The Security of Payment Act: How the Payment Claim Clock Works in Every State

On a Monday morning in Newcastle, a head contractor’s commercial manager comes back from two weeks’ leave. Near the top of the inbox is a payment claim from the facade subcontractor for $186,000, served eleven business days earlier.

Everyone in the office had seen it. Everyone agreed it was inflated by at least $60,000. Nobody replied, because the commercial manager was the one who normally assessed claims. That silence has just turned a disputed claim into a debt.

What is the Security of Payment Act?

The Security of Payment Act is the name builders use for the state and territory laws that give anyone who carries out construction work, or supplies related goods and services, a statutory right to progress payments and a fast way to enforce it.

There is no single national Act. Each jurisdiction has its own, and they differ on timeframes, day counts and what a valid claim looks like. The shared purpose is cash flow: get money moving down the contracting chain in weeks, and leave the final argument about who was right for later.

The fast path is adjudication. An independent adjudicator decides the amount payable on a short timetable, typically within 10 business days of accepting the application, and the decision is enforceable while any bigger dispute continues.[2]

How does a payment claim work?

Outside the Northern Territory, which uses a different model, the sequence is broadly the same everywhere, even when the numbers are not.

1. The claimant serves a payment claim identifying the work and the amount claimed.

2. The respondent either pays in full by the due date or serves a payment schedule stating what it will pay and why it is paying less.

3. If the schedule is lower than the claim, or the scheduled amount is not paid, the claimant can apply for adjudication.

4. If no schedule is served in time, the respondent becomes liable for the full claimed amount.

That fourth step is what caught the Newcastle head contractor. In NSW the respondent has a maximum of 10 business days to serve a payment schedule, and if it does not, the NSW Government’s guidance is blunt: it must pay the whole claim.[1]

The Queensland Act puts the same consequence in one sentence.

“The respondent is liable to pay the amount claimed under the payment claim to the claimant on the due date for the progress payment to which the payment claim relates.”

Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 (Qld), section 77(2)[3]

What must a payment schedule include?

A payment schedule has to identify the claim it responds to, state the amount the respondent proposes to pay, and, if that is less than the claim, give the reasons for paying less.[3]

The reasons matter more than most site teams realise. Under the WA Act, a respondent who gives a schedule cannot later raise reasons for withholding payment that were not in it, and a respondent who gave no schedule in time cannot put in an adjudication response at all.[5] Treat that as the rule everywhere until you have checked your own Act. The schedule is not a courtesy reply. It is the respondent’s entire case.

10 or 15

Business days to serve a payment schedule. Ten in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. Fifteen in Queensland and WA. Miss it and the full claim is owed.

State and territory Security of Payment Acts

Is pay when paid allowed?

No. The Security of Payment Acts make pay when paid clauses ineffective. A head contractor cannot make a subcontractor’s payment depend on whether the principal has paid the head contractor, or tie the due date to that upstream payment.[3][5]

The WA Act spells out how wide that goes. A prohibited pay when paid provision includes one that makes the liability to pay, the due date, the making of a claim, or the release of retention money or a performance bond contingent on another contract.[5] That last part matters for anyone still holding retention against a subcontractor until the principal releases theirs, which we cover in construction retention.

How does the Security of Payment Act differ by state?

This table compares the core timeframes as at September 2026. Business days exclude weekends and public holidays in every jurisdiction, and several also exclude a block over Christmas and New Year.

Sources: NSW Government,[1][2] Queensland Act and QBCC,[3][4] Victorian Building and Plumbing Commission and HWL Ebsworth,[6][7] WA Act,[5] Tasmanian Act,[8] ACT Act and ACT Planning,[9][10] NT Act.[11] This is general information, not legal advice. The Acts change often, so check the current version and your contract before you rely on a date.

A worked example: one claim, two states

Take a subcontractor who serves a payment claim on Monday 31 August 2026, the last day of the month. Assume the subcontract does not require an earlier payment schedule, and count only business days.

The same claim, served the same day, produces adjudication deadlines five weeks apart. A contracts administrator who learned the rules in one state and carries the habit into the other will get one of those dates wrong, and in Security of Payment a wrong date is rarely recoverable.

Plexa’s free security of payment date calculator runs these counts for NSW, Victoria, Queensland and WA and shows which days it skipped.

5 weeks

The gap between the NSW and Queensland adjudication deadlines for the same subcontract claim served on 31 August 2026.

Worked example, business days only

What changed recently?

Three reforms have moved the ground in the last few years.

