Where ready-mix, lumber, and rental receivables actually stand — and what the gap to healthy costs.
Published June 2026 · CollectFlo Research
The construction payment chain is long, and materials suppliers sit at the end of it. Here's the state of collections going into 2026.
Money in construction moves through a chain: owner pays the general contractor, the GC pays its subs, subs pay their material suppliers. Every link in that chain can hold cash for its own reasons — a draw schedule, a retention clause, a dispute over a change order — and every day one link holds it is a day the supplier at the end doesn't have it. Ready-mix plants, lumber yards, and equipment rental companies don't sit in the middle of this chain. They sit at the end of it, financing other people's jobsites with materials and equipment shipped weeks or months before a check arrives.
That structure shows up in the numbers. 82% of construction businesses wait 30 or more days past the expected payment date, and the average contractor carries only 21.4 days of cash on hand — barely enough runway to cover payroll, let alone absorb a slow-paying customer industry research. When the contractors who buy materials are themselves running on fumes, the float gets pushed further down the chain, and materials suppliers are the ones left holding it.
The result is a receivables ladder that stretches from public-company ready-mix operations at the low end to finishing-trade contractors at the high end — with the 45-day healthy target sitting closer to the bottom than the middle.
Each corner of the materials supply chain has its own reason for slow pay. Here's what's driving it in each one.
Public ready-mix companies report receivables turnover around 37 days at the top of the range — but that figure comes from the largest, most operationally mature players in the industry. Privately held regional and independent ready-mix plants, without the billing infrastructure and credit departments of a public aggregate company, typically run 60 days or more.
The gap comes down to timing. Ready-mix invoices go out on pour day — the concrete is delivered, the batch ticket is signed, and the clock starts. But the GC who ordered the pour isn't getting paid by the owner on that same schedule; they're paid on a draw cycle that might not open for another two or three weeks. The plant's invoice sits in a stack waiting for the GC's own cash to show up. Layer in disputes over batch tickets — quantity questions, slump complaints, delivery timing — and an invoice that should take 30 days stretches well past it.
Lumber and building material yards don't have a clean public benchmark of their own — more on why in the honesty note below — so the most reliable proxy is the 57-day average wait suppliers report getting paid, and the 63–77 day range contractors themselves carry. Yards feel this directly because a single job can generate a dozen POs across framing, trim, and punch-list materials, each shipped as a partial delivery against a running account.
That structure creates its own drag. A contractor juggling material accounts at three or four yards pays whoever calls first and pushes hardest — not necessarily whoever shipped first. Partial deliveries against open POs make it easy for a contractor to dispute "did we actually get all of that" long after the material is already framed into the house. Multi-PO jobs mean a yard's AR aging bucket isn't one invoice per customer, it's a dozen, each with its own dispute risk.
Heavy construction equipment rental has the clearest aging data of any vertical in this report, and it isn't flattering: only 51% of AR is current. The rest — 49% — is sitting past due, and 5 cents of every dollar is in the 91-plus-day bucket, the range where collectability starts to drop fast.
The published buckets leave the remaining 8% unitemized. Source: D&B Q1 2025 AR Report, SIC 7353.
Rental billing runs on its own clock, and it's a clock that works against collections. Open rentals bill weekly whether or not the job is progressing, so a piece of equipment sitting idle on a stalled site still generates an invoice every week — invoices a contractor is in no hurry to pay for equipment they're not actively using. Add in damage-waiver disputes at return, and a rental company can watch a single unit's invoices pile up across three or four aging buckets simultaneously before the equipment is even back on the lot.
This is illustrative math using standard DSO formulas — not survey data. It shows what closing the gap between typical and healthy DSO is worth in dollars.
| Scenario | DSO | Receivables carried |
|---|---|---|
| $5M-revenue supplier at typical DSO | 75 days | $1,027,000 |
| Same supplier at the 45-day healthy line | 45 days | $616,000 |
| Cash freed up by closing the gap | 30 days | $411,000 |
| Annual carrying cost of that gap (at a 10% line-of-credit rate) | — | $41,000 / yr |
Run your own numbers: use the AR Cost Calculator
Benchmarks tell you where you stand. This is what closes the gap.
Companies running dedicated AR automation see a 32% average DSO reduction — not by getting tougher, but by making sure every invoice gets followed up on every single time. Tesorio 2025
A contractor juggling a dozen open accounts pays the supplier who's actually asking. If nobody's asking on your invoice this week, someone else's invoice moves up the stack instead.
One angry call when an invoice hits 90 days doesn't work as well as a scheduled cadence of emails, texts, and calls starting well before the due date and continuing until it's paid.
A reminder that a mechanic's lien or bond claim deadline is approaching changes the conversation. It's no longer a friendly nudge — it's a real consequence with a real date attached, and it moves invoices that polite reminders don't.
This edition synthesizes public and third-party data sources. It does not include segment-level percentiles from member-gated industry surveys — NRMCA's Performance Benchmarking Program and CFMA's Financial Benchmarker both publish deeper vertical-specific data, but that data sits behind membership paywalls and isn't reproduced here.
Lumber and building-material figures use contractor-side DSO as a proxy, because the public lumber-retail SIC codes are dominated by big-box, cash-and-carry sales (Home Depot, Lowe's) and don't reflect how contractor-account yards actually get paid.
Future editions of this report will incorporate anonymized data from CollectFlo's own customer base — real ready-mix, lumber, and rental accounts, tracked over time — to fill in exactly the gaps called out above.
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CollectFlo works your aging bucket under your name — every invoice, every reminder, every awkward follow-up call — so your team doesn't have to chase payment on top of running the yard, the plant, or the fleet.