You finished the job three weeks ago and invoiced it the same week. The customer never raised a problem with the work.
Nothing came back. So you sent a polite reminder, because you did not want to be the guy who nags a good customer over one invoice. That got you nothing either, and now you are typing a firmer letter and second-guessing every line in it. You are not sure how hard you are allowed to push, and you are not sure what happens if the letter does nothing.
Every past due invoice template you will find online stops at the wording of the letter. None of them mention the filing deadline sitting behind that invoice. Every state has one, it is usually shorter than you think, and it is counted from a date your invoice does not even mention.
By the end you will know when an invoice is officially late, which date your state counts your deadline from, what to send on which day, whether you can add a late fee, and why the debt collection rules you are worried about do not apply to your own letter.
Short answer: send a reminder the day after the due date, a firmer letter at two weeks, and a final notice at 30 days. Then stop writing letters, because your filing deadline is measured from your last day on the job, not from the invoice.
- The first reminder is a receipt question, not a demand. Most late invoices are an oversight.
- Add a late fee only if the rate was written down before the work started.
- Your own letter is not a debt collector's letter, and federal law says so in plain words.
- Everything above gets easier when the invoice and its reminders go out on their own.
How I know: the filing deadlines below are quoted from five state statutes, and the debt collection point is quoted from the federal statute itself. Every one is linked.
Key takeaways
- Ohio gives you 60 days from your last day on a house. Florida and Washington give you 90 days. Illinois gives you 4 months.
- In California a property owner can shorten your window to 60 days by recording a notice of completion.
- No interest rate written into the job means you get your state's default rate, which in California is 10 percent a year.
- A commercial customer's unpaid bill is outside the federal debt collection law completely.
When is an invoice actually past due?
An invoice is past due the day after the date you put on it. That is the whole test, and it is why the date matters more than the letter.
"Due on receipt" means the day they get it. "Net 30" means 30 days from the invoice date. If you wrote neither, you have no due date to point at, and your firm letter has nothing behind it.
So before you write anything, go read your own invoice. The sentence you need is already on it, or it is missing, and that changes which letter you send.
Your deadline counts from your last day on the job
This is the part that costs trade businesses real money, and it is missing from almost every template you will find.
Every state has a filing you can make against the property when you are not paid for work you did on it. It has a hard deadline. That deadline is not counted from the invoice date, and it is not counted from the due date. It is counted from the last day you furnished labor or materials on that job.
Read Florida's wording. A claim of lien may be recorded "at any time during the progress of the work or thereafter but not later than 90 days after the final furnishing of the labor or services or materials by the lienor," under Fla. Stat. 713.08(5).
Walk a normal job through that wording. You pull off the site on March 3 and invoice on March 10 with net 30 terms, so payment is due April 9. You send reminders through April and May and get nowhere. It is now June 2, and in Florida your 90 days closed yesterday, counted from March 3. Your invoice never showed that date anywhere.
How long you have, state by state
Florida's 90 days are above. Here are four more, each one counted from the same date and quoted from the statute itself.
- Washington: "not later than ninety days," under RCW 60.04.091.
- Ohio: 60 days on a one or two family dwelling, and 75 days on other work, under Ohio Rev. Code 1311.06. The shortest window of the five, on exactly the kind of house most crews work on.
- Illinois: 4 months, which is what keeps your claim ahead of other creditors and buyers, under 770 ILCS 60/7.
- California: the earlier of 90 days, or 60 days after the owner records a notice of completion or cessation, under Cal. Civ. Code 8412. An owner can cut your window by a month, and nobody has to tell you they did.
Those are the recording deadlines, not instructions for your job. Filing is a legal step with its own notice rules, and the reason to know your date today is that it tells you how long your letters have.
Your past due invoice letter, send by send
Four sends, spread across the first month. The first two are an invoice reminder email and nothing more, so keep every one of them short.
The day after the due date: ask whether they got it. No fee talk, no warning. "Hi Dana, invoice 1042 for the water heater job was due yesterday. Wanted to make sure it reached you. Here it is again, and you can pay from the link at the top." Most late invoices are a lost email or a customer who meant to pay on Friday.
Day 14: say the number and give a date. Attach the invoice again, name the amount, and ask for payment by a specific day rather than "as soon as possible." A real date gives them something to answer.
