The client wants a discount now the work is finished

Start with the legal position, because it is shorter than people expect: there is no rule that finished work earns a discount. The request has no basis in the contract or the law, and this page says so plainly. It is a pressure move, and it works on builders in a specific position: tired, owed retention, and keen to be recommended.

Separate what is already owed from what is still open

This is the whole game. By the end of a job the account is usually two piles:

• Sums already due: certified valuations, notified sums past their final date, retention past its release trigger. On jobs the Construction Act covers these are not negotiable downwards without the notice machinery having run (section 111); a discount request against them is a request to waive money the law already gives you.
• Sums genuinely still open: the last valuation, unagreed variations, disputed dayworks. This is the only pile a negotiation legitimately touches.

Answer the discount email by splitting the piles in writing. Most of the “final figure” usually turns out to be pile one, and watching it get separated changes the client’s tone by itself.

If you choose to concede, sell it, do not leak it

Sometimes a concession is commercially right: a good client, more work coming, a genuinely arguable pile two. Then three rules keep it a decision instead of a defeat:

1. Price it against the open items, not the total. “We will take £X off the disputed variations” reads as resolution; “£X off the bill” reads as an admission the bill was soft.

2. Get something back: payment of the whole balance within seven days, the retention released now, the final account signed as agreed. A concession that buys immediate cash and a closed account has a real price; one that buys a vague promise of goodwill has none.

3. Write it as full and final settlement of the account, conditional on the payment actually arriving. A discount given and then paid late is the worst of both worlds.

What never goes in the trade

Retention already due, interest already accrued, and your right to the notice machinery on anything still to be certified. Trading structural rights for one payment is how the next job’s discount request gets bigger. And do not let the discount conversation absorb a retention that is simply overdue: that is a debt wearing a negotiation costume.

If the pressure hardens

A client who moves from “could you do something” to “we will not pay unless” has converted a request into a withheld payment, and the ordinary ladder applies: schedule letter, letter before action, then adjudication (section 108) on a business job. A residential occupier is outside the Act (section 106), so the route is the county court, where “the work was fine, we just wanted a discount” is not a defence that survives contact with a judge. The wider mechanics of landing the account are in agreeing the final account.

What to do this week

1. Split the account into the two piles, in writing, with the paper behind each line.

2. Decide your concession ceiling before the meeting, priced against pile two only, and what it buys.

3. Put a date on closure: an open final account ages badly, and the discount request grows with it.

Where the information stops

A full and final settlement is a contract, and a badly worded one can release claims you did not mean to release, defects liability cuts both ways. Before signing anything described as full and final on a serious account, have a construction solicitor read it; that hour is the cheapest clause review you will ever buy.