Apple pays within 45 days of its fiscal month end. Google Play pays around the 15th.
Those are the two documented windows, and they are the whole answer to when store payouts actually arrive. Apple says payments are made to the bank account and the currency you provided within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month in which the transaction was completed. Google says orders processed, refunded or charged back from the 1st to the end of a month are paid out around the 15th of the following month. Every figure below comes from App Store Connect Help and Play Console Help, read on 16 October 2026.
The rest of this page is the gap between those sentences and your bank statement. A fiscal month is not a calendar month. A threshold can hold the money without telling you anything is wrong. An estimate is not a settlement. And a payout can be returned by your own bank over a name that does not match, which looks exactly like a store that has forgotten about you.
Start hereThe short version
Two clocks, two thresholds, and one bank that can say no.
A sale in your app is not money you have. It is money the store collected, will hold for a reporting period, will net refunds against, and will send on its own schedule once four or five conditions are satisfied. Apple runs on a 45 day window after its fiscal month closes. Google runs on a monthly payout around the 15th. Neither window starts when the customer tapped buy.
Knowing the two windows is the difference between a quiet month and a panic. It is also the part of app monetisation that nobody models, because a plan that assumes revenue lands in the month it was earned is wrong by more than a month on the first payment and wrong by a threshold on every small one after that.
When does Apple actually send the money?
Within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month in which the transaction was completed. That is Apple's own wording, and it carries two conditions people skip. The first is the word fiscal. Apple generates financial reports once a month based on its own fiscal calendar, which it publishes inside App Store Connect, and a report is only generated at all if there were purchases or refunds during that fiscal period. So the 45 days do not start on the last day of the calendar month. They start on the last day of Apple's month, which is the one on that calendar.
The second condition is a list. Apple pays only if you have a Paid Apps Agreement in effect, banking information entered in App Store Connect, earnings that exceed the minimum monthly payment threshold for each country or region in which you sell content, and any monthly invoicing requirements for your country or region completed. Payments go to the primary bank account on file at the time the payment is processed, and Apple states that payments to multiple or split bank accounts are not supported. One account, the one that was primary on the day.
Two dates in the month tell you whether anything is happening. Payment information for the previous fiscal month starts appearing in Payments and Financial Reports on the first Wednesday of the current fiscal month, and data keeps populating until financial reports are ready for all countries or regions by the first Friday. Downloadable financial reports for the previous fiscal month are available by that same first Friday. Before the first Wednesday, there is nothing to look at and nothing to escalate.
One detail saves an argument with your accountant. The payment date shown in App Store Connect is the date the payment leaves Apple's bank, not the date it reaches yours. Every payment also carries a seven digit Transaction ID, which Apple also calls a Consolidated Credit Identifier, and that reference travels with the transfer details to your bank. It is the number to quote when you ring the bank, and the number Apple asks for when you contact support. Budgeting for all of this sits next to what it costs to publish an app in the first place, because the fees go out on their own schedule long before anything comes back in.
App Store Connect Help, overview of receiving payments, read 16 October 2026
Check yours
Why your payout has not landed yet
Tick what is true today. Each answer is what the store itself documents about that situation, not a guess at what its systems are doing.
Nothing ticked. If a payment date has passed, the threshold is met and no alert is showing, the next thing to check is the bank, not the store.
When does Google Play pay out, and what stops it?
Google is simpler to describe and easier to misread. Orders processed, refunded or charged back from the 1st to the end of a month are paid out around the 15th of the following month. Around is Google's word, not a hedge of ours: Google does not initiate deposits on weekends or banking holidays, and it notes that it may take several days for your bank to credit your account after a deposit is initiated. By that rule, a payout that would fall on a weekend or a banking holiday moves to the next banking day, and the credit to your account lands later still.
The threshold is a flat pair of numbers rather than a table. Merchants who receive local currency payouts need an earned balance of at least US$1 at the time of payout. Merchants who receive USD wire transfer payouts need at least US$100. The second one is the trap for a small app selling abroad, because a hundred dollar floor on a wire transfer can hold several months of real revenue before it releases, and nothing in the console looks broken while it does.
Refunds are the other surprise, and they are built into that first sentence. The payout window covers orders processed, refunded or charged back in the month. A refund granted in November against an October sale lands in the November payout, as a deduction. It does not reverse the October payment you already received. For an app with a generous refund policy or a chargeback problem, that means a month can net out far lower than its sales suggested, and the payments profile itself only updates within 24 hours of a payout, so the figures move after the fact.
Two kinds of stop exist, and they behave differently. A bank problem is a failed transfer. A review is a hold. Google's payments centre help says that if unusual activity is found on your account Google may require more information, that disbursements may be on hold for up to 35 days, and that you must successfully pass verification in order to receive your payouts, both pending and future. Pass it and the held balance arrives with your next scheduled payment. Never complete it and you will not receive future merchant payouts at all. Play Console Help adds a quieter one: without the required tax information, certified as accurate, Google may take a range of actions including withholding merchant payouts.
Play Console Help, get paid for your sales, read 16 October 2026
Why is the number in the dashboard never the number in the bank?
Because one is an estimate and the other is a settlement, and Apple labels them differently on purpose. Before a payment is made, App Store Connect shows Total Estimated Proceeds, a consolidated amount owed to you as of today. Apple says plainly that the amount you actually receive may be different, generally because of changes in the foreign exchange rate by the time of payment, and because of any applicable withholding tax, which is applied when the payment is made. After payment, the same figure is labelled Proceeds, and that one is the actual amount paid.