Victoria, 15 April 2026. The most significant change is the abolition of excluded amounts and claimable variations regime, which had made Victoria the outlier nationally. Reference dates were replaced with a monthly entitlement to claim, payment terms were capped at 20 business days, and a party must give 5 business days’ written notice before having recourse to security.[6][7] Anything written about Victorian Security of Payment before April 2026 should be treated as out of date.

Queensland trust accounts. On 10 February 2025 the Queensland Government paused the further rollout of trust accounts. They still apply to eligible Queensland Government contracts of $1 million or more, and to private sector, local government and statutory authority contracts of $10 million or more.[12]

The ACT, 11 March 2024. The ACT removed reference dates, allowed a claim on the last day of each calendar month, and introduced a statutory due date of 15 business days that applies even where the contract says something longer.[10]

Why deadlines get missed

The villain is almost never ignorance of the Act. Most commercial managers know the schedule period. What fails is the path a claim takes between arriving and being answered.

Claims arrive by email to whoever the subcontractor last dealt with. They sit in a shared inbox, get forwarded to site for a quantity check, wait for a project manager who is on leave, and only reach the person who writes schedules when someone chases. Every hand-off costs a day, and none of those days are visible to anyone counting.

The result is a deadline that nobody owns. The claim was received, so the clock started. Nobody logged the date of service, so nobody knew when it would stop. This is the same approval-chain problem that makes construction invoices take six weeks to approve, with a harsher penalty at the end of it.

What good looks like

The builders who never lose a claim on time are not the ones with the best lawyers. They are the ones whose claims are visible from the moment they land.

• Every payment claim is logged with its date of service the day it arrives, not the day someone opens it

• The schedule deadline is calculated for the jurisdiction that governs the contract, not the state the office is in

• Assessment is assigned to a named person with a backup, so leave does not stop the clock

• The payment schedule gives specific reasons for every amount withheld, because those reasons are the whole case at adjudication

• Variations claimed are backed by a documented instruction, the gap we cover in how construction variations turn into disputes

• Subcontractor claims are paid by the statutory due date, so head contractors can sign a truthful supporting statement in NSW

Where Plexa fits

Plexa captures subcontractor claims and supplier invoices in one central location, so a claim is visible from the day it lands rather than from the day someone forwards it. Approval workflows trigger automatically on a new claim, with payment limits set by user or role, which means a claim is routed to an assessor on day one rather than when somebody notices it.

The Subcontracts module tracks the original contract value, approved variations, claims to date, approved amounts and retention held and released, with drill-down to approved claims at line-item level, and it generates payment schedules and issues them to contractors.

On the client side, the Head Contract module raises claims and variations with direct links to the subcontractor variations behind them, so the claim going up the chain and the claims coming in are one record.

Back in Newcastle, the facade claim would have been assigned to a backup assessor the morning it arrived. The schedule would have gone out on day eight at $126,000, with reasons. The argument over the other $60,000 would still be happening, but it would be an argument, not a debt.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Security of Payment Act? It is the common name for the state and territory laws that give people who carry out construction work, or supply related goods and services, a right to progress payments and a fast adjudication process to enforce it. Each jurisdiction has its own Act with different timeframes.

How long do you have to respond to a payment claim? It depends on the jurisdiction. The payment schedule is due within 10 business days in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT, and within 15 business days in Queensland and WA, or earlier if the contract requires it.[1][3][5]

What happens if a payment schedule is not served? The respondent becomes liable to pay the full claimed amount by the due date, regardless of whether the claim was inflated. The claimant can then recover it as a debt or, after the required notice, apply for adjudication.[1][3]

How long do you have to apply for adjudication? After receiving a payment schedule with a lower amount, 10 business days in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT, 20 business days in WA and 30 business days in Queensland. The NT allows 65 working days after the payment dispute arises.[2][4][11]

Do business days include the Christmas period? Not in most jurisdictions. NSW, Tasmania and the ACT exclude 27 to 31 December. Queensland excludes 22 to 24 December, 27 to 31 December and 2 to 10 January. WA excludes 22 December to 10 January.[3][5][8][9]

Can a contract use pay when paid terms? No. Pay when paid provisions have no effect under the Security of Payment laws. In WA that expressly includes clauses that make the due date or the release of retention depend on payment under another contract.[5]

Related reading

Why payment approval chains run past the statutory due date is the subject of why construction invoices take six weeks to approve. How retention interacts with these rights is covered in construction retention. And where most disputed claims start is explained in how construction variations turn into disputes.

If you want to see every payment claim, schedule and due date tracked in one place across your projects, book a 30-minute demo with the Plexa team.