The construction payment date calculator

The four dates, in the order they fall

A construction payment runs on a fixed sequence set by the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 and the contract. Each date is counted from the one before it, so getting the first one wrong moves all of them.

1. Due date

The date the payment becomes due. Under JCT it is seven days after the interim valuation date. Under NEC with Option Y(UK)2 it is seven days after the assessment date. Every deadline below is counted from here, not from the valuation date.

2. Payment notice

The payer, or the payer’s agent, must give a payment notice not later than five days after the due date, stating the sum considered due and the basis on which it is worked out (s.110A). Silence here is expensive: if no notice is given, the payee’s application can become the notified sum.

3. Pay less notice

To pay less than the notified sum, the payer must serve a pay less notice, and it has to arrive before a prescribed deadline ahead of the final date for payment (s.111). Miss it and the notified sum is due in full, whatever the works are actually worth that month.

4. Final date for payment

The last day the money can lawfully be paid. It is a set number of days after the due date, fourteen on the common JCT and NEC positions, seventeen under the Scheme, or whatever your contract states.

How the pay less notice deadline is worked out

The pay less notice deadline is the last moment the payer can serve a valid pay less notice. It is fixed a set number of days before the final date for payment, not before the due date, and the gap is set by the contract, so JCT, NEC and the Scheme do not all use the same figure (s.111). Enter your valuation or assessment date above, pick the contract, and the calculator returns the pay less notice deadline for that form, with England and Wales bank holidays already taken out. This is the date people mean when they search for a pay less notice deadline calculator, and it is the one that costs money if it is missed: serve the notice late and the notified sum is due in full.

Why bank holidays and not weekends

The Act counts time in the ordinary way, so weekends count as days. What it takes out are Christmas Day, Good Friday and days that are bank holidays under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971. A calculator that removes weekends is counting the wrong thing, and a diary reminder that ignores a bank holiday can put a pay less notice a day out of time.

Scotland and Northern Ireland have different bank holidays. The Act counts them by the calendar of the part of the UK the work is in. This calculator uses the England and Wales list, so on a job in Scotland or Northern Ireland, check the dates against your own calendar before you rely on them.

JCT and NEC start from different names for the same idea

JCT counts from the interim valuation date. NEC counts from the assessment date. They are the same point in the sequence under a different name, and the due date sits seven days after either of them. The common mistake is to treat the NEC assessment date as if it were already the due date, which pulls every downstream deadline forward by about a week. This calculator uses the assessment date as the starting point, the same as a valuation date, so the timetable comes out right.

FIDIC contracts run on a different clock

On a FIDIC Red or Yellow Book contract the payment timetable is contractual, not statutory, and it is counted in calendar days rather than by taking out England and Wales bank holidays. The contractor submits a Statement; the Engineer issues the Interim Payment Certificate within 28 days; the Employer pays within 56 days of the Statement. There is no payment notice and no pay less notice; those are creatures of the UK Construction Act and do not exist under FIDIC. The 28 and 56 day periods are the 1999 defaults and are frequently changed in the Particular Conditions, so check your edition and set the fields above to match.

Stop working these out by hand

QScope works this timetable out on every project, shows the pay-less window against the job before it closes, and puts the same dates on the certificate the client receives.

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