Article · 10 August 2026 · 8 primary sources · 15 min read

Published 10 August 2026 · Verified against source on 7 September 2026

The Payments Clause: does the new Commercial Payments Bill apply to affiliate commissions?

The headline is 60 days. The part that matters is which day the clock starts on, and whether affiliate commission is in scope at all.

There's a new law going through Parliament about late payment. Before we decide whether it affects us, I think there's a prior question nobody has asked.

Does the Commercial Payments Bill actually apply to affiliate commissions?

I don't mean the consumer transaction. That's obviously B2C. A customer clicks a link, buys something from an advertiser, and gets whatever they bought.

I'm talking about what happens after that sale.

The publisher generates the transaction. The advertiser validates it. The network processes it. The commission eventually gets paid.

That's a completely different commercial relationship.

And after a fortnight reading the actual Bill rather than the summaries, I can't find anything that explicitly answers the question.

So I'm not going to pretend I have.

I'm going to work through what I think it could mean.

I'm not a lawyer. This is a view from operations, from someone who spent 9 and a half years running the processes, validations and payments sitting underneath this industry. I'm going to quote the Bill as I go so you can see the actual wording rather than my version of it.

If I've got this wrong, I'd like to be argued with.

Because I think there's something here.

First, what does the Bill actually say?

The headline is going to be: businesses will have to pay within 60 days.

That's broadly right. It isn't the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is that the clock has to start on one of 4 specific days, and the list is closed.

4 days.

And then the maximum:

So the question isn't really "do we pay within 60 days".

The question is:

what event starts the clock?

What happens if your payment term doesn't match

And then:

A term that doesn't match isn't trimmed back to 60 days. It's void, and 30 days gets implied in its place.

Not 60. 30.

Now hold that next to a payment term that says commission is payable after validation.

But first: is any of this a B2B contract at all?

Take a normal affiliate transaction.

A consumer buys a £100 product from an advertiser. That's B2C. The consumer isn't the publisher. The publisher isn't selling the product. The network isn't buying it.

So if someone says this Bill regulates that £100 transaction, I don't think that's right.

But that's not the only contract involved.

There may also be a publisher supplying a marketing or referral service to an advertiser, with commission payable when the contractual conditions are satisfied.

Or a publisher, a network and an advertiser, with different contracts sitting around the same consumer transaction.

And the fact that the underlying sale is B2C doesn't automatically mean the commission relationship is.

So the real question isn't "is affiliate marketing B2C?"

It's:

is the commission payment a payment under a B2B contract for the supply of services?

I don't think the Bill answers that specifically for affiliate marketing. And that's the bit I haven't seen anyone properly ask.

So who is the supplier, and which payment are we even talking about?

Follow the money.

A consumer buys £100.

The publisher generates the sale.

The advertiser owes £5 commission.

The network processes it.

The publisher receives £5.

Now: who is the supplier? Who is the purchaser? And which contract creates the obligation to pay that £5?

If the publisher is supplying marketing services directly to the advertiser, you could argue publisher is supplier, advertiser is purchaser, and the £5 is payment for the service. That looks like an ordinary B2B commercial payment.

Put a network in the middle and it's less obvious. There may be one contract between advertiser and network, and another between network and publisher. Which means there could be several commercial relationships sitting around one £100 consumer transaction.

Advertiser to network. Network to publisher. Advertiser to publisher.

Potentially different answers depending on how the contracts are actually written.

The Bill does recognise that other contracts can relate to a main contract, and it contains provisions dealing with connected arrangements. But it doesn't tell you which of those affiliate payments it's looking at.

So I don't think anyone can simply say affiliate networks are in, or affiliate networks are out.

You'd have to look at the actual contractual structure.

Which is rarely done, because until now there has not been a reason to.

Then we get to validation

Most affiliate programmes work something like this.

Sale → Tracking → Validation → Approval → Commission → Payment

And validation can take days, weeks or months.

Sometimes because the advertiser needs to establish the sale was legitimate. Sometimes returns. Sometimes cancellations. Sometimes chargebacks. Sometimes attribution disputes. Sometimes internal reconciliation.

