Late Payments in France: Your Legal Rights and How to Actually Get Paid

One in four business failures in France is linked to late payment. That statistic gets quoted often enough that it has lost its force, so here is the version that lands better: your biggest client paying at ninety days instead of sixty means you are lending them money, at no interest, indefinitely, whether you agreed to it or not. The law is more on your side than most small business owners realise. Very few use it. The rules, briefly Payment terms between businesses are set by Article L441-10 of the Code de commerce. The default term is 30 days from delivery or performance. By written agreement this can extend to 60 days net from the invoice date, or 45 days end of month. That 60-day ceiling is a matter of public order. A contract clause setting 90 days is not a negotiation you lost. It is void, and treated as though it were never written. Your client cannot lawfully impose it, however large they are. What you are automatically owed when payment is late Two things become due from the day after the due date, with no reminder, no formal notice and no negotiation required. Late payment penalties. The rate should be set in your terms of sale, and it can never be lower than three times the legal interest rate. If your terms are silent or non-compliant, the fallback is the European Central Bank refinancing rate plus ten points, which works out at 12.15% for the first half of 2026. Penalties run day by day on the gross amount including VAT. A fixed recovery indemnity of €40. Set by Article D441-5. It is due per late invoice, not per client and not per reminder. Ten late invoices from the same customer means €400, not €40. If your actual recovery costs exceed €40 you can claim more, but then you have to evidence them. Neither of these requires you to ask nicely first. They are due by operation of law. The obligation that runs the other way Here is the detail that catches people out. Your terms of sale and every invoice you issue must state the payment term, the late payment penalty rate, and the €40 indemnity. Those three mentions are not optional. Their absence exposes you to a fine, and it also undermines your own position when you try to claim. A supplier chasing penalties with an invoice that never mentioned them is starting from a weak place. So the first action item is not chasing anyone. It is checking that your invoice template contains all three lines. Enforcement is real now The DGCCRF audits payment terms and publishes the results. Administrative fines reach €75,000 for an individual and €2 million for a company, doubled for a repeat within two years. Sanctions are published by name on the DGCCRF website, and for a large group the naming tends to sting more than the money. Suppliers can report a customer through SignalConso, anonymously if they prefer. For a small supplier facing a large customer who is systematically late, this is genuine leverage. It should be used carefully and usually mentioned before it is used, but it exists. Chasing without wrecking the relationship The legal position is one thing. Keeping the client is another. What works in practice: Send the invoice correctly the first time. A surprising share of late payments are administrative. Wrong reference, wrong recipient, missing purchase order number. From September 2026, structured electronic invoicing removes some of this by design. Chase before the due date. A short message five days out, framed as a check that everything is in order, is not aggressive and it works. It also surfaces problems while there is still time. Escalate on a schedule, not on a mood. Reminder at day one, second at day ten, formal notice at day thirty. Written down in advance so it happens consistently rather than when someone gets annoyed. Make the formal notice specific. "Please regularise this quickly" is not a formal notice. Identify the invoice, the amount, the due date, the penalties claimed, the deadline you are giving, and what happens next. Vagueness reads as an absence of intent to follow through. Decide in advance when you will claim penalties. Many businesses never do, out of fear of the relationship. A reasonable middle position is to state them clearly on every invoice, waive them on a first late payment, and apply them on a repeat. The part nobody has time for All of this depends on somebody noticing an invoice is late. In a small company nobody does, because noticing requires comparing a list of issued invoices against a list of received payments, regularly, forever. This is one of the clearest cases for automation. A tool connected to both your bank and your invoicing can tell you what is overdue and by how many days without anyone comparing anything. Mirage Cloud connects to Qonto and Pennylane among other French tools, which puts banking and accounting data in the same place, and its finance agent is scoped to exactly this kind of monitoring. The tool is not the important part. Noticing on day one instead of day twenty-one is the important part. Most small business cash flow problems are not caused by a lack of money. They are caused by finding out too late.