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A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners and the office team that chases the money, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 7-minute read.
Every owner watches revenue. Far fewer watch the gap between the day the work is finished and the day the cash actually lands. On a lot of jobs that gap is wide enough to squeeze a profitable company into a cash crunch while the top line still looks healthy.
Be precise about the size of the shift, because plenty of the numbers in circulation do not survive a look at the source.
Start with what is documented in restoration. The C&R / KnowHow State of the Industry Report, free to download, found that 76% of jobs took 31 days or more to be paid in full, and 15% took 61 days or more. That is the 2024 edition. Those two percentages are not restated in the 2026 edition (covering calendar 2025), which puts it on page 15 as nearly three-quarters of restorers saying it took 30 days or more to receive payment by the end of 2024, with the share waiting 60 days or more growing. The direction holds. Attach the edition year when you quote the precise figures.
The Restoration Industry Association (RIA) Cost of Doing Business Report does publish a day count, on page 33 of the 2025 edition (which reports FY2024 data), and it is worth reading in full rather than as a single average. The industry average is 60 days. By revenue band: 46 days under $1M, 57 at $1.1M to $5M, 55 at $5.1M to $10M, 91 at $10.1M to $15M, 66 at $15.1M to $24.9M, 48 at $25M to $49.9M, and 80 above $50M.
The progression is not a straight line, and the shape matters more than the average: the slowest band in the industry sits in the middle of the growth curve, where job size outruns the collections process. Two cautions if you quote the 60. The report states it in body text and never plots it, and the unweighted mean of the seven bands is closer to 63. RIA gives the report free to any company that completes the Cost of Doing Business survey, so you can pull that page yourself.
For a benchmark, the closest thing to authority on US contractors is the 2025 Construction Financial Benchmarker from the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA), whose executive summary put days in accounts receivable at 55 days (55.2) across 1,558 US construction companies for FY2024. Economy-wide, Allianz Research put US days sales outstanding at 48 days as of Q4 2024, the US slice of a study covering 45,000 listed firms in 35 countries. A restoration shop sitting at 60 days is a few days behind the typical contractor and twelve days behind the wider economy.
Ninety days is the tail, and on commercial work the tail is crowded: Siteline's 2026 State of Subcontractor Billing Report (free, but gated behind a sign-up form), a survey of 492 construction finance and operations professionals across both subcontractors and general contractors, found 43% of subcontractors waiting more than 90 days for final payment and retainage, against 15% of general contractors. Where you sit in the payment chain puts you there, far more than how fast your crew works. That spread is why the number to plan against is your own.
You can have a strong year on the income statement and still miss payroll, because profit and cash are not the same thing. When you finish a job you book the revenue, but you have already spent the cash: labor every two weeks, equipment, materials, subs. If the payment is ninety days out, you are floating all of that cost for a quarter. Do that across a dozen open jobs and you are effectively lending to your carriers at no interest, whether you meant to or not.
Working capital scales with days. Double the days and you double the cost you carry to run the same volume: a shop comfortable carrying 45 days of direct cost is suddenly asked to carry 90, on the same crews and the same schedule. Nothing about the operation changed, yet the cash requirement did. That relationship is plain arithmetic, and it is why growing shops feel tightest right as they win more work: every new job adds cost today and revenue a quarter from now. Run your own days through Size the Working Capital Your Commercial Book Actually Needs to see the dollar figure it produces for your book.
You cannot control when a carrier cuts the check, but you can build the business so a long cycle does not break it. Three moves do most of the work. Bill in progress on large jobs so cash arrives as the work is delivered, not all at the end. Run a weekly receivables cadence so nothing ages in silence. And size your working capital deliberately for a 90-day cycle, instead of being surprised by it every quarter.
And plan for the long cycle rather than hoping for the short one. Be careful with the story that everything is getting slower. The 2025 RIA report does not describe its own day counts as improving or worsening, only as "much higher than most restoration companies are comfortable with," and J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Property Claims Satisfaction Study has final payment to policyholders at 40.7 days, down from the prior year. The trade coverage that reported an improvement was covering the prior edition, so attach the year before you repeat it. What has not improved is the structure of commercial work, where you sit below a general contractor and retainage rides behind final completion. That is what puts a job past ninety days, and it makes the front end the cheapest place to protect cash: collect the deductible up front, lock down authorization before mobilizing, keep documentation clean enough to clear review the first time, and set payment expectations with the customer before the work starts. Disputes and resubmissions are what stretch a long cycle longer, and clean inputs are what prevent them. Siteline's report found 67% of subcontractors spending eleven or more hours a month preparing, submitting and tracking pay applications, which is the size of the administrative drag sitting between finished work and a cashed check.