JCT contracts set out payment as a repeating sequence anchored to a date in the contract particulars. Once the sequence is understood it is straightforward; the difficulty is that each project fixes its own dates and periods, so the general description never quite matches the contract in front of you. Working out the actual sequence is where a payment and pay less notice review begins.
What follows describes the shape rather than any particular edition or project. Editions differ, the particulars differ, and amendments change both, so the contract itself remains the only reliable source for your dates.
The sequence in outline
An interim valuation date is fixed in the particulars and repeats. The due date for payment follows it by a stated period. A notice stating the sum considered due is then required within a period measured from the due date.
The final date for payment follows the due date by a further stated period. The deadline for any notice to pay less is fixed by reference to that final date.
Every one of those periods is a number in the particulars rather than a constant, which is why two JCT projects can run on quite different timetables while using the same printed form.
The interim valuation date is the anchor
It is the point by reference to which the work is valued, and it drives everything after it. Where a project has drifted into valuing on a different day each month, the contractual anchor has effectively been abandoned.
That drift is tolerated until a cycle is contested, at which point the contractual date reasserts itself and the actual sequence may look different from the one everybody has been operating.
Checking the particulars against what has been happening is therefore a useful early exercise, and it frequently explains why a dispute has arisen.
It is also worth doing at handover between commercial staff, since the practice is what gets passed on and the contract is what governs.
Who issues what
Under the traditional forms a certificate is issued by the contract administrator or quantity surveyor; under design and build the employer gives the notice. The practical point is the same: a document stating the sum considered due must be issued within the period the contract sets.
Where that document is late, or where it does not state a basis of calculation, it may not perform the function the contract requires of it.
The contractor’s application has its own place in the sequence and its own timing requirements, which are frequently overlooked by the applying party.
Where a contract administrator is involved, their role is to certify rather than to negotiate, and a certificate that reflects what the employer would like to pay rather than what the work is worth creates problems for everybody including the employer.
After practical completion
The mechanism usually changes once the works are practically complete. Valuation intervals can lengthen and the trigger for payment can change, and the contract says so in terms that are easy to miss in a busy month.
That transition is a common point of failure, because the rhythm established over a long project stops applying at exactly the moment nobody is watching.
The same applies to the final payment, which usually has its own mechanism and its own longer periods. Treating it as one more interim cycle is a reliable way to miss a date that only occurs once.
Retention release sits alongside it, with its own events and its own dates. Where the retention is the real issue, retention recovery assessment is the narrower piece of work.
Where amendments bite hardest
Lengthened payment periods, which move the pay less deadline. Shortened notice periods, which compress assessment. And conditions attached to applications, which can affect whether a cycle has properly started.
Because the JCT mechanism is a sequence of linked periods, a change to any one of them propagates. Reading the amended clause in isolation rarely shows the effect; rebuilding the timetable does.
This is why two projects on the same form and the same edition can behave entirely differently, and why experience of one is not a reliable guide to the other.
The documents worth keeping together
For each cycle: the application, the certificate or payment notice, any notice to pay less, and the dates on which each was issued and received. Four items and four dates.
Kept together, they answer most questions about a contested cycle in minutes. Scattered through general correspondence, they take days to reconstruct.
The reconstruction cost is the hidden expense of poor filing, and it falls precisely when the project team is least able to absorb it, usually while they are busy with the next project.
It is worth keeping the dates of receipt as well as the dates on the documents. A notice dated within the period but received after it raises a different question, and the evidence for it is in the transmission rather than in the document.
Running it well
The practical approach is a timetable built from the particulars at the start, a standing template for the notices, and a filing convention that keeps the cycle documents in one place.
None of that is difficult and all of it is usually absent. The cycles that go wrong are rarely the ones where somebody made a valuation error; they are the ones where the sequence was not being operated as a sequence, and nobody noticed until a figure was contested.
The valuation underneath it remains the substance, and doing that properly month by month is client side quantity surveying rather than claims work.
Money held back on a payment cycle?
A payment and pay less notice review examines one cycle end to end: the application, the notices, the dates and what the contract actually required of each party.