8 September 2026

Reference dates: one payment claim per date, and the claim you waste

Security of Payment entitles you to serve a payment claim on and from each reference date. Serve two against the same date and the second one is not a claim at all.

A claim goes out on 25 March for $186,000. The head contractor rejects it on a technicality. A corrected claim goes out on 2 April against the same month. In several jurisdictions the second document has no statutory effect whatsoever, and the month it belonged to is gone.

What a reference date is

A reference date is the date on and from which a payment claim may be made. Where the contract fixes one, say the 25th of each month or the last business day, that is the reference date. Where the contract is silent, the legislation supplies one, typically the last day of each named month in which work was first carried out and of each subsequent month.

TWO OF THE EIGHT ACTS HAVE NOW ABOLISHED THE CONCEPT. New South Wales removed reference dates in 2019 and Victoria followed with Act No. 43/2025, which repealed s 14(4) to (9) and replaced them with s 14A: a claim may be served on and from the last day of the named month in which the work was carried out, and of each subsequent month in which further work is carried out. The practical question in those two states is no longer which reference date a claim sits on, it is which named month.

It is a creature of the statute, not of the contract’s billing cycle, and the two are not always aligned. A contract that says "claims on the 20th" and a statute that supplies the last day of the month produce two different dates, and the entitlement follows the statute.

The rule that costs money

Where reference dates survive, the Acts are built on the premise that one reference date supports one payment claim. Serving a second claim against a reference date already used does not create a second entitlement, and a document served without a reference date behind it is not a payment claim, so nothing follows from it: no due date, no payment schedule obligation, no adjudication right. Where they have gone, the same discipline arrives as a frequency rule instead: Victoria s 14D allows one claim per named month unless the contract provides otherwise.

• A defective claim is usually better corrected at the NEXT reference date than re-served against the same one.
• A claim can include amounts previously claimed and unpaid. That is how the earlier work is carried forward, not by re-serving the old claim.
• Final payment claims after termination follow their own rules, which differ by jurisdiction and are the most commonly litigated corner of this.

Eight Acts, not one

The reference-date machinery differs across the states and territories, and so does the terminology. New South Wales amended its provisions in 2019 in ways Queensland did not follow; the East Coast model and the West Coast model differ more fundamentally still. A process built for one state and applied in another is the most common source of an invalid claim.

So the operative question on every project is which Act applies, which is a question about where the work is, not where your office is.

What to put on the claim

• Identification of the construction work to which it relates, in enough detail that the respondent can assess it.
• The amount claimed.
• Any statement the applicable Act requires the claim to carry.
• The reference date it is made against: not required everywhere, and worth stating everywhere.

What the product does with this

The project carries its state, and every statutory window runs from the day the payment claim was served, which is recorded against the claim itself. Reference dates are not computed: the contract's claim date is the one to diary. Variations approved since the last claim are already valued and evidenced, which is what makes serving on the date practical instead of a two-day scramble that misses it.

General information, not legal advice. Which Act applies, and its reference-date rules, depend on where the work is carried out.