Malmö: The European Commission named late payments one of its enforcement priorities for the single market in 2026, roughly a year and a half after the law meant to fix them collapsed. Small suppliers waiting on invoices now depend on a directive from 2011 and on national regulators who rarely use the powers they already hold.
The Commission proposed a Late Payment Regulation in September 2023 as part of its SME relief package. The headline change was a hard 30-day cap on commercial payment terms, covering both business-to-business deals and public authorities, replacing the current 60-day ceiling that parties can extend by agreement. Industry federations split immediately. Large buyers warned about working capital. Supplier associations called the cap the only enforceable number anyone had put forward.
Council working parties rejected the text and a succession of presidencies failed to find a compromise. Parliament’s legislative train now records the file as withdrawn. Directive 2011/7/EU survives untouched, which means payment terms stay negotiable, enforcement stays national, and a Swedish workshop chasing a French customer still relies on whichever authority feels responsible.
Against that background the Commission’s single market strategy reads oddly. It identifies what officials call the terrible ten barriers reported by businesses, a list running from complicated establishment procedures and divergent national services rules through fragmented packaging requirements and missing common standards. Late payments then reappear as a 2026 enforcement target, alongside obstacles to green transition services, with no new legal instrument behind either.
Enforcement without legislation is not nothing. The Commission can open infringement cases where member states apply the 2011 directive badly, and it can press national competition and consumer authorities to act. It cannot change the terms a dominant buyer imposes, and that is the barrier suppliers actually describe.
The 2026 annual single market and competitiveness report, published on 30 January, put the wider problem plainly. European firms, especially smaller ones, face an accumulation of rules, reports, procedures and national divergences that slows investment and delays scaling. The Commission counts ten omnibus packages already tabled and claims roughly 15 billion euros in annual administrative savings, with more simplification promised through 2026.
Simplification and enforcement pull in different directions here. A digital omnibus streamlines the acquis. An environmental omnibus eases compliance. An omnibus on extended producer responsibility softens packaging obligations. None of them creates the single binding rule that would stop a large buyer stretching payment to 120 days. Removing burden and imposing discipline are both defensible policies, but they are not the same policy.
Sweden makes the case visible. Payment culture varies enormously across the single market, and Nordic firms trading south routinely report waits their domestic customers would never impose. A supplier in Malmö can invoke the 2011 directive’s statutory interest, yet doing so risks the commercial relationship, and few companies sue their largest client over a delay they expect to recover.
Defenders of the withdrawal argue the 30-day cap was too blunt for sectors where long production cycles are normal, and that a rigid rule would have pushed some buyers toward informal delay rather than contractual delay. That objection carries force. It also leaves the Commission promising enforcement priorities against a problem its own impact assessment said the existing directive cannot solve.
What happens next depends less on Brussels than on whether a member state revives the file. A capital holding the Council presidency could put payment terms back on the agenda, and several national parliaments have debated caps of their own. National caps would fragment the single market further, which is the outcome the withdrawn regulation existed to prevent.
