What is the average payment term to suppliers?

Payment term is an ESRS S2 indicator, not a separate financial standard

The average payment term to suppliers typically appears in sustainability questionnaires as part of the theme "employees in the value chain" or more broadly under payment behaviour towards the value chain, not as a standalone financial metric with a legally established standard. The CSRD itself does not prescribe a specific figure or maximum term; the directive requires large undertakings to report on their impact on the value chain via the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and payment behaviour towards suppliers falls under this as an indicator of how an undertaking treats smaller trading partners.

For the entrepreneur filling in the questionnaire, this usually means: providing a simple figure — the average number of days between invoice date and payment date over the past financial year. If you do not have that figure readily available, then "not yet calculated" is a more honest answer than an estimate you cannot substantiate. Some portals ask for this figure in combination with questions about the size of the undertaking, so it is useful to also know how many employees the undertaking has at hand, because buyers often set the payment term against the scale of the supplier. A question about the sector in which the enterprise operates also appears in the same questionnaires, because payment behaviour varies considerably by sector.

Where this comes from: the ESRS standards under the CSRD

The obligation to report on the value chain follows from Directive (EU) 2022/2464, which prescribes the ESRS standards for sustainability reporting by large undertakings. The directive itself does not mention a specific data point "payment term"; that detail is filled in by the ESRS standards established under the directive. For the smaller supplier receiving the questionnaire, this is usually a derived question: their customer must report on it and therefore passes the figure down the value chain.