written it up with wording you can copy in how to chase an unpaid invoice.
Setting terms in seconds
Our free invoice generator has a payment terms picker: on receipt, 7, 14 or 30 days. Pick one and it calculates the due date and prints it on the invoice, so the customer sees a date rather than a duration.
This article is general guidance, not legal advice. If you're pursuing a significant debt, take proper advice.
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