Adjudication is a game of counting business days

Adjudication under a Security of Payment Act is the quick route to a decision on an unpaid payment claim. It is deliberately fast, and its speed is enforced by strict deadlines counted in business days. The claimant who wins on the merits but miscounts the days does not get to adjudicate at all.

The sequence

Every East Coast Act runs the same chain, and each link is a business-day window.

• Reference date. The earliest a payment claim may be served.
• Payment claim. Served on or after the reference date, identifying the work and the amount.
• Payment schedule. The respondent's reply, due within the state window: ten business days in New South Wales and Victoria, fifteen in Queensland and Western Australia.
• Adjudication application. Made within the statutory window after the schedule, or after the schedule was due and none came.
• Adjudication response and determination. Each on its own business-day clock.

How business days are counted

A business day excludes weekends and public holidays. The period runs from the day after the triggering event, so counting starts on the next business day, not the day the claim or schedule was served. That single convention shifts every downstream deadline, and getting it wrong in the claimant's favour is how applications arrive out of time.

The trap of counting on a calendar

Ten business days feels like ten days. Across two weekends it is fourteen calendar days, and a public holiday makes it fifteen. A claimant who diarises calendar days will think the application window is open longer than it is, or will let the schedule deadline pass believing there is time in hand. The Act does not forgive the arithmetic.

Holidays differ by state

Public holidays are excluded, and they are not uniform across the country. A claimant running matters in more than one state has to count each one against its own calendar. A single hard-coded holiday list will misdate deadlines the moment work crosses a border.

Silence has consequences

The engine of the regime is the consequence of an unanswered claim. Serve a valid payment claim, receive no payment schedule inside the window, and the respondent generally becomes liable for the claimed amount. From there the claimant can adjudicate or recover the debt. That is why the counting is not clerical detail. It is the whole mechanism.

Let the dates be a field

The safe way to run this is to fix the reference date, name the governing state, and let every subsequent deadline be counted in business days over the right holidays. Held that way, the timeline is a sequence you manage. Held in your head, it is a lapse waiting to happen.