How days are counted on a construction payment cycle: calendar days, section 116, the Saturday deadline and the bank holidays that move

Published 25 September 2026 · VariationFlow

How the Construction Act reckons the days on a payment cycle for UK subcontractors: section 116 and what it excludes, why weekends count and a pay less deadline can fall on a Saturday, why a bank holiday inside a period adds a day, which region’s holidays apply, the one-off holidays no rule predicts, the JCT reckoning clause, and the different mechanism in Northern Ireland.

A pay less deadline falls on Saturday 20 June. The main contractor’s quantity surveyor serves the notice on Monday 22, first thing, on the footing that a Saturday deadline obviously rolls to the next working day. It does not. The notice is two days late, the notified sum is payable in full, and the only thing standing between the subcontractor and that money is whether anybody on its side counted.

Almost every argument about a late notice comes down to how the days were counted, and almost nobody on site has read the section that says. This is what it says.

The Act counts calendar days, and excludes three things

Section 116 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 governs how any period of days under Part II of the Act, and under a contract’s payment provisions where they comply with it, is reckoned. Two rules. A period that runs from a date begins on the day after that date. And where a period would include Christmas Day, Good Friday or a bank holiday under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 in the part of Great Britain the contract is in, that day is excluded from the count.

That is the whole of it, and the two things it does not say are the two that matter. It does not say weekends are excluded. A Saturday counts, a Sunday counts, and a deadline can land on either and stand. And it does not say a deadline that lands on an excluded day moves. It says the day is not counted, so a bank holiday inside the period makes the period a day longer, and the deadline lands a day later than a calendar count would put it. The Act reckons. It does not roll.

Reckoning and rolling are different mechanisms

Rolling is what most people assume: count every day, and if the last one is not a working day, move to the next one that is. Some statutes do work that way, and plenty of contracts define a period in working days, which is a third thing again. Section 116 does neither. It counts every day except the named holidays, and the answer is the answer whatever day of the week it is. Confusing the mechanisms is not a harmless simplification, because it is wrong in both directions: rolling a Saturday deadline to the Monday makes a late notice look timely, and treating a bank holiday as an ordinary day makes a timely notice look late.

Which holidays, and whose

Section 116 names the bank holidays of the part of Great Britain the contract relates to, and the three regions of the United Kingdom do not share a list. England and Wales have New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, the early May holiday, the spring holiday on the last Monday in May, the summer holiday on the last Monday in August, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Scotland adds 2 January and St Andrew’s Day, takes its summer holiday on the first Monday in August, and has no Easter Monday and no late-August Monday. Northern Ireland adds St Patrick’s Day and 12 July to the England and Wales list. The region that counts is the one the work is in, not the one the head office is in.

Two more things the list does that a rule cannot predict. When Christmas Day or Boxing Day falls on a weekend, a substitute weekday is proclaimed in its place, and the proclamation substitutes rather than adds: Saturday 26 December 2026 is not a bank holiday and Monday 28 December is. And the Crown proclaims one-off holidays that appear in no schedule: the Platinum Jubilee on 3 June 2022, the late Queen’s funeral on 19 September 2022, the Coronation on 8 May 2023, and, in the current year, a Scottish bank holiday on 15 June 2026 for the World Cup. A period on a Scottish job that ran across that Monday was a day longer than a calendar said, and no formula would have known.

The JCT clause says the same thing in its own words

The JCT main contract forms carry their own reckoning clause, clause 1.5, which works the same way: a period runs from the day after the event, and public holidays are left out of the count. So on a JCT job the contractual periods and the statutory ones are reckoned alike. The JCT forms separately define a Business Day, which excludes weekends as well, and use it for other purposes, the Interim Valuation Date among them. Do not let the one definition leak into the other: the pay less notice period is counted in days, not Business Days.

Northern Ireland counts the same numbers a different way

Part II of the Act does not extend to Northern Ireland, so section 116 does not apply there. The Construction Contracts (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 carries the same periods and no reckoning provision of its own, and the Interpretation Act (Northern Ireland) 1954 fills the gap with a roll rather than an exclusion: every day is counted, and a deadline that lands on a Sunday or a public holiday moves to the next day that is neither. A Saturday does not move it. So a holiday inside the period is counted in Belfast and excluded in Birmingham, and running the Great Britain rule on a Northern Irish site returns a date a day too late for every holiday it crosses. The Northern Ireland guide sets out the whole mechanism.

The habit

• Write the deadline as a date, not as “seven days before”. Count it once, under section 116, with the region’s holidays in front of you, and diarise the date.
• When a deadline is a Saturday or a Sunday, say so in the diary in words, because everyone who looks at it afterwards will assume it moved.
• Check the government’s published bank-holiday list every year rather than a calendar you printed in January. The one-offs and the substitutes only exist in it.
• For a notice you are serving, treat the day before the deadline as the deadline. For a notice you are receiving, hold the other side to the day itself.

How VariationFlow counts

Every date on the payment timeline is reckoned, not rolled: the engine counts calendar days and leaves out Christmas Day, Good Friday and the bank holidays of the region the site is in, and it applies the Northern Ireland roll instead where the site is there. The holiday calendar is computed by rule for any year and then checked, region by region and year by year, against the government’s published list, which is how the 2026 Scottish holiday was found. Rolling to a working day is kept for reminders, where it belongs.

This guide is general information rather than legal advice. Whether a particular notice was in time turns on your own contract’s periods and the dates on the documents, and it is worth counting them with an adviser before either side relies on the answer.