Contracts and deadlines

Contract deadlines: Construction Act payment dates, NEC4 and JCT notices

3 min read · Checked against the product 3 October 2026

How VariationFlow diarises the payment notice, pay-less notice and final date and counts them under s.116, runs the NEC4 subcontract compensation event clocks and the JCT notices, and why a JCT project asks you to record its periods.

Most money lost on a UK subcontract is lost to a date: a pay-less notice nobody checked, a compensation event notified too late, an oral instruction never confirmed. With payment and notice tracking switched on for the project, on the VariationFlow plans, VariationFlow computes the dates from your contract profile. They are indicative only and not legal advice, so check them against the executed contract.

The payment cycle

The payment timeline on the project page shows each cycle’s due date, the payer’s payment notice, the last day for a pay-less notice and the final date for payment, projected from your first valuation date until you choose “Enter actual dates”. On an NEC4 ECS project, Option Y(UK)2 puts the due date fourteen days after the assessment date and the final date fourteen days after that. On Other / bespoke the product uses the Scheme for Construction Contracts, which applies where a contract has no adequate payment terms of its own: the final date 17 days after the due date, and a pay-less notice no later than 7 days before it.

Under each valuation, the Payment notices (s.111) tracker records your valid application or default payment notice and when the payer’s notices arrived. If the pay-less window closes with no valid pay-less notice, it shows “Possible notified sum”: under s.111 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 the sum may be payable in full, though the payer can still seek a true-value adjudication once it has paid.

How the days are counted

Periods are reckoned under s.116 of the 1996 Act: Christmas Day, Good Friday and the region’s bank holidays are left out of the count, and weekends are not, so a deadline can fall on a Saturday and is not moved to the Monday. Part II of the Act does not reach Northern Ireland. There the Construction Contracts (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 uses the same numbers, counted under s.39 of the Interpretation Act (Northern Ireland) 1954: every day counts, and a deadline landing on a Sunday or public holiday rolls to the next day. Choose the region by where the site is.

JCT projects: record your own periods

There is no JCT sub-contract form in the list yet, so a JCT project starts on the JCT main contract’s periods, and a sub-contract fixes a later due date and final date. Until your own three periods are typed into the payment terms, on the project form or in the wizard, the tracker shows “Record contract periods” and gives no verdict on whether a pay-less notice was in time, and the late-payment letter will not state a final date. Each JCT variation also carries a notices panel for the daywork voucher, loss and expense, and extension of time. On SBC and Design and Build it adds the oral instruction: confirm it in writing within 7 days, and no dissent within a further 7 days of receipt makes it a deemed instruction. Those 7 days are the main contract’s, so check your sub-contract.

NEC4 subcontract clocks

Under clause 61.3 of the ECS a compensation event must be notified within seven weeks of becoming aware of it, or the Prices, the Completion Date and any Key Date do not change. Each variation’s clock runs from the awareness date you enter, or the capture date, turning to CE due soon with 21 days left and CE bar critical with 7, until you choose “Mark CE notified”. A recorded Z clause replaces the seven weeks, and the Contractor-instructed box takes the event outside the bar. The quotation tracker follows clause 62.3, two weeks for your quotation and four for the Contractor’s reply, and clause 62.6: three weeks after you notify a failure to reply, the quotation is treated as accepted.

The Contract Deadlines page

Contract Deadlines lists every clock at risk across your notice-tracking projects, most urgent first: Overdue, Opportunity (money the other side may owe because it missed a notice), Critical, Due soon, Action needed and Resolved. Each row opens the variation or valuation behind it. On the VariationFlow plans the clocks also email the QS assigned to the project.