Why your Mexican distributor asks for 90 days

A European exporter offers 30 days, considers that normal, and is surprised when the Mexican distributor asks for 90. The instinct is to read it as a negotiating position or a warning sign about the counterparty. Usually it is neither. It is the structure of Mexican corporate finance showing up in your contract.

The number that explains it

Banco de Mexico runs a quarterly survey of firms on how they finance themselves. In the second quarter of 2026, published on 20 August 2026, 60.9 per cent of the firms surveyed said they had used financing from suppliers. Commercial bank credit came second at 24.5 per cent. Financing from a corporate group or head office was 11.2 per cent, development banks 0.8 per cent, foreign banks 0.5 per cent and debt issuance 0.2 per cent.

Two things to be precise about, because this figure gets misquoted. It is qualitative: it measures the share of firms using each source, not the share of financing volume they represent. And it is not a Mexican peculiarity in kind, only in degree.

The size split is where it gets useful. Among firms with more than 100 employees, supplier financing rises to 71.4 per cent and bank credit to 38.4 per cent. Among firms of 100 employees or fewer, the figures are 59.5 and 22.7 per cent. So the larger the distributor, the more likely they are to be financing themselves through their suppliers, and the more sophisticated they are about it.

What that means at the table

Your Mexican distributor is not asking for 90 days because they are short of cash this month. They are asking because 60 to 90 days is what their other suppliers give them, it is the working capital model their business is built on, and a supplier who offers 30 is asking them to fund a hole out of a bank facility that a quarter of firms have.

Three consequences follow.

Price the working capital before you price the product. Sixty extra days on a 500,000 euro annual run rate is roughly 82,000 euros of receivable carried permanently. At any realistic cost of capital that is a real number, and it is a number your competitors have already put into their price. If you refuse the terms and hold price, you lose on both.

Do not read long terms as a credit signal. They are not diagnostic. What is diagnostic is payment behaviour against agreed terms, concentration of the distributor's own receivables, and whether they are financing themselves upstream because they cannot get bank credit or because it is simply cheaper. Ask which.

Understand that you have no statutory floor. This is the part that catches Nordic exporters. Several Latin American countries legislated on late payment. Colombia's Ley 2024 de 2020 caps business-to-business terms at 45 calendar days, though not where both parties are large enterprises, as we set out on the Colombia market page. Chile went further and its 30-day rule has applied since 1 March 2020. Mexico has no equivalent general statutory deadline. Whatever you agree is what you get, and there is no default rule improving your position if the contract is silent.

How to hold the line without losing the deal

Concede the term and take something for it. The terms are negotiable currency and almost nobody uses them that way.

• Trade days for volume commitment. Ninety days against a firm annual minimum is a different transaction from ninety days against best efforts.
• Stage the terms. Thirty days on the first two orders while the relationship is unproven, moving to sixty and then ninety on a schedule tied to payment performance. This is normal and is rarely refused by a serious counterparty.
• Insure it. Credit insurance on Mexican receivables is available and prices the risk for you. If an insurer will not cover your distributor, that is information you paid very little to obtain.
• Use a letter of credit for the opening period. Expensive and slow, and appropriate for a first shipment to an untested buyer. Retire it once you have a payment history.
• Get the currency right. Invoicing in euros moves the exchange risk onto the distributor, which they will price into their margin request. Invoicing in pesos moves it onto you. There is no free option; decide which one you can hedge more cheaply.

For choosing the counterparty in the first place, see finding the right distributor in Mexico, and for what happens when it does not work, ending a distributor agreement in Mexico.

Common questions

What are normal B2B payment terms in Mexico?

There is no statutory default and no single norm, but 60 to 90 days is common in distribution, and the Banco de Mexico survey data explains why: supplier credit is the primary financing source for a majority of Mexican firms. Thirty days is an outlier offer rather than a prudent one.

Does Mexico have a law on late payment?

Not a general one comparable to Colombia's Ley 2024 de 2020 or Chile's 30-day rule. Mexican commercial law leaves payment terms to the contract, so the terms you negotiate are the terms you have.

Is a long payment term a sign of a weak distributor?

Not on its own. Banco de Mexico's second quarter 2026 data shows supplier financing use rising with company size, to 71.4 per cent among firms above 100 employees. Payment behaviour against agreed terms is the diagnostic, not the length of the term requested.

Should I invoice a Mexican distributor in euros or pesos?

Whichever currency risk you can hedge more cheaply, and be explicit that you are choosing. Invoicing in euros pushes the exposure onto the distributor, who will ask for margin to carry it. Invoicing in pesos keeps it with you, where it may be cheaper to manage.