The exchange rate is worth understanding if you sell in several currencies. Apple says the rates used are typically the spot rate on the date of payment and no more than three business days before the proceeds reach your account. You are therefore paid at a rate set weeks after the sale, not at the rate on the day. A month of strong sales into a weakening currency can arrive visibly smaller than the dashboard promised, with nothing wrong anywhere.
Then there is the threshold, which is the single most common reason a small app sees an estimate and no payment. Apple requires your account to exceed a minimum payment threshold before payment can be sent. The published table is mostly 0.02 USD for the big markets, including the United States in USD, the United Kingdom in GBP and Japan in JPY, but it rises sharply elsewhere: 10 USD for a bank in Thailand in THB, 27 USD for Hong Kong in HKD, and anything not in the table at all must exceed 40 USD. Fall short and App Store Connect shows Balance Carried Forward and rolls the money into the next payment period.
That rolled money has a column of its own. Balance consists of any amounts not paid out from previous months, or amounts returned, and Apple notes that the Balance and Total columns only appear when there is a running balance from the previous payment period. If you have never seen those columns, you have never carried a balance. If they appear one month, read them before assuming a payment went missing, because the money is usually sitting in them.
What do you do when a payout does not arrive?
Work out which of three states you are in before you contact anyone. Either the date has not arrived, or the money is being held, or a transfer was attempted and bounced. Apple shows all three in the same place: estimated proceeds display when the expected payment date has not yet occurred, when the minimum threshold has not been met so the balance carries forward, or when a payment was returned and your action may be needed. Those are the three documented reasons. There is no fourth.
A returned payment is the one that needs you. Apple shows an alert in App Store Connect with the reason the payment was returned and the bank reference number, and the alert carries three fields: the reason, the required adjustment, and the Transaction ID your bank can use to find the attempted payment. You can opt in to email notifications for returned payments, which is worth doing on the day you set up the account rather than the day you need it. Apple says that once you make all necessary updates, payments should resume within two regularly scheduled payment cycles, and that returned and held earnings may take up to two cycles to resend and will show in the Balance column of that payment breakdown. The alert stays until a payment succeeds.
On Google Play, the causes are mostly clerical and Google lists them. An incorrect bank account number or routing code. A closed account. An account holder name that was not exactly the same as the name on the bank account. A bank in a different country from the one on your payments profile, or an account not held in that country's local currency. An account not set up to receive incoming ACH or EFT payments. A bank code changed by a recent merger. Google's own first step is to re enter the bank information in case of a typo, then to ask the bank what it needs, and a bank account has to be verified before it can be used at all.
One more thing to rule out before you blame the payment system: a store can also stop paying because the app stopped selling. If an update was pulled in review and the listing went quiet, the payout problem is downstream of the review problem, and appealing a rejection is the thing to fix first. Finance alerts and review alerts arrive in different inboxes, and people chase the wrong one for a week.
Play Console Help, payout schedule and thresholds, read 16 October 2026
The same payout, scheduled differently by each store
| The question | App Store | Google Play | Same on both |
|---|---|---|---|
| When the money is sent | Within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month the sale closed in | Around the 15th of the following month | No |
| Which calendar the month follows | Apple's own fiscal calendar | The 1st to the end of the calendar month | No |
| Minimum balance before it is sent | A per country threshold, 0.02 USD up to 40 USD | US$1 local currency, US$100 USD wire transfer | No |
| Under the minimum, the balance rolls over | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A failed transfer shows up in the console | Payment Returned alert, with reason and a Transaction ID | Bank verification and payments profile alerts | No |
| A report exists for a month with no sales | No | Not documented on the payout schedule page | No |
Who gets paid when a builder generated the app
The store pays the developer account, and the developer account is yours. That is not a detail of any particular tool, it is how the agreements work: the bank details, the tax forms and the Paid Apps Agreement all hang off the account that published the app, and the money lands wherever that account says. An AI builder changes who wrote the code and nothing else about the payment chain.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project that you own, with two way GitHub sync so the code is never trapped. It uploads iOS builds to TestFlight, publishes to Google Play internal testing and builds a standalone Android APK. It does not submit to the App Store on your behalf, because App Store Review Guideline 4.2.6 rejects apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content. You press submit, so you are the one on the agreement and the one with the bank account. Newly is $25 a month and there is no free tier.
Ask for a paywall and the agent wires up RevenueCat for the subscription products, which means the store is still the merchant and everything on this page still applies: the fiscal month, the threshold, the 15th, the returned payment. The one case where the payout chain really does change is when the account itself changes hands, which is why transferring an app to another account is worth reading before you agree to hand anything over. The earnings follow the account, not the app icon.
Questions people ask about store payouts
App Store Connect Help, read on 16 October 2026, says payments are made to the bank account and the currency you provided within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month in which the transaction was completed. Four things have to be true first: a Paid Apps Agreement in effect, banking information in App Store Connect, earnings that exceed the minimum monthly payment threshold for each country or region in which you sell, and any monthly invoicing requirements for your country or region completed. Note the words fiscal month. Apple generates financial reports once a month on its own fiscal calendar, not the calendar month, so the clock does not start on the 31st.
Put the two dates in the calendar before you ship
First Wednesday for Apple, the 15th for Google, and the bank details checked once at the start so a payout never bounces over a name. Then the money arriving late stops being news.
Start building