DSO benchmarks by industry 2026
Days sales outstanding (DSO) is the average number of days a sale takes to turn into cash. APQC's cross-industry median is 38 days, and the best quarter collect in 30 or fewer. Your industry moves the benchmark most: among European listed companies, receivables run from about 10 days of sales in grocery retail to 93 in engineering and construction.
The headline numbers
The eight figures worth carrying into a meeting. Each links to the section that gives it context, and to the document it came from.
Get these statistics as a PDF
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What is a good DSO across all industries?
Three bodies publish a cross-industry DSO from large samples, and they measure slightly different populations. APQC benchmarks organisations that submit their own data; The Hackett Group and PwC calculate DSO from the published accounts of listed companies. Read them as a range, not as one number.
38 days
Cross-industry median days sales outstanding. Half of the organisations in APQC's database collect faster than this, half slower.
Sample of 13,195 organisations. APQC's formula is average gross receivables divided by gross annual sales over 365, excluding unbilled receivables. The database updates continuously, so treat the figure as current rather than tied to a report year.
APQC, Open Standards Benchmarking, measure 100178 (days sales outstanding), 2026Independent research
30 vs 46 days
DSO at the top-quartile and bottom-quartile marks on the same measure. The best quarter of companies are paid in 30 days or less; the slowest quarter wait 46 days or more.
APQC's own commentary on measure 100178, June 2025. APQC adds that a good DSO varies by industry and business type.
APQC, What is DSO in Finance?, 2025Independent research
48.5 days
DSO across the 1,000 largest European-headquartered non-financial companies, up 1% on the year as receivable balances rose and revenue fell.
Hackett's 2026 European survey has since been released, but only its €1.26 trillion excess working capital headline is public; its DSO figure sits behind registration, so the 2025 edition is the latest one we could read.
The Hackett Group, 2025 European Working Capital Survey (news release, 10/11/2025), 2025Analyst benchmarking
18 days
Gap in DSO between median and top-quartile performers among large companies. Hackett reports the same 18-day gap in both its European and US 2025 surveys.
In the US survey, receivables were the largest share of excess working capital: an opportunity Hackett valued at $600 billion.
The Hackett Group, 2025 U.S. Working Capital Survey (news release, 18/08/2025), 2025Analyst benchmarking
50.0 days
Global DSO in 2024, up from 47.3 days in 2015. Over the decade DSO rose 1.8% in the EU and 5.5% in North America, while the UK went the other way.
Analysis of more than 17,000 listed companies worldwide. PwC singles out Italy as the EU country with the highest DSO.
PwC, Working Capital Study 25/26, 2025Analyst benchmarking
+2.1 days
Deterioration in DSO among North America's 1,000 largest public companies in 2025, the third straight year of decline. DSO worsened in 40 of the 50 industries analysed.
Aggregate receivables grew 11%, nearly twice the pace of revenue. The receivables opportunity rose 29% to $773 billion, 40% of the total working capital opportunity.
The Hackett Group, 2026 North American Working Capital Survey (news release, 05/10/2026), 2026Analyst benchmarking
Cross-industry DSO, by source
APQC Open Standards Benchmarking (median, self-reported, 13,195 organisations); The Hackett Group 2025 European Working Capital Survey (1,000 largest European companies); PwC Working Capital Study 25/26 (global, 17,000+ listed companies, 2024).
- APQC top quartile
- 30 days
- APQC median
- 38 days
- APQC bottom quartile
- 46 days
- Hackett, Europe's 1,000 largest
- 48.5 days
- PwC, global listed companies
- 50.0 days
What we take from this
The spread between these numbers is mostly about who is counted. APQC's median comes from organisations of every size submitting their own data; Hackett and PwC take the largest listed companies, whose customers are often other large companies with the bargaining power to push terms out. If you are an Irish SME, APQC's 38 days is the more useful yardstick, and 30 days is what good looks like.
The direction matters as much as the level. Every large dataset on this page shows DSO drifting up: PwC over ten years, Hackett in Europe in 2024 and in North America for three years running. Standing still on DSO means falling behind your own customers' payment habits.
What is the average DSO for my industry?
No independent body publishes a free, current DSO table by industry. The nearest is Aswath Damodaran's public dataset at NYU Stern, which gives each industry's accounts receivable as a percentage of annual sales. Multiply by 365 and you have receivables in days of sales, the same arithmetic as DSO. The percentages below are his; the day counts are our conversion.
52 days
Receivables across all European listed non-financial companies: 14.27% of a year's sales, or about 52 days.
