When an invoice is not paid: what you are owed, and what to do

Directive 2011/7/EU on combating late payment in commercial transactions applies across the EU to business-to-business transactions and to payments by public authorities. Every member state has implemented it, with local variations that matter in detail but not in shape.

The national implementation is what a court would actually apply, so the local figure and the local test for a grossly unfair term are worth knowing for your own country. The entitlement itself is not in question anywhere in the union.

In September 2023 the Commission proposed replacing the Directive with a Regulation: a hard thirty-day limit for everyone, interest and compensation applying automatically, and stronger enforcement. Parliament adopted its position in April 2024.

It then stopped. The file has not progressed in the Council, and as of August 2026 Parliament’s own legislative tracker lists it as blocked.

This matters because a great deal of what was written about it in 2024 reads as though the thirty-day cap is already in force. It is not. Until the Council moves, the Directive as implemented in your country is the rule, and a client quoting the proposed Regulation at you is quoting something that does not yet exist.

A surprising share of chased invoices were paid. The money went somewhere you have not looked, or arrived smaller than expected and was not recognised as the payment.

The first two have their own guides, because the arithmetic behind them catches people out repeatedly: exchange rate differences and what happens to an international payment.

There is a financial argument for chasing on day one rather than day thirty, and it is stronger than the inconvenience.

In most countries your income is recognised when you issue the invoice, not when the money arrives. So the moment it goes out, that amount is in your books as revenue, and the tax on your profit is calculated on it. You may well pay that tax before the client has paid you.

If the invoice is never collected, you eventually write it off as a bad debt. Relief usually follows, in the period you write it off and through a procedure with conditions attached, which is not the same as the money coming back and never the same as it never having happened.

So an uncollected invoice takes twice. Once for the work you did and were not paid for, and once for the tax you paid on income you never received, held by the state until a later period sorts it out. An invoice nobody follows up is not neutral. It is a cost with paperwork.

The same applies to VAT in most systems, since it falls due on the invoice rather than on the payment. Relief for unpaid invoices exists in most member states, with its own conditions, waiting periods and evidence requirements, and it is worth knowing what yours are before you need them rather than after.

Most unpaid invoices are not disputes. They are invoices that were never queued for payment, and the fix is administrative rather than adversarial. Consistency does more here than force.

Escalation sounds like lawyers, and for the amounts a freelancer invoices, lawyers usually cost more than the claim. Two EU procedures exist precisely for that gap. Both run on standard forms, both are designed to be used without legal representation, and both apply to cross-border claims inside the EU, meaning you and the client are in different member states.

Domestic claims fall outside both, and every country has its own fast route for those instead, often a payment order procedure of its own and in some markets a notarised debt instrument that is enforceable without a hearing at all. Those differ enough that the only sound advice is to ask locally what yours is called, before you need it rather than after.

The reason to know any of this is not to litigate. It is that “this is going to the European Order for Payment” is a sentence with a procedure behind it, and a client who has heard it behaves differently from one who has heard that you are disappointed.

Every one of those steps is recovery. The cheaper work happened before the invoice went out: a specific due date rather than a formula, the invoice number printed as the payment reference, the document sent the day the work was delivered, and terms short enough that late means late.

That is the whole of how to make an invoice that gets paid, and it is worth reading in the order that matters: an invoice that is easy to pay is paid sooner by people who were never going to argue with you anyway.