I talk to contractors almost every day, and over the last six months the late payment conversation has gone from occasional grumbling to a real operational problem. People who were reliably getting paid within 30 days are now waiting 60, 90, sometimes longer. Saw the thread in here about this recently and it matched what I've been hearing almost word for word.
Here's what I've started to notice after watching this play out across a bunch of different contractors. The stated payment terms on a contract, especially state and county contracts, are close to meaningless as a predictor of when you'll actually get paid. Net 30 is what's written down. The reality is that most state and local agencies run on annual appropriations cycles, and their accounts payable offices move slower than federal. The gap between "net 30" and "check clears" is structural. It's not that someone forgot your invoice. The money isn't flowing through their system at the speed the contract implies.
The two things I've seen actually move the needle: first, negotiate your invoicing frequency on T&M and IDIQ task orders. Most people default to monthly invoicing because that's what feels normal, but a lot of these contracts allow weekly or biweekly invoicing if you ask during negotiations. Smaller invoices clear AP faster and compress the total wait from work-done to cash-in-hand. I didn't realize how common this was until a contractor told me they cut their average wait from 75 days to about 40 just by switching to biweekly.
Second, before you sign anything, check the agency's actual payment history. USASpending has this for federal contracts, and most states have transparency portals that show the same data at the state level. An agency that consistently pays at 45 days is going to keep paying at 45 days regardless of what the contract says. I've gotten this wrong before by trusting the stated terms on a contract with a county that turned out to be a chronic 90-day payer. Could have seen it in advance if I'd looked.
The contractors I've talked to who handle the cash flow side well aren't necessarily working with faster-paying agencies. They figured out the real timeline before they signed and structured their invoicing around it instead of around what the contract said. I just wish I'd started looking at that data sooner.