5,757 companies. Aggregated receivables divided by aggregated sales, so the largest companies weigh most. Day count is 14.27% × 365, our arithmetic.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, Europe (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
93 days
Engineering and construction: receivables equal to 25.51% of sales, the longest of any large non-financial sector in the European data.
160 companies. Stage billing and retentions on contracts are a large part of why this sector runs long.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, Europe (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
82 to 83 days
Computer services (22.55% of sales) and electrical equipment (22.69%), the next-longest sectors with large samples.
210 and 146 companies respectively.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, Europe (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
65 to 69 days
Software (17.94%), business and consumer services (18.04%), machinery (18.41%) and pharmaceuticals (18.82%) cluster together, a little above the all-company figure.
290, 176, 210 and 115 companies respectively.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, Europe (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
10 to 37 days
Sectors selling largely for cash or on short terms sit far lower: grocery and food retail 2.76% of sales, hotels and gaming 7.80%, food processing 10.03%.
34, 103 and 173 companies respectively.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, Europe (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
45 days
The same measure for US listed non-financial companies: receivables at 12.39% of sales, about a week shorter than Europe.
4,822 companies. Day count is 12.39% × 365, our arithmetic.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Working capital ratios by industry, US (data as of January 2026), 2026Academic research
Receivables in days of sales, European listed companies by industry
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, working capital ratios by industry, Europe, January 2026. Published figure is accounts receivable as a percentage of sales; days are that percentage × 365 (Fintask's conversion), rounded to whole days.
- Engineering & construction
- 93 days
- Electrical equipment
- 83 days
- Computer services
- 82 days
- Pharmaceuticals
- 69 days
- Machinery
- 67 days
- Business & consumer services
- 66 days
- Software
- 65 days
- Building materials
- 61 days
- Distributors (wholesale)
- 56 days
- Transportation
- 55 days
- All non-financial companies
- 52 days
- Food processing
- 37 days
- Hotels & gaming
- 28 days
- Grocery & food retail
- 10 days
What we take from this
Use this table to set expectations, not targets. These are listed companies, measured on year-end balances, and the figure includes every kind of receivable on the balance sheet. A construction subcontractor at 80 days is not necessarily slow; a software business at 80 days probably is.
The better test for your own business is DSO against your payment terms. If you invoice on 30 days and your DSO is 55, the 25-day gap is collection, disputes and unapplied cash, and that part is within your control whatever sector you are in. APQC benchmarks exactly this ratio for that reason.
How long do Irish businesses take to get paid?
Ireland has no official DSO statistic. What it does have is survey data on payment times, terms and late payment, compiled for the European Commission's EU Payment Observatory, and an annual Irish survey by the credit insurer Atradius.
61 days
Average time Irish suppliers waited to be paid in business-to-business trade in 2024, up 9 days on 2023. Public bodies took 70 days, up 5.
The Observatory's elaboration of Intrum's European Payment Report survey. Average agreed B2B payment terms in Ireland lengthened by 4 days, to 42.
European Commission, EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025 (Ireland country profile), written by CEPS and EY, 2025Official statistics
60.3 days
Average B2B payment period across the EU in 2024, against average agreed B2B terms of 43 days. Government-to-business payments averaged 69.8 days.
Longer payment terms went with longer payment periods in 87% of cases.
European Commission, EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025: summary of findings, 2025Official statistics
47%
Irish companies reporting delayed payments in 2024, the highest level since 2019. Ireland stays about five percentage points below the EU average.
587 Irish companies, from the ECB and European Commission Survey on Access to Finance of Enterprises.
European Commission, EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025 (Ireland country profile), written by CEPS and EY, 2025Official statistics
9.85 hours
Average time EU companies spend each week chasing late payments.
European Commission, EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025: summary of findings, 2025Official statistics
67%
Share of overdue invoices in Ireland that are paid within 30 days of falling due, which Atradius says keeps Irish DSO broadly in line with agreed terms. 9% run past 90 days.
Survey of 210 Irish businesses, Q1 to Q2 2026. Atradius sells credit insurance and collections.
Atradius, Payment Practices Barometer: B2B payment practices trends Ireland 2026, 2026Vendor-commissioned
37% and 18%
Irish firms naming banking delays (37%) and unclear or incorrect invoicing (18%) as reasons customers pay late. Customer cash-flow problems (35%) and quality disputes (27%) are the others in the top four.
Multiple answers allowed. Atradius found Irish late payment more often operational than a sign of customer distress, unlike the wider Western European picture.
Atradius, Payment Practices Barometer: B2B payment practices trends Ireland 2026, 2026Vendor-commissioned
20 days
Average gap across Europe between agreed B2B payment terms and actual payment, widened from 16 days in 2023. Around 12% of revenues are now paid late.
