For trades & subcontractors

You sit at the end of the chain — last to be paid, first to be squeezed when money gets tight further up. Which is precisely why the Security of Payment Act exists, and why the strongest powers in it belong to you. A properly made claim that goes unanswered becomes a debt nobody can defend. You can lawfully walk off site. You can freeze the money before it ever reaches the person who owes you. Almost none of that requires a lawyer — it requires the paperwork being right, and on time.

Before any of it: your licence and your insurance

For residential building work, the statutory right to a progress payment is conditional on holding the licence the work requires and, where it applies, the HBCF insurance. No licence, no entitlement — the whole machinery below is simply unavailable to you, however plainly you are owed the money.

It takes a minute to check your own at verify.licence.nsw.gov.au. Do it before you rely on any of this, not after.

Your three powers, strongest first

Silence becomes an undefendable debt

Serve a valid payment claim and they have 10 business days to reply with a payment schedule. If nothing comes, they owe the full amount you claimed — and in court they cannot cross-claim and cannot raise any defence under the contract. Not defects, not backcharges, not "it wasn't worth that".

This is the most powerful thing in the Act, and it costs you nothing to arm. It turns on the claim saying it is made under the Act.

You can stop work — lawfully

After the right notice you may suspend 2 business days later, and you are not liable for the loss they suffer because of it. If they take the remaining work off you while you're suspended, you can recover that loss too. Resume within 3 business days of payment.

Downing tools without the notice is a breach of contract. With it, it's a statutory right. One letter is the entire difference.

You can freeze the money one level up

Once you've applied for adjudication you can serve a payment withholding request on the principal contractor above your builder — the party who owes money to the party who owes you. They must hold back enough to cover your claim. A principal contractor who pays it through anyway becomes personally liable to you for the debt.

It is the single most effective step an unpaid subbie can take, and it is barely used, because hardly anyone knows it's there.

The excuse you will hear, that means nothing: "I can't pay you until the owner pays me." Pay-when-paid and pay-if-paid provisions are void in NSW. Whether money has reached your builder from above has no bearing on what they owe you. It is not a defence, it is not a reason to be written in a payment schedule, and it does not stop a single clock.

The two dates that decide everything

Your payment falls due 20 business days after you serve the claim. Your contract can make that shorter; it cannot make it longer — a clause pushing you out to 45 or 60 days is void to that extent, and you cannot be made to contract out of the Act at all.

And business days are not calendar days. Weekends and public holidays are out, and so is 27 to 31 December. A claim served in mid-December runs a long way into January, which is exactly when people assume they've run out of time and give up.

On retention

If money is being held back as retention on larger head contracts, the regulations can require it to be held in a statutory trust account rather than mixed with the head contractor's own funds — with record-keeping obligations, Small Business Commissioner inspection, and offences for getting it wrong. It applies at the top end of the market rather than to every job, but it is worth knowing your retention is not simply theirs to use.

Where to start

If you haven’t been paid

The builder hasn’t paid me — what can I actually do?Which of the three situations you’re in, the window for each, and the two powers most trades don’t know they have.

Before you claim — get the document right

What is a payment claim?The three things it must say, when you can serve it, how to serve it — and the one line that arms everything.

Your own paperwork to the client

The strongest debt in the world is worth nothing late.

Every power on this page is unlocked by a document that says the right thing, goes to the right address, and lands inside a window counted in business days. Miss the line, or count the days wrong, and the money is still owed — you just can't reach it the easy way any more. eSiteOffice drafts what the Act and the contract require, serves it properly, and watches the clock on both sides. It opens in September.

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