The client pays late every month. How do you get ahead of it?

The builders who get paid on time are not luckier or scarier. They run jobs where every payment has a date the client agreed to in advance, so a late payment is not a mood, it is “nine days past the final date”, in writing. Here is how to build that.

Step one: get the dates out of the contract, once

On a job the Construction Act covers, the contract must provide an adequate mechanism for deciding what is due and when (section 110); where it does not, the Scheme fills the gaps. Either way, four periods drive everything, and they are the same four this series keeps returning to: when payment falls due, the payment notice window, the pay less window, and the final date. Pull them out of your contract particulars once, the four numbers page shows exactly where to look, and write the whole job’s calendar from them: every application date, every due date, every final date, to the end of the works.

Send that schedule to the client at the start, as a courtesy: “so we both know when things happen”. It reads as organised, not aggressive, and it quietly removes the defence of surprise from every later conversation.

Step two: apply on the right day, every time

A schedule only binds if your side of it is clean. Applications served on the agreed day, in the agreed form, stating the sum and basis, because a valid application is what becomes the notified sum when the client goes quiet, and a sloppy one is the first thing a non-payer attacks. Your own reliability is, unglamorously, the strongest legal position you can build.

Step three: make lateness cost something, politely

The day after a final date passes, a standard note goes out, the same wording every time: sum, final date, days late, and the interest position. On business clients that is statutory interest and fixed sums; on any client it is whatever your contract provides. The note being routine is the point: chasing that only happens when you are furious teaches the client that the first three reminders are free.

And if the pattern hardens into genuine non-payment, the tools are the ones the rest of this series covers: the notice machinery when they go silent, and ultimately suspension on seven days written notice, which exists precisely for the client who treats final dates as suggestions.

On a job for someone living in the house

The Act and the Scheme do not apply to a contract with a residential occupier (section 106), so the schedule is only as strong as the contract you signed. Which is the argument for writing stage payments and dates into every domestic contract before starting, the staged payments page covers what happens when you did not, and for the interest clause, remember the consumer fairness test: a modest rate survives, a punitive one gets struck out entirely.

What to do this week

1. Build the dates calendar for your current job from the contract particulars, to the end of the works.

2. Send it to the client with the next application.

3. Write the standard late note now, while you are calm, so next month it is a template and not a composition.

Where the information stops

A client who is late every month and getting later may be a client running out of money, and that is a different problem from a disorganised one. If the pattern is worsening, read the quiet client page and consider whether the next conversation should happen before the next valuation, not after it.