Late payment isn't a personality quirk of the industry — it's a system you're allowed to redesign. Freelancers who get paid on time aren't luckier; they run tighter mechanics. Here are the mechanics.

Before the work: set the terms

  • Payment terms go in the agreement, not the invoice. By invoice time it's too late to negotiate. 14 days is a perfectly professional default; 7 for small jobs.
  • Deposits are normal. 25–50% up front for project work filters the clients who were never going to pay well, and funds the work in progress.
  • For long projects, stage payments tied to milestones — never 100% on completion of something that takes three months.

The invoice itself

Send it the day the work completes (every day of delay signals it isn't urgent), address it to the actual accounts contact (ask for this when the project starts), include a due date not just "14 days", your bank details, any PO number — and make paying frictionless with a card/open-banking pay link. FreeAgent invoices (included in our packages) do the lot, plus the part most freelancers hate: automatic polite chasing before and after the due date, so the awkward emails send themselves.

You're legally owed more than the invoice

Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts legislation, B2B invoices past terms accrue statutory interest at 8% above base plus a fixed compensation fee (£40–£100 per invoice by size). You don't have to charge it — but a line in your terms noting that you may concentrates minds, and on a chronic late-payer, actually applying it is both legitimate and clarifying.

The escalation ladder

  1. Automatic reminder at due date (software's job)
  2. Personal email at +7 days — warm, direct, attaching the invoice again
  3. Phone call at +14 — remarkably effective precisely because nobody does it
  4. +21: pause ongoing work ("happy to resume once the account's current") — the single most persuasive move available
  5. +30: letter before action, then Money Claim Online for sums worth chasing — small claims exist for exactly this and rarely need a lawyer

The pattern behind the problem

Chronic late payment clusters: certain clients, certain sectors, certain project shapes (big one-off deliverables, no deposit, vague scope). Your accounts data shows the pattern — FreeAgent's debtor reports make it obvious — and the fix is usually pricing or terms, not persistence. A client who pays at 60 days is charging you for credit; reprice them or release them.