And sometimes because that's simply how the programme has always worked.

Now go back to those 4 days.

"Whenever the advertiser eventually decides the sale is valid" isn't one of them.

Unless affiliate validation qualifies as an acceptance or verification procedure.

And that's the part I don't think we can answer confidently yet.

Is affiliate validation actually verification?

That definition is about whether the supplier's goods or services conform to the contract.

Now look at what validation actually does.

Some of it looks very much like verification.

Was the traffic allowed?

Was there prohibited brand bidding?

Was the voucher code permitted?

Was the traffic incentivised where it shouldn't have been?

Was the customer actually new where new customers were a requirement?

Did the publisher comply with the programme terms?

Those are checks on whether the publisher's service conformed to the agreement.

But there's another category.

The customer returned the product.

The customer cancelled.

There was a chargeback.

Finance hasn't finished month end.

Those aren't checks on whether the publisher performed. They're contingencies affecting whether the commission becomes payable at all.

Which gives the advertiser a perfectly reasonable argument:

Validation isn't verification of the publisher's service. It's the process by which we establish whether a commission was ever earned.

That's a decent argument. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

But there's another way of looking at it.

The definition doesn't say the procedure must only establish conformity.

A validation process can be doing more than one job at once: checking compliance with the affiliate agreement, while also protecting the advertiser against returns.

So could the whole window be treated as an acceptance or verification procedure?

Possibly.

Possibly isn't certainty, and the Bill doesn't tell this industry which side of the line it's on.

If it is a verification procedure, here's what happens to it

3 subsections, and they build.

So 30 days is the default, unless the contract says longer.

And if it says longer:

And then this.

The purchaser has to show it's fair and reasonable.

That's a very different proposition from:

"We've always had a 90-day window."

Or:

"That's just how travel works."

Or:

"Our terms say 120 days."

The question becomes:

Can you explain why this particular validation period is fair and reasonable?

I'm not arguing against validation. I ran it.

Quite the opposite.

You cannot operate performance marketing properly without validation.

You need to stop fraud.

You need to stop duplicate commissions.

You need to account for returns.

You need to resolve attribution disputes.

You need to make sure the publisher actually complied with the programme terms.

I spent 9 and a half years doing exactly that. My team quality-analysed untracked sales, worked through the approvals and the declines, and I wrote clauses into merchant agreements setting how long a disputed sale could take to resolve and how long after that it had to be paid.

Validation isn't bureaucracy.

It's part of the product.

My question is different.

How long should validation reasonably be allowed to take? And who should have to explain why it takes that long?

Historically this industry has answered that through custom.

The advertiser sets the window.

The network publishes it.

The publisher accepts it.

Everyone gets on with it.

If the Bill applies to the commission relationship, that may no longer be enough.

What the industry has said, and when it said it

Our industry has done serious work on payments.

There's a publisher payments guide from April last year, a webinar in October, and a voluntary code of conduct published in January.

All 3 came out before this Bill was introduced in May.

And none of them references payment legislation.

The law firm write-ups I have read don't mention affiliate marketing, performance marketing or commission payments. There may be ones I have missed.

The 2 conversations simply haven't met.

That's not a criticism of anyone.

The timing explains it entirely.

The figure everyone pulls out of that trade body table is 13 months, which is a maximum possible on one platform rather than a typical term.

The number I'd look at instead is the column next to it.

4 networks state, in the industry's own document, that they have no network-wide maximum.

One notes some travel advertisers may be allowed over 360 days.

A fifth says custom validation cycles have no fixed limit, and the only requirement is that the window is declared in the programme terms.

Most networks do run a default auto-approve window, so this isn't a free-for-all.

But at the top end, where the long windows actually live, the guardrail isn't a limit.

It's disclosure.

And then there's the size question

The Bill doesn't simply say big business pays small business within 60 days.

The exemption structure is more complicated than that, and it runs the opposite way to how you'd guess.

A purchaser who is smaller than their supplier can be carved out.

So can a contract where the purchaser and the supplier are both large undertakings.

And the Secretary of State can exempt further categories of contract by regulation.

