JCT or RIBA: which contract for a small building job?

First, the point of using either: a proper short form brings the machinery this whole series keeps relying on, payment terms, variations, extensions of time, a defects period, insurance obligations, in wording that has been argued over for decades so you do not have to draft it. Everything below assumes you have accepted that a bare quote is the worst option and are choosing between the two families.

The RIBA domestic forms: written for the homeowner client

RIBA publishes short building contracts aimed squarely at domestic and modest commercial work, in plain language a non-builder can actually read. Two features matter to you:

• They are consumer-aware by design. A contract with a residential occupier sits outside the Construction Act (section 106), so none of the statutory payment machinery applies and your payment rights are whatever the contract says. The RIBA domestic forms are drafted for exactly that gap: staged payments, timescales and dispute routes written in, without assuming the Act underneath.
• They assume an architect is often around, since an architect’s practice publishes them, but they work with or without one administering.

For an extension or refurbishment for the people living in the house, this family is usually the natural fit, not least because a homeowner will sign a document they can read.

JCT Minor Works: written for the administered small job

JCT’s Minor Works family is the small-job member of the industry’s standard suite: compact, familiar to every professional, and built around a named contract administrator issuing certificates, whose role has its own page. Where the client has an architect or surveyor running the contract, or the client is a business, this is the environment it was made for, and the machinery meshes with the Act’s payment regime on jobs the Act covers.

The trap in the old title of this page: Minor Works is not a small SBC

Builders who have worked under JCT’s bigger forms assume the small one is the same animal with fewer pages. It is not, and the differences are exactly where money lives: the short form’s variation valuation, loss and expense and extension provisions are simpler and thinner than the big forms’, which is fine on a straightforward job and expensive on a complicated one. If the job has serious design risk, phased handovers or heavy variations, the answer may be a bigger form, not a stretched small one. Pick the form for the job you are actually building, then read the particulars you fill in, because the four payment numbers come from there, not from the form’s name.

What to do this week

1. Decide by client, then by complexity: homeowner living in the property, start from the RIBA domestic family; administered or commercial job, start from JCT Minor Works; genuinely complex job, question whether a short form fits at all.

2. Fill in the particulars deliberately: payment dates, damages rate, defects period, insurance. Every blank is a future argument.

3. Keep the signed copy findable, because every page in this series ends with “check your contract”, and that instruction assumes you can.

Where the information stops

This page compares families, not editions: both publishers revise their forms, and the current editions’ exact provisions are what bind you. On a job that is large for you, or one with unusual risk, an hour with a construction professional choosing and completing the form is the cheapest clause of all.