8,385 businesses in 20 European countries. Intrum is a credit management and debt collection company.
Intrum, European Payment Report 2026 (press release, 21/04/2026), 2026Vendor-commissioned
Average B2B payment period in Ireland, 2019 to 2024
EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025, Ireland country profile (figure 97), from Intrum European Payment Report survey data. Business-to-business transactions; days from invoice to payment.
- 2019
- 75 days
- 2020
- 54 days
- 2021
- 54 days
- 2022
- 46 days
- 2023
- 52 days
- 2024
- 61 days
What we take from this
Irish payment times went the wrong way in 2024: nine days longer for business customers, the largest increase the Observatory reports for any member state. A 61-day payment period on 42-day terms means the average Irish supplier is waiting close to three weeks beyond what was agreed.
The Atradius detail is the hopeful part. When late payment comes from banking delays, disputed invoices and invoices the customer cannot match, the fix sits on the supplier's side: clean invoices, remittances matched on arrival, disputes picked up the day they appear.
What payment terms does Irish law allow between businesses?
The EU Late Payment Directive is in Irish law as S.I. No. 580/2012. It sets the default term, caps what can normally be agreed, and gives the supplier fixed compensation on every late invoice.
30 days
Default payment period for business-to-business invoices when the contract does not set one. The same standard applies to public bodies paying businesses.
Government of Ireland, S.I. No. 580/2012, European Communities (Late Payment in Commercial Transactions) Regulations 2012, 2012Official statistics
60 days
Longest term that can normally be agreed. Anything beyond 60 days must be expressly agreed in the contract and must not be grossly unfair to the supplier.
For public bodies, going beyond 30 days to 60 needs express agreement and a justification in the nature of the contract.
Government of Ireland, S.I. No. 580/2012, European Communities (Late Payment in Commercial Transactions) Regulations 2012, 2012Official statistics
€40 / €70 / €100
Fixed compensation a supplier can claim on each late invoice: €40 up to €1,000, €70 up to €10,000 and €100 above that, on top of statutory interest.
Government of Ireland, S.I. No. 580/2012, European Communities (Late Payment in Commercial Transactions) Regulations 2012, 2012Official statistics
What we take from this
Set against the law, the Irish payment data reads badly. Agreed terms average 42 days and actual payment 61 days, so the typical invoice is paid well past the 30-day default and close to the 60-day ceiling. In our experience few suppliers ever claim the compensation they are entitled to, because the customer relationship matters more than €40.
That is why the practical lever is process rather than enforcement. Terms written into every invoice, reminders that go out before the due date rather than after, and a clear record of what was agreed all shorten the wait without anyone invoking a statutory instrument.
What actually brings DSO down?
The research agrees that DSO is set long before a collector picks up the phone: by credit terms, invoice accuracy, dispute handling and how quickly a payment is matched to the invoice it settles.
89% / 85%
Organisations Hackett rates as AI World Class in order-to-cash have 89% more automated cash application and 85% fewer delinquent days than their peers.
Hackett names credit decisions, payment terms, order accuracy, billing quality, dispute management and cash application as the drivers of receivables performance.
The Hackett Group, 2026 North American Working Capital Survey (news release, 05/10/2026), 2026Analyst benchmarking
40 of 50
Industries in which DSO worsened among North America's largest companies in 2025, despite strong revenue and profit. Hackett's conclusion: better collections alone do not fix it.
The Hackett Group, 2026 North American Working Capital Survey (news release, 05/10/2026), 2026Analyst benchmarking
27% and 18%
Irish firms whose customers pay late because of quality disputes (27%) or unclear and incorrect invoices (18%), both problems that start in the supplier's own process.
Atradius, Payment Practices Barometer: B2B payment practices trends Ireland 2026, 2026Vendor-commissioned
31%
EU companies that admit delaying their own supplier payments because they are paid late themselves. Late payment travels down the supply chain.
European Commission, EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025: summary of findings, 2025Official statistics
What we take from this
Two things move DSO that most teams underrate. The first is cash application: a payment that sits unmatched keeps the invoice open, triggers a chaser to a customer who has paid, and inflates DSO for no commercial reason. The second is invoice quality: a missing PO number or a wrong price gives a customer a legitimate reason to wait.
Our DSO calculator uses the 18-day median-to-top-quartile gap from this page and scales the days you can recover by how much of your cash you already apply automatically. Run it with your own revenue and DSO before deciding whether collections or matching is the bigger lever for you.
How this page was put together
Every figure was read out of the publisher's own document — the benchmark record, the survey report, the dataset, the statutory instrument — and not out of an article quoting it. Each line carries the publisher, the edition and a link, so you can check any of it in a click.