Which leaves the middle.

So a medium network paying a medium publisher is in scope.

A small network paying a small publisher is in scope.

The exemptions also need regulations that don't exist yet, a written contract, and the contract itself has to say the exemption applies.

Nobody gets to decide after the fact.

And what counts as micro, small, medium and large isn't in the Bill at all.

It's left to regulations.

So again:

we don't have the complete picture.

So does it apply?

I don't know yet.

And I think anyone saying confidently that it definitely does, or definitely doesn't, is getting ahead of the legislation.

What I think we can say is this.

The underlying consumer sale is B2C.

The question is whether the separate commercial relationship governing the commission falls within the Bill.

The affiliate commission relationship can be B2B.

A publisher may be supplying marketing or referral services to an advertiser or a network.

That potentially puts the commission contract in a very different category.

The Bill doesn't mention affiliate marketing.

Not expressly.

But it does regulate commercial contracts for services, and affiliate commissions can arise from those contracts.

And it has specific rules about verification, which affiliate validation could overlap with.

But it isn't obvious that it does.

That's the grey area.

And I think that's the bit worth discussing.

Meanwhile, there's a question you can answer today

Whatever the legal answer turns out to be, there's an operational one every network, advertiser and reward platform could answer this week.

How long does your money actually take to move through the system?

Not what your terms say.

What actually happens.

Take one transaction and put a date against every stage.

Sale generated → Sale received by the network → Validation begins → Validation completed → Commission approved → Invoice raised → Invoice accepted → Payment initiated → Money received.

That's your real payment cycle.

I suspect a lot of businesses don't have that number.

Not because they're badly run.

Because nobody has ever needed to join the data up.

The sale sits in one system.

Validation sits somewhere else.

Finance has the invoice.

The bank has the payment.

And nobody has ever asked:

From the moment the publisher performs the service, how long until the money lands?

If you're owed money, you can't challenge a payment cycle you can't measure.

If you're paying someone, you can't defend a term you've never timed.

And if legislation does eventually apply to your relationship, you don't want to be joining those dots for the first time when somebody asks you to prove what happened.

Do it in both directions.

Advertiser → Network → Publisher.

Measure the real elapsed time.

Then ask:

Which part of it is necessary?

Which part is operational?

Which part is contractual?

And which part is simply habit?

That's a more interesting question than:

"Do we pay within 60 days?"

And there's one more person in this chain

The consumer.

They're outside all of this.

Not the supplier.

Not the purchaser.

Not protected by any of the payment rules I've described.

But they're sitting at the end of the chain.

Somebody clicks a cashback link because they're promised £5 back.

If the transaction takes 6 months to validate, they wait 6 months.

No statutory interest.

No protection.

Just a longer wait.

And nobody measures what that does to whether they come back.

Which is the thing I keep finding in operations.

The number everyone argues about often isn't the number that matters.

The Bill talks about payment terms.

The industry talks about validation windows.

The number I'd want is:

How long does a customer transaction take to become money in a publisher's account, and then money back in the customer's hands?

Because that's the actual journey.

And if we don't know that number, we're debating the wrong thing.

So here's my question to the industry

Does the Commercial Payments Bill apply to affiliate commissions?

If you think yes, I'd like to understand why.

If you think no, I'd like to understand which part of the legislation takes affiliate commissions outside its scope.

And if you think, like me, that it's somewhere in the middle:

What happens when this legislation meets the way affiliate validation actually works?

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice.

I'm asking because I spent 9 and a half years running this process, and I know how messy the journey from sale to validation to commission to payment actually is.

This is one of those questions where the answer isn't sitting in one department.

It's somewhere between law, contracts, attribution, finance and operations.

Which is exactly why I'm interested in it.

So. Have I got this wrong?

I'd like to know.

Nat Portman spent 9 and a half years at Quidco.com, from 2007 to 2016, latterly as Head of Client Operations, running the processes, validations and disputed payments sitting between 12 affiliate networks and 4,200 retailers. Since then she has worked across payments, embedded finance and merchant operations. She now works with reward, cashback and creator commerce platforms on the operations behind the sale.