Payment Claims Under the Construction Contracts Act

1. What the Act protects

The CCA gives anyone who’s carried out construction work the right to make a payment claim for it, whether or not the underlying contract says anything about progress payments at all. Once a valid claim is served, the payer has a fixed number of days (the contract's own terms, or the Act's default timeframes where the contract is silent) to respond with a payment schedule — a document that says what they intend to pay, and if it’s less than claimed, why.

Miss that response deadline, and the payer generally becomes liable for the full claimed amount — not what they think the work was worth, what was actually claimed. That's the mechanism that makes a properly made claim genuinely powerful.

2. What makes a claim valid

A payment claim under the Act needs to identify the construction work and the relevant period, state the claimed amount and how it was calculated, and indicate that it’s made under the Construction Contracts Act. Most subcontracts layer their own requirements on top of that statutory minimum — a specific claim format (often mirroring the sample forms in a standard subcontract's appendices), a detailed breakdown against the schedule of prices, and clear references for any variations being claimed.

A claim that’s vague about what it's actually for, or that bundles unapproved variations in with progress claims without separating them out, is an easy target to dispute — not because the work wasn’t done, but because the claim itself doesn’t clearly establish what’s being claimed and why.

3. What happens if the Main Contractor doesn’t respond in time

If a valid payment claim goes unanswered past the response deadline, the payer becomes liable to pay the claimed amount in full — they lose the right to dispute the value of the work at that point, at least for that claim. This is the CCA's central piece of leverage, and it only exists because the claim itself was valid and could be shown to have actually been served on time.

That's why proving what was claimed, and when, matters as much as the claim's dollar figure — a dispute over whether a claim was even received, or received on time, undoes the protection the Act is supposed to give you.

4. Common mistakes

• Submitting a claim without a clear breakdown against the original contract works and any variations.
• Claiming a variation that was never formally instructed or notified in writing.
• Missing the claim date entirely, or submitting so close to it that a dispute over timing is possible.
• No record of retention already withheld, so the net amount claimed doesn’t reconcile.
• No proof the claim was actually sent, or sent to the right person, on the date claimed.

Individually these look like paperwork issues. Together, they're the difference between a claim that forces a response and one that just gets argued over indefinitely.

5. How evidence strengthens a claim

This is the part Subbie HQ is actually built around. A Payment Claim in Subbie HQ isn’t typed up from scratch each month — it's generated directly from your own live records:

• Original contract works progress is calculated straight from your Contract Schedule — every priced item, what's been claimed before, and what's genuinely new this period.
• Approved Variations are allocated to the claim individually, so the claim itself shows exactly which Variations are in it and what's still outstanding.
• Retention is tracked automatically — the percentage withheld, the running total held to date, and the two-stage release (an initial release once your works are complete, and a final release, typically at the end of the Defects Liability Period) with a clear action to mark each stage complete.
• The claim itself generates as a PDF matching the standard payment claim schedule structure — every numbered line a Main Contractor’s QS already expects to see, not a bespoke format they have to decode.
• Sending it creates its own record: pick who it goes to, review an auto-drafted covering email, and the claim is emailed with the PDF attached and marked issued — a timestamped, evidenced claim date, not a memory of when you meant to send it.

None of that changes what the Act requires. It just means that when a claim's validity or timing gets questioned, the answer is already sitting in your project record instead of something you have to reconstruct from memory.

6. Where to get real legal advice

This guide is general information, not legal advice — the Construction Contracts Act, your specific subcontract's terms, and how they interact can genuinely vary between jobs. If you're actually in a payment dispute, or unsure whether a specific claim or response is valid, talk to a construction lawyer or your industry association before relying on anything here.