Day 30: the final notice, in writing and on paper. Name the invoice, the amount, the original due date, and what you will do next if it is unpaid by a stated day. Mail it as well as emailing it. Keep the copy.
Day 31 onward: stop writing and start deciding. Four letters have told you what you need to know. Compare the date you left that job to your state's deadline above, and pick your next step while you still have room to take it.
One pattern to break while you are at it. Owners usually get softer as an invoice ages, because the relationship feels more awkward every week. Write all four sends once, put them on an automated sequence, and the day 30 letter goes out on day 30 whether that week felt awkward or not.
Can you charge a late fee on an unpaid invoice?
Yes, if you wrote the rate down before the work started. That is the requirement people get wrong. A fee you invent after the invoice is already late was never part of the deal, and your customer can simply decline it.
What you lose by not writing it down is not the whole fee, though. It is the rate. California's statute says that when a contract "does not stipulate a legal rate of interest, the obligation shall bear interest at a rate of 10 percent per annum after a breach," under Cal. Civ. Code 3289(b). Your state sets its own default, and it is usually well under what you would have charged.
So put the rate on the estimate and on the invoice, in a sentence a customer can read: "Balances unpaid 30 days after the invoice date carry 1.5 percent monthly interest." Your estimate and invoice terms are the place that sentence belongs.
You are not a debt collector, and the law says so
Plenty of owners write a soft letter because they are afraid of the federal debt collection rules. Those rules are the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and two lines in its own definitions take your letter out of them.
The first is who counts as a debt collector. The Act excludes "any officer or employee of a creditor while, in the name of the creditor, collecting debts for such creditor," at 15 U.S.C. 1692a(6)(A). You are the creditor. When your office manager emails your customer about your invoice under your business name, that is the exclusion, word for word.
The second is bigger. The Act only covers a "debt," which it defines as money owed on a transaction "primarily for personal, family, or household purposes." A property manager, a builder, or a restaurant that has not paid you is a commercial customer, so the Act does not reach that invoice at all.
What the exclusion does not give you is room to threaten or harass a customer. Those limits come from your own state's collection and consumer protection laws, and they apply to you whether the federal Act reaches your invoice or not. What it does mean is that the plain, firm, factual letter you were afraid to send is the one you were always allowed to send.
How to collect unpaid invoices when the letters stop working
Four sends and no payment means it is time for a different tool. Each one has its own cost and its own deadline, and the right one depends on the size of the bill.
Small claims court suits the smaller invoices, because you can file without a lawyer. The limits start at a few thousand dollars and reach about $25,000 depending on the state. A collection agency takes a percentage of whatever it recovers. The property filing above is the one with the shortest deadline, so it is the one to ask about first.
How to get paid faster on the next job
Most of this is decided before you ever send an invoice.
Take a deposit, so you are never carrying the full cost of a job you have not been paid for. Put your payment terms and your interest rate in the same sentence on every estimate. Take cards and bank payments, because an invoice that can be paid from a phone in 20 seconds gets paid sooner than one that needs a checkbook. Invoice the day you finish rather than at the end of the month.
And write down the date you left every job. It is the one date your deadline is counted from, and it is the one most businesses never record.
FAQ
What if the customer says part of the bill is wrong?
Split the invoice. Ask them to pay the part nobody is arguing about, and put the disputed line on its own invoice while you sort it out. A customer who owes you $4,000 and disagrees about $300 of it will often sit on the whole $4,000 for a month, and splitting it gets most of your money in the door this week.
Does a past due invoice letter need to be mailed, or is email enough?
Email is fine for the early reminders and it gives you a timestamp. Mail the 30 day final notice as well as emailing it. That is the one you may need to show later. A letter on paper also gets opened by people who have stopped reading your emails.
My customer says they never got the invoice. Now what?
Send it again the same day, with the original send date in the message, and move the due date only if you actually want to. A customer who has not seen a bill cannot pay it. An invoicing system that records when each one was sent and opened settles this argument in a few seconds.
Stop chasing invoices by hand
Catch CRM is an all-in-one platform for home service and trade businesses across the United States. Estimates, invoices, and the reminders that go with them live in it beside your jobs. If your invoices are going out late, book a demo and we will set the sequence up against your own job list. Same if the firm letter never gets sent because the week got away from you.
This is general information, not legal advice; consult an attorney about your situation.