Three out of four creative freelancers have waited more than six months to receive payment for work they already delivered, and most of them have lived through that experience more than once. According to Thrilla's survey of over 5,000 UAE creative professionals, 75% have waited six months or more to get paid, more than once. Creative freelancer payment delays in the GCC are not a minor administrative inconvenience. They are a structural crisis quietly hollowing out the independent talent economy, one unpaid invoice at a time.
This is not about difficult clients or miscommunication. The problem runs deeper than that. It is built into the way creative work is procured, contracted, and settled across the industry, and until someone names the system clearly, it will keep repeating.
The Chain Nobody Talks About
The most common payment path for a creative freelancer in the GCC looks something like this. A brand engages a regional agency. The agency subcontracts to a production house or specialist studio. That entity brings in the freelancer. By the time the brand's procurement team processes the invoice, the agency has already moved on to the next project, and the freelancer is sitting at the end of a four-party chain with no leverage and no visibility.
Multi-layer agency structures are the single biggest structural driver of freelance payment delays in this region. Each handoff adds processing time, approval cycles, and financial risk. If the brand delays payment to the agency by 60 days, the agency delays payment to the sub-vendor, and the freelancer absorbs the full compounded delay. Nobody in the middle of that chain is personally losing sleep over it because nobody in the middle is going without income.
No Payment Protection, No Recourse
In most developed freelance markets, escrow-based payment systems have become a baseline expectation for project work above a certain value. In the GCC creative industry, payment protection for freelancers is almost nonexistent. Platforms that facilitate project-based work in other industries have begun normalising it globally, but the creative sector has not caught up.
Without any payment protection, a freelancer who completes a film shoot, designs a full fashion campaign, or delivers an event production package has no mechanism to guarantee that payment follows. The work is done. The asset is handed over. The invoice sits in someone's accounts payable queue with no enforcement attached to it. The freelancer has already spent the hours. The client has already received the value. The power asymmetry is complete.
Thrilla is building toward escrow-backed guaranteed payments as a core upcoming feature, where funds will be held securely at the point of booking and released on job completion. That feature is in development and will be one of the most meaningful structural shifts the platform brings to creative talent working across the UAE and GCC.
Contracts Written in Good Faith, Enforced by Nobody
Informal contracting is the second major failure point. A significant share of creative engagements in the GCC are still initiated by WhatsApp message, email thread, or verbal agreement, with a formal purchase order issued weeks after work begins, if it is issued at all. When a dispute arises over scope, deliverables, or timeline, the freelancer has no document to point to that would hold up to scrutiny.
Even when contracts do exist, they routinely lack payment enforcement clauses, late payment penalties, or dispute resolution mechanisms. According to the Global Freelance Client Payment Delay Report 2026, the majority of freelancers worldwide wait over 30 days for payment after completing work, with payment uncertainty ranking as the top work-related stressor for independent workers ahead of income volatility and client acquisition.
The Industries Where Payment Delays Hit Hardest
Freelance payment delays in the UAE and across the GCC are not evenly distributed. Three industries account for a disproportionate share of the worst cases.
Events and live entertainment operate on project cycles that compress enormous amounts of work into short windows, then stretch payment across quarters. Freelancers who crew a major conference or produce a brand activation in Dubai are often waiting for settlement long after the event photographs have been posted to the client's social channels.
Film and video production compounds the problem through rights clearances, post-production sign-offs, and broadcaster payment cycles. A director of photography who wraps a shoot in January may not see final payment until the following autumn.
Fashion is the third chronic offender. Editorial work, campaign production, and styling engagements are often treated as favours rather than professional services. Contracts are thin, timelines are vague, and invoices are treated as opening positions rather than obligations.
Client Procurement Is Not Designed for Creative Work
Large corporate clients in the GCC, particularly those in government-adjacent sectors or multinational structures, operate procurement systems designed for goods and services with clear unit costs and delivery receipts. Creative work does not fit neatly into those systems. A 30-second film, a brand identity, or a campaign concept does not arrive in a box with a barcode.
Procurement teams request purchase orders that require budget codes, vendor registration, and multi-signatory approval. Freelancers are frequently not registered vendors at all, which means someone internally has to create a workaround just to process the payment. Each workaround adds weeks. And because creative freelancers often lack the institutional relationships to escalate internally, they have no way to move the process forward from the outside.
Who Is Actually Responsible
Responsibility sits at multiple points simultaneously. Agencies that pass payment risk entirely downstream to freelancers while protecting their own cash flow are not neutral intermediaries. Clients whose procurement systems cannot accommodate the realities of creative work are not simply bureaucratic. Platforms and marketplaces that facilitate creative work without building payment infrastructure into the model are leaving a gap that freelancers fill with their own financial resilience.
The region's regulatory environment has made significant strides in formalising employment protections. Those protections have not yet extended meaningfully to the independent creative workforce. That workforce is growing. It is producing work that defines how the GCC presents itself to the world. It deserves infrastructure designed with it in mind.
What Thrilla Is Building to Fix This
The solution is not to ask freelancers to negotiate harder or chase invoices more aggressively. The solution is to build a marketplace where payment protection, transparent contracting, and agreed payment terms are not optional features but foundational ones.
Thrilla is the GCC's first AI-native creative talent marketplace, founded in Dubai in 2025 by Jack Deakin, Jason Murphy, and Billie Van Der Veen. Billie is a professional actress who spent years experiencing exactly the payment dynamics described above. The platform was built from lived experience, not from the outside looking in.
The Early Access offer reflects the mission directly. Clients post jobs on Thrilla for free, with no subscription, no commission, and no fees of any kind. Thrilla does not take a penny from clients. The goal is to prove that the creative industry can work differently, before asking anyone to pay for it.
Join Thrilla as a creative talent and work with clients who have agreed payment terms from the moment the booking is confirmed. Post your next creative project on Thrilla and connect with professional talent through a platform built to make the payment problem structurally impossible.
