Why NET 60 is creeping back into corporate procurement

Your $18k monthly retainer just landed a new payment term: NET 60. The procurement manager calls it "standard policy." It isn't a negotiation. It's a take-it-or-leave-it.

This is happening more often than it was two years ago, and it's not random. Understanding the structural reason behind it is the first step to countering it.

Why large companies are stretching terms again

After a brief loosening during the post-pandemic talent crunch, corporate procurement teams are reasserting control over working capital. The logic is cold and simple: every day a payable sits unpaid is a day the company earns interest on that cash (or avoids drawing on its credit facility). At scale, stretching 10,000 vendor invoices from NET 30 to NET 60 frees up tens of millions in float.

Three things are accelerating this in 2025:

• Rising cost of corporate credit. Higher interest rates make free-floating payables genuinely valuable to the CFO. Pushing terms out is a no-cost treasury move.
• Procurement consolidation. Larger firms are centralising vendor management into shared-service centres. Those centres optimise for DPO (Days Payable Outstanding), not vendor relationships.
• The "standard policy" script. Procurement teams have learned that presenting NET 60 as non-negotiable policy kills most pushback before it starts. It is a tactic, not a law.

As an independent consultant, you are disproportionately exposed. You have no accounts receivable department, no credit line to bridge a 60-day gap, and no leverage from volume. A single $18k invoice stuck on NET 60 means you're funding a corporation's working capital with your own.

What a NET 60 slip actually costs you

The abstract term becomes concrete fast. Say you complete a strategy engagement in the first week of January and send an invoice for $22,500. Under NET 60, you won't see that money until early March. Under NET 30, you'd have it in early February.

That 30-day slip has real costs:

• Cash flow drag. If you're running two concurrent clients, you may be carrying $40k+ in unbilled or unpaid receivables at any moment. That's capital you can't invest, save, or use to pay your own contractors.
• FX exposure. If you invoice in USD but your home currency is EUR, a 60-day hold means 60 days of exchange rate risk. A 2% EUR/USD move on a $22,500 invoice is $450 gone before you touch the money.
• Compounding effect. One NET 60 client normalises it. Two make it your new cash flow baseline. Three and you're permanently 45 to 60 days behind your own expenses.

The late-payment directive gap in the EU is well-documented elsewhere. What's less discussed is that most consultants simply accept stretched terms because they fear losing the client. That fear is usually overestimated.

How to push back without losing the contract

The "standard policy" framing is designed to make you feel like you're asking for an exception. You're not. You're negotiating a commercial term, which is entirely normal.

Open with economics, not frustration

Don't frame it as a cash flow problem. Frame it as a pricing problem. A 60-day payment cycle has a cost, and that cost belongs in the engagement fee. Try: "My rate assumes NET 30. If we're working to NET 60, I'll need to adjust the project fee by 3% to account for the financing cost." Many procurement managers will quietly move to NET 30 rather than explain a fee increase to their budget owner.

Offer early-payment incentives

A 1.5% discount for payment within 10 days (sometimes written as "1.5/10 NET 60") is a standard commercial instrument. Large companies with treasury teams understand it immediately. You get faster cash; they get a small saving that looks good on their DPO report.

Get a milestone structure into the contract

NET 60 on a single end-of-project invoice is the worst-case scenario. A 40% deposit, 30% at mid-point, and 30% on delivery caps your maximum exposure to 60 days on the final tranche only. That's a structural fix, not a rate negotiation.

Name the clause, not the feeling

"My standard terms are NET 30, as set out in section 4 of my engagement letter" lands differently than "I usually get paid in 30 days." Formalising your terms in a document makes them feel as fixed as procurement's policy. Because they are.

The tools that stop NET 60 from becoming a 75-day problem

Negotiating better terms is the first lever. The second is making sure that once agreed, the invoice clock actually runs.

The most common reason NET 30 becomes NET 45 or NET 60 in practice has nothing to do with corporate policy. It's a missing PO number, a disputed line item, or an invoice that sat in a spam folder for two weeks before someone noticed. Every one of those delays is avoidable.

When your auto-reminder fires on day 58 of a NET 60 invoice (not day 65 when you finally remember), it lands while the payment is still technically on time. That single habit shift recovers days on every invoice.

The bigger picture

NET 60 creep is a structural feature of how large companies manage working capital in a high-rate environment. It's not personal, and it's not going away. But it's also not immovable.

The consultants who fare best are the ones who treat payment terms as a commercial variable, price the cost of long terms into their rates, and then use systems that make sure the agreed term is actually the final term. The gap between NET 60 and NET 75 is almost always operational, not contractual. Close that gap first.