B2B payment terms in Italy: what a foreign supplier should expect

Payment terms are the part of the Italian market that foreign suppliers discover last and should decide first. A German or Dutch company used to 14 or 30 days net reads an Italian request for 90 days end of month as a warning sign. In Italy it is often just the opening position of a solvent buyer. This guide explains what Italian companies ask for, how late payment really behaves, what the law says, and how to protect your cash flow from the first conversation. It is a commercial guide, not legal or financial advice: check the decree and your own advisers before signing.

What payment terms do Italian companies actually ask for?

Sixty days is the centre of gravity. Market practice sits between 30 and 90 days, usually counted from the end of the month of invoice, and large buyers in retail, construction and automotive supply chains push toward 90 or more. The 2025 Atradius barometer for Italy found that 64% of B2B sales were made on credit, with common terms ranging from 31 to 90 days. Consultancy Altios, writing for foreign CEOs in May 2026, puts the typical range at 60 to 90 days. The 2026 Atradius edition reports a modest rise in credit based sales, with Italian firms using longer terms deliberately to support trading relationships.

Two things explain why Italy sits long. First, about 95% of Italian companies have fewer than 10 employees: a small owner managed firm uses supplier credit as working capital because bank credit is slow and expensive for it. Second, the whole chain pays late, so each company passes the delay downstream. Your buyer is not testing you; they are managing their own receivables.

Sources: Atradius Payment Practices Barometer Italy 2025;Atradius Western Europe 2026, Italy;Altios, Market Entry in Italy, May 2026;ISTAT data on Italian micro enterprises via partitaiva.it.

How late do Italian B2B customers really pay?

More than half of invoices are paid after the due date, but most of them are paid. Atradius measured overdue payments on roughly 53 to 55% of Italian B2B invoices in 2025 (two summaries of the same survey report 55% and 53%), driven mainly by customer liquidity problems. Bad debts, invoices written off entirely, were about 6% of B2B sales. In the 2026 edition, customer cash flow issues are named as the top reason for late payment by 71% of respondents.

The historical trend is better than the reputation. Atradius put the average days sales outstanding in Italy at 85 days in 2017; by 2023 Italian firms reported that the payment terms they granted had shortened to an average of 43 days from invoicing. The gap between agreed terms and actual payment is where your planning has to live: a 60 day term with a 20 day habitual delay is an 80 day receivable, and that is the number to price.

Sources: Atradius Italy 2025;Atradius Italy 2026; Atradius barometers 2017 and 2023 for the historical DSO and terms figures.

What does Italian law say about payment terms and late payment?

Legislative Decree 231/2002, which implements the EU Late Payment Directive, is the baseline. Where the contract is silent, payment is due 30 calendar days from receipt of the invoice or of the goods. The parties can agree up to 60 days; longer terms are allowed only if expressly agreed in writing and not grossly unfair to the creditor. When the term expires, statutory interest runs automatically, without a reminder, at the European Central Bank reference rate plus 8 percentage points, plus a fixed recovery cost. Public administrations have their own, stricter rules.

In practice few suppliers invoice statutory interest to a customer they intend to keep. Its value is in negotiation: a buyer asking for 120 days knows the law is on your side, and a polite reference to the decree usually brings the request back to 60 or 90. Read the decree itself or ask an Italian lawyer before relying on any summary, including this one.

Source: summary of Legislative Decree 231/2002 on Italian B2B payment terms (secondary source; verify against the official text).

Statutory baseline versus market practice: the gap at a glance

Which Italian payment conventions should a foreign supplier know?

Four expressions appear in almost every Italian purchase order and are worth learning before the first quote.

• 30/60/90 giorni fine mese (FM). Days counted from the end of the invoice month. "60 giorni FM" on an invoice dated 3 March means payment on 31 May. If you mean days from the invoice date, write "data fattura" (DF) explicitly, or the buyer will assume end of month.
• Bonifico. The ordinary bank wire transfer. Standard for first orders and for foreign suppliers without an Italian bank account.
• RiBa (ricevuta bancaria). A bank collection order: you present the receivable through your bank, the buyer's bank pays it at maturity. Very common among Italian companies, traceable, and a useful early warning because an unpaid RiBa is visible to both banks.
• Fatturazione elettronica (SDI). Electronic invoicing through the national exchange system is mandatory for companies resident in Italy. A foreign supplier with no Italian VAT position issues its normal invoice; the Italian customer records it on their side. Once you open an Italian entity, the obligation becomes yours.

None of these is a barrier. They are signals of a buyer who runs a normal Italian administration, and using the right words in your quote tells the buyer you have sold in Italy before.

How should a foreign company price and protect its cash flow in Italy?

Decide the terms before the first meeting and treat them as part of the price, not a concession after it. A practical sequence used by suppliers who sell into Italy without a local entity:

1. Open at 30 days data fattura, settle at 60 fine mese.Starting where the law starts gives you room to move toward the market standard without looking inflexible.
2. Price the days. If your home market pays at 30 and Italy at 80 including delay, that is 50 days of working capital per order. Put it into the Italian price list rather than fighting it on each deal.
3. Ask for a deposit on first orders. A 30% advance on the first two or three orders is a normal request for a new foreign supplier and is rarely refused by a serious buyer.
4. Use credit insurance or factoring for export receivables.Italian receivables are insurable and widely factored; the cost is usually lower than the margin you would lose conceding 120 days.
5. Qualify the buyer before you quote. Chamber of Commerce filings in Italy are public and complete: turnover, employees, filed accounts, protests. A company you cannot find there should not get credit terms at all.

Why does buyer qualification start in the first conversation?

Because the cheapest unpaid invoice is the one you never issue. When Clientium runs business development in Italy for a foreign company, the market mapping comes before any outreach: theAtlas of Italian companies covers 1,067,441 corporations with turnover and headcount from Chamber of Commerce data, so company size and financial substance are filters applied to the list, not surprises discovered at invoicing. Appointments are then booked only with decision makers who match writtenqualification criteria agreed upfront, and you pay only for appointments that show up: 6,000+ appointments for 127+ client companies, with an 87% show rate against a market average of about 60%.

The same filters protect your terms. A conversation opened with the owner of a company whose accounts you have already seen is a conversation where 60 days end of month is a reasonable agreement between two solvent parties, not a leap of faith. How the whole entry model works, from mapping to appointments, is on theEnter the Italian market page. For the relationship side of the same negotiation, read the guide onItalian business culture for B2B sellers; for the choice between a distributor who carries the credit risk and selling direct, seedistributor, agent or outsourced business development; and if you are setting up a local team, thecountry manager's first 90 daysincludes a cash collection plan.