White Paper: Where Contracts Get Stuck (...and How to Fix It)

Most contracts get signed in days, with a median of 2.8 days from being added. The slowest 10% take 24 days or more, and they account for 57% of all the days contracts take to get signed.

Where Contracts Get Stuck is ContractSafe’s first proprietary data report. It isn’t a survey. It’s a white paper built on anonymized timestamps from more than 55,000 contracts at more than 450 companies that use ContractSafe, from August 2025 to September 2026, including 15,000+ approval requests and 48,000+ e-signature requests.

Inside, You’ll Learn:

• How long contracts spend at each of the four steps (waiting to start, in progress, approval, and signature) and where the slowest 10% lose the most time.
• Why the slowest contracts spend 44% of their time in the four steps waiting for signatures, and only 19% in approval.
• How much time each extra approver and signer adds, and why four signers is where it breaks.
• Why, when approvers go one at a time, the slowest one is most of the wait, and what to do about it.
• Which day to send an approval request, and why Friday is the fastest day for signatures.
• Seven moves your team can start this quarter to get contracts unstuck.

Download the report and find out where your own contracts get stuck.