The large company and administrations delay payment more to SMEs and self-employed

BarcelonaPayment by large companies and administrations is not only not improving, but is getting worse. Last year, 85% of the largest companies exceeded the legal payment deadline between companies by seven days, reaching up to 67 days. And administrations more than doubled this, settling at 70 days, instead of the 30 established in the regulations, according to the Multisectorial Platform against Default (PMcM), which brings together one million companies and self-employed workers.

According to the new edition ofthe Report on Default: study of payment terms in Spain 2025, both between companies and from administrations, payment terms exceed those established in law 15/2010, which set company payments at 60 days and public administration payments at 30 days. The deterioration by the public sector is particularly serious, according to the president of the platform —who is also president of the Catalan employers' association Pimec— Antoni Cañete.

The issue is that this is the second consecutive year that administrations are paying later than companies, even though their maximum legal deadline is half. In fact, the sorpasso already occurred in 2024, when the average payment period for the public sector was 67 days, compared to 64 for the private sector, a situation that had not occurred since 2014.

In the public sphere, the biggest delays occur in local administrations. 55% of respondents affirm this. Next are the autonomous communities and regional bodies, with 26%, and the central administration, with 19%.

Public sector exemplary behavior

Cañete calls for urgent action and demands exemplary conduct from the public sector. In this regard, he recalls that the European Commission has been pressuring Spain for years due to payment delays by administrations. Brussels even opened a formal infringement procedure in 2015 and, despite numerous warnings, no sanctions have been imposed. The study highlights that in the private sector, large companies are the ones with the worst behavior, as the governor of the Bank of Spain, José Luis Escrivá, stated at the end of last year during his visit to Pimec.

The report states that the situation is further aggravated in the case of subcontracting, with an average payment period of 87 days by main contractors. Cañete states that the payment chain to the public sector has "been suffocating SMEs and self-employed workers for a long time" and assures that this chain is "poorly controlled". Furthermore, he denounces the existence of abusive conditions in contracts or commercial agreements, both public and private, with the imposition of payment terms exceeding those permitted by law.

In any case, the default rate, understood as the percentage of non-payments on total turnover, stood at 3.3% in 2025, down from 5.2% in 2024. This is a decrease parallel to that of banking defaults. The platform insists on the need to approve a regulation that includes sanctions for delays and non-payments, which continues in the debate phase in the European Council.