Ask HN: What is the typical time your contracting invoices are paid?

We have net 30 terms that we pay our engineering contractors. Most seem to get nervous if we haven't paid in 10 days though. If you are a contracting engineer how long is it before you usually get paid from companies you are working with?

As someone who's only hired freelancers through Upwork, something I really like was that they required I pay them every week. Once the first payment went through the freelancer knew I was legitimate. It also made it easier for me to budget since I had small numbers I could extrapolate out for how much the project will cost.

Much larger discount for early payment than I've heard of.

At this large of discount doesn't it sound like the original rate is just obviously marked up to account for this offer?

Related, but wouldn't this lose potential clients that think the rate is too high, unless/until you quickly explain there's a discount for early payment or without their being confident that they will always be able to take you up on that offer?

Depends on the client. Some clients pay within 3 days and some delay the payment for weeks. Some companies even have policies to pay invoices only after the second reminder (for cash flow reasons...). For me, early payments are sign of reliability and trustworthiness. I get a bit nervous and stressed if I have to remind clients to pay my invoices. Clients who repeatedly forget or delay payments go way down my "want to work with again"-list and get sorted out this way sooner or later.

When I can, they are paid before I send them because I stipulate a retainer in the contract and further stipulate that the retainer is to be applied against final invoice. Likewise, my default terms include payment is due upon receipt and failure to pay is grounds for stopping work.

The only one that really matters is the retainer, because that's the one about who owes who what and it means I owe work instead of the client owing me money. It prevents clients from using me as a bank.

That's not to say that some clients have well defined invoicing processes and that I wont' work with some of those. I say 'some' because some other client side well defined payment processes include partial payment or slow payment or no payment. And those are clients I generally want to avoid.

One of the things a retainer does is that it demonstrates how the client really views the idea of paying me. If they struggle with the idea of writing me a check during the honeymoon, it probably ain't going to get any easier for the client as the project proceeds and when it snags in the middle or when the client has what they want. And deeper down, the basis of good client relations is less contracts and more mutual trust. Clients who default to not trusting professionals tend not to be worth the effort of trying to earn their trust.

Good luck.