The stores pay you on their calendar, not yours, and the two calendars do not match.

When does Apple actually send the money?

Within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month in which the transaction was completed, paid to the bank account and the currency you provided. That is the wording on App Store Connect Help, read on 16 October 2026, and the word doing the work is fiscal. Apple counts in fiscal months, and the start date and end date columns of your financial report are described as based on Apple's fiscal calendar rather than on calendar months. Those help pages do not print the calendar itself, so you cannot work out your own due date from the 31st of last month. Read the expected payment date that App Store Connect shows for the period and use that.

Four conditions come before the clock, and all four are yours to satisfy. A Paid Apps Agreement has to be in effect. Banking information has to be in App Store Connect, and Apple pays the primary bank account on file at the time a payment is processed, because payments to multiple or split bank accounts are not supported. Your proceeds have to exceed the minimum monthly payment threshold for each country or region in which you sell content. And any monthly invoicing requirement your country or region imposes has to be completed. Miss one and there is no payment to be late.

Payments go out by direct deposit or electronic funds transfer, and Apple issues them as low value transfers rather than high value wire transfers where that option exists. Apple's bank consolidates the proceeds for each currency in which you have sales, so you get a single payment per currency per fiscal month rather than a trickle of small ones. Apple also warns that payments may be subject to bank fees and transaction costs charged by your bank or by intermediate financial institutions, which reduces what is deposited. If your bank is in a different country from your currency, budget for that difference.

Two reporting dates are useful to know because they tell you when there is something to look at. Payment information for the previous fiscal month starts appearing in Payments and Financial Reports from the first Wednesday of the current fiscal month, and keeps filling in until financial reports are ready for every country or region by the first Friday. Reports are generated once a month on the fiscal calendar, and only when there were purchases or refunds in that period, so a quiet month produces no report at all. They stay available for ten years. Seeing the figures needs the Account Holder, Admin or Finance role.

App Store Connect Help, overview of receiving payments, read 16 October 2026

When does Google Play pay, and why is it not in the bank yet?

Google is the easier of the two to predict. Play Console Help, read on 16 October 2026, says orders processed, refunded or charged back from the 1st of a month to the end of that month get paid out around the 15th of the following month. The Google payments centre says the same thing from the other direction: payouts for Google Play developers start each month on the 15th for the previous month's sales. Its own example is sales from 1 to 31 May paying out on 15 June. No fiscal calendar, no 45 day window, just the calendar month and the 15th.

Note what is in that sentence beside orders. Refunds and chargebacks that happen inside the month are settled in the same cycle, which is why a payout can be smaller than the sales figure you were watching. A customer who buys on the 2nd and refunds on the 20th nets to zero in one payout rather than showing up as a credit two months later. A sale made during a staged rollout on Google Play counts in the month it was processed, like any other sale. The track and the rollout percentage change who can buy, not when you are paid.

Then there is the gap between a payout and money you can spend. Google does not initiate deposits on weekends or banking holidays, so a cycle landing on one is initiated on the next business day. Its own worked example is an order charged on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday being deposited on the Monday, and moving to the Tuesday when Monday is a banking holiday. After Google initiates the deposit, it says it may take several days for your bank to credit your account, and it points you at your own bank for the turnaround time. Put together, a sale early in one month can be spendable money around the third week of the next one.

Play Console Help, order processing and payouts, read 16 October 2026

What is the minimum before a store pays you anything?

Apple publishes a table, and the headline figure is the one you are least likely to be held to. The minimum payment threshold reference, read on 16 October 2026, says all other bank countries or regions and bank account currencies must exceed a minimum payment threshold of 40 USD. That 40 USD is the fallback for anything not in the table. Most developers are in the table, and the figure there is lower by a wide margin: accounts in USD, GBP, EUR, JPY and CAD are listed at 0.02 USD, which is to say no barrier at all. A handful run the other way, with 100 USD for a COP account in Colombia, 90 USD for NIO in Nicaragua and 27 USD for HKD in Hong Kong.

That matters because the number people quote for Apple is usually 150 USD, picked up from forum answers that are years old. It is not in the current documentation. Look up the row for your own bank country and currency rather than trusting a figure you were told, and read the condition carefully: Apple requires the threshold to be exceeded for each country or region in which you sell content, not for the total.

Google gives two figures and they depend on how you are paid rather than on where you are. Merchants who receive local currency payouts need an earned balance of US$1. Merchants who receive USD wire transfer payouts need US$100. The balance is measured at payout time, so the practical effect is a month that ends at 80 dollars on a wire transfer account rolling into the next one. If you are a small seller and you were set up for USD wire transfers, that single setting is probably why nothing has ever arrived.

Below the threshold, nothing is lost. Apple shows the state as Balance Carried Forward and says the proceeds carry over to the next payment period. Google holds the balance until it reaches the minimum. An app earning 10 dollars a month on a 100 dollar wire threshold is paid roughly once a year, in one lump, which is correct behaviour rather than a bug. It is also an argument for checking that setting before you spend a quarter wondering why apps get rejected and whether yours was quietly pulled. A held balance looks identical to a dead app from the outside.

App Store Connect Help, overview of receiving payments, read 16 October 2026

Why is the payout smaller than the sales figure?

Because a payout pays proceeds and your dashboard shows prices. Apple's financial report fields reference defines Partner Share as the proceeds you receive per unit, which is the customer price minus applicable taxes and Apple's commission, per Schedule 2 of your Paid Apps Agreement. The customer price itself is inclusive of any applicable taxes Apple collects and remits. So three things come out between the price on the product page and the number in your report: the tax the store collected, the store's commission, and then the refunds and chargebacks that settled in the same period. Your bank can take a fourth bite on the way in.

The practical habit is to stop comparing your payout to your sales total, and compare it to the proceeds column instead. Both stores publish a per unit proceeds figure, and that is the number your forecast should use. A paid app at a round price never deposits a round number, and a subscription business with a free trial deposits nothing at all in the first month while the trials are running.

Where the money is charged decides who pays you and when. Store billing means the store collects, keeps its cut, and pays you on the schedule above. A card charged outside the app, for a real world service, means your payment processor pays you on its own schedule, which is usually days rather than weeks. That is a real difference in working capital, and it belongs in the decision about which payment layer to use rather than being discovered afterwards. Mixing both means two payout calendars and two sets of reports to reconcile every month.