The payment response and the deadline that fixes the number

The Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act pairs every payment claim with a payment response. The response is the respondent’s statement of what it accepts is due and, where it withholds, why. It is the document that keeps the claimed amount from standing unanswered.

The two deadlines

The timing depends on what the contract says.

• Where the contract sets a period, the payment response must be served within that period, and the Act caps it at twenty-one days after the payment claim is served.
• Where the contract is silent, the default applies and the response is due within fourteen days of the payment claim.

So the outside limit is twenty-one days, and the fallback where nothing is agreed is fourteen. Neither figure is the seven days that people sometimes reach for. Seven days is the dispute settlement period, a separate window that comes later, and confusing the two costs a respondent its right to withhold.

What the response has to contain

A payment response states the response amount, the amount the respondent proposes to pay, and identifies the difference from the claim: what is disputed, what is withheld, and the basis for each reduction. A bare number with no reasons is weak, because an adjudicator can only weigh grounds that were actually put in the response.

Silence has a price

If the respondent serves no payment response, or serves one out of time, the claimant can take the matter to adjudication under the SOP Act, and the respondent may be shut out from raising reasons it never gave. The default position is that the claimed amount is what falls due. That is the whole point of the mechanism: it moves money first and argues later.

The PSSCOC and SIA forms build the response step into their certification machinery, but the statutory deadlines sit underneath whatever the contract says. A drafting attempt to stretch the response period beyond the Act does not hold.

The habit that protects you

Treat every payment claim as a clock that has already started. Diary the response deadline the day the claim lands, work back from the cap, and serve the response even when the figure is agreed. The response you did not strictly need to argue is cheap. The one that went in two days late lets the claimant fix the number for you.