Net payment terms · Design
Net payment terms in design: what is normal
Net-15 to Net-30 is healthy for design work; Net-60 or longer means you are financing the client.
Typical range
Net-15 to Net-30 from invoice date. Net-30 is the common default for agency and mid-size clients; smaller direct clients often pay on receipt or Net-15.
Off-market
Net-60, Net-90, or "payment when we get paid by our client" (pay-when-paid). Any of those pushes the client's cash-flow problem onto the designer.
One-line fix
"Invoices are due Net-30. Amounts unpaid after 30 days accrue a 1.5% monthly late fee." Pair short terms with a deposit so the balance owed is already smaller.
What we see
Payment terms decide who finances the gap between work being done and money arriving. Net-30 is a reasonable division of that burden; anything beyond it means the designer completes the work, invoices, and then acts as an interest-free lender to the client for two or three months.
The clause to watch for is "pay-when-paid" (sometimes "pay-if-paid"), where the client only pays the designer once their own client pays them. That makes the designer a co-investor in a deal they have no visibility into or control over, and it is enforceable in many places. A designer should decline it or price the risk in explicitly.
Short net terms work best paired with a deposit and a late fee. The deposit shrinks the amount exposed to the payment delay, and a stated late fee (commonly 1.5% per month) gives the invoice teeth. Both are standard, and clients drafting their own contract simply leave them out rather than object to them.
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