What overdue receivables are
Every company that sells on credit is owed money by its customers. Those sums are its receivables. When a customer misses the date agreed in the contract, the debt becomes overdue. Rosstat's definition is wider than unpaid invoices alone: it also counts advances paid to other companies, sums owed by subsidiaries and other debtors, and even tax overpayments due back from the state. The largest part of the overdue total, though, is owed by customers for goods, work and services, which is why the indicator is best read as unpaid bills.
Rosstat publishes the figure every month in its report on the socio-economic situation of Russia, in the section on the state of payments and settlements in organisations. The same table separates three kinds of debt, and it matters which one is meant: receivables, the money owed to companies; payables, the money companies owe to others; and bank loans and borrowings. This indicator uses only the first, and only its overdue part.
How the figures are published
Rosstat describes the figures as “operational data”, and they run a month behind the report: the edition for January to July, for example the report of that name for 2026, gives receivables at the end of June. The monitor records each value with its source document and the date it was read, as it does for every indicator.
How the monitor builds the number
A nominal rouble total would rise with inflation alone, so the monitor deflates each month's figure into 2021 prices with the same consumer price index it uses for inflation. It then reads the result as a multiple of the level in January 2022, when overdue receivables stood at ₽3.22 trillion. That makes the question the indicator answers simple: what multiple of its size just before the war is the pile of unpaid bills, in real terms?
The pre-war anchor, worth 100, is 1×. The trouble line, worth 0, is 2×: a doubling of unpaid bills in real terms. That line is a registered judgment, fixed before any reading was scored.
Why it replaced bankruptcy counts
The indicator was added on 21 August 2026 to measure distress between companies in money. Before that, the monitor counted court bankruptcies. Those counts are held down by moratoria and by the cost of filing, and in every month the monitor recorded they sat at the healthy end of its scale, so they carried no information. The bankruptcy indicator was retired the next day, so that one kind of stress would not be counted twice; the amendment record gives both decisions. A bankruptcy count records the companies that reach court; overdue receivables record the unpaid money itself, every month.
The line changed once. At first the trigger tested a nominal total of ₽12 trillion while the score measured the real multiple; on 22 August 2026 the two were joined, and the real 2× line now serves as both the trigger and the zero of the score.
What unpaid bills reveal
When a large customer pays late, its suppliers have less money to pay their own suppliers, wages and taxes. Overdue receivables capture that chain in one number, which is why the monitor calls the indicator transmission in money terms: strain moving through the private economy, visible in invoices that were not paid.
Other official sources touch on the same strain without measuring unpaid bills directly. In September 2026 the Bank of Russia's monitoring of sectoral financial flows showed incoming payments through its own payment system to industries serving state demand 20.0% lower in August than a year earlier, as we reported; the bank notes that the series covers less than half of all payments. And the finance ministry proposed in September 2026 that, in 223-FZ purchases by state companies from small and medium-sized firms, penalties on the supplier for late delivery may not exceed those on the customer for late payment from 1 January 2027.
Class and trigger
Overdue receivables are a class-2 indicator: published by a state with an incentive to manage its numbers, but recording a failure, unpaid bills, that is hard to hide from the companies left waiting. A class-2 reading can trigger a verdict only with a second class-2 indicator, such as rail loading, past its own line at the same time. The guide to rail freight explains that physical counterpart.
What it cannot tell you
The monitor reads only the national total. Rosstat's report does break the overdue sum down by industry, shows on a separate line the part owed by state customers for products delivered, and counts the companies that are owed overdue money, but the total alone does not show where a change comes from, or whether a few large debtors or many small ones are behind it. It measures money owed to companies, not their bank debt and not failed businesses. And the real multiple depends on the price index used to deflate it: if consumer inflation is understated, the real figure is overstated accordingly.
For how this stress fits the wider chain, from the budget to households, see how Russia finances the war; for the public-sector side of the same economy, see the guide to regional budgets.
The live reading
Below this guide is the latest real multiple of overdue receivables against January 2022 and its score: 1× is 100 and 2× is 0. It changes when Rosstat publishes its next monthly report.