Who issues the payment notice
Certificate, payment notice, application, valuation. Four words used almost interchangeably on site for documents that do different jobs and carry different consequences.
QScope Team · 5 March 2026 · 4 min read
Under the Construction Act the payment notice comes from the payer, or from a person specified in the contract to give it on the payer’s behalf. That is the whole rule, and almost every confusion in practice comes from not applying it.
Follow the money
Payment flows down the chain: employer to main contractor, main contractor to subcontractor. The notice goes with the money, so:
- The employer, or the contract administrator acting for it, notifies the main contractor.
- The main contractor notifies its subcontractors.
- The main contractor applies to the employer. It does not certify to the employer, because it is not the payer.
A main contractor issuing a payment certificate to its client has produced a document the contract does not recognise. It may still function as an application, but it is being called something it is not, and that is not a helpful position to be in if the cycle is later examined.
Where the contract administrator sits
On a traditional JCT Standard Building Contract, the contract administrator certifies on behalf of the employer. The certificate is the payment notice, and the administrator is acting as certifier, independently, not as the employer’s advocate.
On design and build there is usually no contract administrator and no certificate. The employer, or the employer’s agent, issues a payment notice in response to the contractor’s application. Same mechanism, different document, different name.
This is why the form of contract alone does not tell you what to call the document. JCT SBC and JCT DB are both JCT, and they behave differently.
Pay less notices always come from the payer
Whoever issued the payment notice, the pay less notice comes from the party who is going to pay. A payee cannot serve one, and a certifier serving one in its own name rather than the employer’s is inviting an argument about whether it was validly given.
Why the label matters
Because the consequences attach to what the document is, not what it is headed. A document that meets the requirements of a payment notice will usually be treated as one even if it is called something else. But the reverse also holds: calling something a certificate does not make it one, and does not give it effect the contract has not provided for.
Get the role right at project setup, once, and every document afterwards carries the correct name without anyone having to think about it again.
QScope names the periodic document from your role and your contract form, so the wrong template never goes out under the right heading.