Late payments are falling in France, but nearly half of companies still pay past due — that's the volume a follow-up has to cover
According to the Altares Dun & Bradstreet study published on 15 September 2026, 49.7% of French companies now pay suppliers on time, up from 45.2% a year earlier, with the average delay down to 12.3 days — the best level in three years. The progress is real. It still leaves 50.3% of companies paying late, with sharp disparities by company size and sector.
The study, published 15 September 2026, marks a genuine turnaround after a continuous deterioration seen in 2024 and worsened in 2025: France's average payment delay drops to 12.3 days, better than the European average (13.1 days). But Altares itself flags it: sharp disparities remain by company size and sector. For a small business or an agency billing recurring services — a registered address, mail handling, administrative support — the national average says nothing about the one client who, this month, is past due.
In practice, one company in two still paying late means an owner or a back-office team keeps checking, invoice by invoice, which one is due, which deserves a polite reminder, and which deserves a firmer one. It's repetitive work, sensitive to tone (you don't chase a loyal client the same way as a repeat late payer), and easy to let slip when attention is elsewhere — at the front desk, on a new file, on a ringing phone.
For AppH
- An agent that tracks client due dates and drafts a follow-up reminder, calibrated to the client's history, absorbs exactly that repetitive work — never sending a firm reminder or formal notice without human approval.
- For a multi-branch network, the question repeats 30 times in parallel: who follows up in each branch, with what tone, how consistently? A draft ready to approve changes how long that takes, without depending on one person's memory.
Against / the honest limit
- AppH doesn't decide to start a collection procedure or assess a client's creditworthiness: it drafts a reminder, a person approves and sends it.
- The improvement Altares measured is real but recent (a single quarter of net recovery) and uneven across sectors; we're reporting a national trend, not a guarantee for every company.
What strikes us about this study isn't the headline figure — it's good news — but what it hides: half of French companies still pay late, and that half isn't spread evenly. A small structure without a dedicated accounting department has less room than a large group to absorb a delay. We'd rather have an agent that tracks every due date and drafts the reminder than a spreadsheet opened only when someone remembers.
Reviewed by a human at AppH