One kind of figure is our arithmetic rather than the publisher's. Damodaran publishes receivables as a percentage of sales by industry; the day counts beside each industry are that percentage multiplied by 365. The published percentage is always shown alongside.
Statistics are tagged by where they come from. Independent benchmarking, academic data and official statistics are stronger evidence than a survey run by a company that sells credit insurance or debt collection. Atradius and Intrum are included because their samples are large and their methods disclosed, but they are labelled so you can weigh them accordingly.
Some figures were left out. PwC's DSO by sector exists only in an interactive chart we could not read numbers from, and The Hackett Group's 2026 European DSO sits behind a registration wall, so we used its 2025 edition. Hackett's 2026 North American release gives the change in DSO but not the level. The “average DSO by industry” tables that circulate on software vendors' blogs could not be traced to any published dataset. Atradius's Irish sector breakdown was left out because the chart labels could not be read unambiguously from the report. If you have the underlying data for any of these, we would like to see it.
Reviewed annually. APQC updates its benchmark database continuously, Damodaran refreshes his industry data each January, The Hackett Group publishes its working capital surveys between August and November, and the EU Payment Observatory, Atradius and Intrum publish once a year.
Run these benchmarks against your own numbers
Our DSO calculator uses the 18-day gap between median and top-quartile DSO from this page. Put in your revenue, DSO and cash application rate to see the cash a lower DSO releases. Free, no email required, nothing stored.
DSO / cash release calculator
See how much cash is tied up in your receivables, and what pulling your DSO back by a few days is worth.
Related research
This page covers how long customers take to pay. The other research pages cover what it costs to process the invoices you receive, what manual finance work costs overall, and what finance teams think about handing that work to AI.
Manual data entry in finance: the statistics
Manual data entry statistics for finance, each traced to its source: what it costs ($9.84 an invoice on average), how often it goes wrong (0.34% of keyed fields, 18.4% of invoices) and the hours, close days and people it uses up. Each figure below carries its publisher, its year and a link to the document it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What finance teams think about AI: the statistics
AI in finance statistics, each traced to its source: 59% of finance functions now use AI (Gartner, 2025), yet only 2.7% of finance staff would let it make judgment calls on its own (Deloitte, 2025). Finance teams are not sceptical about whether AI works. They are sceptical about letting it act unsupervised — and that single distinction explains almost everything else in the data. Each figure below carries its publisher, its year and a link to the document it came from.
Cost per AP invoice: the benchmarks
Cost per invoice is the full cost of accounts payable, staff, systems and overhead, divided by the supplier invoices it processes. Ardent Partners puts the 2026 average at $9.90; its best-in-class fifth pay $2.67 against $12.50 for everyone else. APQC's median is $6.00. The gap comes from manual handling, not software prices.
Questions people ask
What is a good DSO?
APQC's cross-industry median is 38 days, and the top quarter of companies collect in 30 days or less. A good DSO also depends on your payment terms and sector: compare yourself with your own terms first, then with your industry.
What is the average DSO by industry?
In Damodaran's January 2026 data for European listed companies, receivables equal about 52 days of sales overall, ranging from roughly 10 days in grocery retail to 93 in engineering and construction. Software sits near 65 days and machinery near 67.
What is the average DSO in Europe?
The Hackett Group's 2025 European Working Capital Survey puts DSO across Europe's 1,000 largest non-financial companies at 48.5 days, up 1% on the year. PwC's global figure for 2024 is 50.0 days.
How long do Irish businesses wait to be paid?
The EU Payment Observatory's 2025 report puts the average Irish business-to-business payment period at 61 days in 2024, up 9 days on 2023, against average agreed terms of 42 days. The EU average was 60.3 days.
What are the legal payment terms in Ireland?
Under S.I. No. 580/2012, business invoices are due in 30 days if the contract says nothing. Parties can agree up to 60 days; longer terms must be expressly agreed and not grossly unfair. Late invoices carry €40 to €100 fixed compensation plus interest.
How do you calculate DSO?
APQC's formula is average gross accounts receivable divided by gross annual sales over 365, excluding unbilled receivables. €300,000 of receivables on €3.6 million of annual sales gives a DSO of about 30 days.
Where do these DSO figures come from, and how often are they updated?
Every figure was read from the publisher's own document and carries its name, year and link. Industry day counts are Damodaran's receivables-to-sales ratios multiplied by 365, which we say wherever they appear. The page is reviewed annually.
Want to know where your own collection days go?
Thirty minutes with a Chartered Accountant who builds receivables automation for a living. We will look at your DSO against your terms, your unapplied cash and your disputes, and tell you honestly whether automation would move it.