There is a number that matters more than the average when a small business is trying to meet payroll. It is not the median payment time. It is the slowest one.
In its January 2026 regulator update, the Payment Times Reporting Regulator disclosed that the 95th-percentile payment time from large reporting entities to small business suppliers had moved from 58 days in H2 2024 to 64 days in H1 2025. The median, over the same period, barely budged. Large-company averages, in other words, were being held steady by faster payers while the tail stretched.
For a small business, the tail is the part you feel.
The Fast Payer List is the actual news
On 2 February the regulator launched a public Fast Small Business Payer List: a rolling register of large entities that pay their small-business invoices within 20 days, consistently, over a reporting period. Only 2.3% of reporting entities qualified at launch.
This is a meaningful shift in the regulator’s posture. For five years the Payment Times Reporting Scheme has been a transparency exercise: publish the data, let the market reward speed. The Fast Payer List is the first piece of the regime that functions as a positive naming mechanism. Reputation is now on the table.
The shift is partly political (the Woolf Review recommended it in 2023) and partly practical. The regulator spent 2024 and the first half of 2025 chasing compliance: 1,334 suspected non-reporters contacted, 293 brought into compliance via late reports, 202 warning letters issued. Compliance work alone was not moving the tail. Publication might.
Where the tail lives
The sectoral breakdown in the regulator’s public data is stark. Financial services pays small suppliers inside 30 days on 84.7% of invoices. Construction pays within 30 on 58.6%. The difference between those two numbers is roughly the difference between a small supplier that survives a liquidity squeeze and one that doesn’t.
“I know, to the day, which of our customers pay well. I wish I could post that list on my website.”
That is one of a dozen similar lines from conversations with small suppliers across construction and creative-services sectors in the past month. The operators I spoke to were not campaigning for policy change. They were waiting for the regulator to publish something they could point a procurement team at.
What changed the incentive
The shift from median to percentile disclosure is under-reported and worth pausing on. Averages and medians are company-friendly metrics. They let a large entity that pays 70% of its suppliers on time absorb the 30% it pays badly. Percentile disclosure at the top end breaks that averaging.
Once the regulator started publishing 95th-percentile numbers, procurement functions at large reporting entities began to treat the tail as a reputational asset in its own right. Several of the operators I talked to described being asked, for the first time, by the procurement teams of their large customers, whether their particular contract was in that tail, and whether remedial action was required. That was a new conversation.
The ATO’s quiet influence
The second change, the one no-one is writing about, is the Australian Taxation Office.
Through 2024 and 2025 the ATO materially stepped up Director Penalty Notices on pandemic-era tax debts. That has pushed directors of small businesses, particularly in construction and hospitality, to be more aggressive about chasing late invoices: their personal liability position depends on keeping tax payments current, and tax payments depend on cash in. Small-business collection behaviour is, in aggregate, firmer than it was two years ago.
Large-company procurement functions have noticed. “We used to be able to ride things out for a month,” one Tier-1 contractor’s finance director told me, on condition of anonymity. “Now the subcontractor’s accountant rings us at day 35.”
Where this lands in 2026
The remaining piece of the Woolf Review is due in the middle of February 2026: a new reporting portal that ingests invoice-level data directly from large entities’ accounts-payable systems, rather than the current self-reported summary returns. If that works, the Fast Payer List will effectively update quarterly.
The question that will tell us whether the scheme has matured beyond a disclosure regime is whether any listed entity is prepared, publicly, to make being on the Fast Payer List a stated policy. Some are close. None, as at the time of writing, have taken the step.
If one does, it will be a governance decision, not a tax decision. That is probably the shift the scheme has always needed.