Security of Payment Act — the clock you can't afford to miss

A payment claim lands in your inbox on the 30th. It's the middle of a bad month — three jobs running, a super deadline, half your site supervisors on leave. You mean to look at it properly. You don't. On the 15th business day your accounts manager asks what to pay against it, and you realise the window to dispute a single dollar of it closed days ago.

Under the Security of Payment Act, you now owe the whole thing. Every line you would have queried. Every variation you think is rubbish. The lot — because the Act doesn't care that you were busy. It cares that you didn't respond in time.

That's the trade at the heart of every state's Security of Payment regime: it's fast, it's strict, and it punishes the party who lets the clock run out. Usually that's the one paying.

The same Security of Payment skeleton in every state

Every Australian state and territory runs a version of the Act — NSW, Victoria, Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania, ACT, NT. The skeleton is identical everywhere:

1. A contractor serves a payment claim.
2. The respondent has a fixed window to serve a payment schedule saying what they'll actually pay, and why.
3. If the schedule is for less than claimed — or never comes — the claimant can take it to adjudication.
4. An adjudicator decides, fast, and the determination is enforceable as a debt.

What changes between states is the numbers on the clock. Same rules, different deadlines — which is exactly the trap if you run jobs across borders and assume the timeframe you know in one state applies in the next.

In NSW, the respondent gets 10 business days to serve a payment schedule. In Queensland and WA, it's 15. Miss it anywhere and the consequence is the same: you become liable for the full amount claimed. (Sources: NSW Fair Trading, Turtons.)

What "approved by default" actually means

This is the clause that catches people, so it's worth being blunt about it.

If you receive a payment claim and fail to serve a payment schedule within the window, the claim is taken to be approved — in full. Not the amount you think is fair. The amount they claimed. You then can't raise those disputes in any later adjudication; you've lost the right to argue.

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Silence is consent. The clock doesn't stop because you're busy.

It cuts the other way too. As the claimant, that same default is the most powerful thing you own — if the contractor above you sleeps on your claim, the Act is on your side. Which is the point we made in the substantiation piece: on a Tier 1 job the default protects whoever moved on time, and burdens whoever didn't.

The downstream clock — when payment is actually due

Serving a schedule on time is only the first deadline. In NSW, once a valid claim is made:

Business days, NSW. Per Turtons' summary of the Act.

If the claimant is underpaid, they generally have 10 business days from the payment schedule to apply for adjudication; if they're not paid a scheduled amount at all, it's 20 business days from the due date. Every one of those is a hard edge. Land on the wrong side of it and the remedy you were entitled to evaporates.

The substantiation packet — what survives adjudication

Hitting the dates keeps you in the game. Winning the adjudication is about evidence. An adjudicator decides on the documents in front of them, fast, and they hand the disputed amount to whichever side backed its position. For a contractor claiming, and for a respondent disputing, the same packet decides it:

• Signed dockets — labour and plant, charged to a cost code, signed on site the day the work happened.
• Approved variations — the written instruction, dated before the work, not reconstructed after.
• Supplier invoices for materials.
• Photos and time records for standby, delay, and disruption.

No packet, no defence. The most common failure modes all trace back to it: late schedules issued with no supporting reasons, back charges raised after the substantiation window closed, retention released without checking the contractual schedule, verbal variations claimed at month-end with nothing on paper.

Where tectm fits

tectm treats the Act as what it is — a sequence of clocks and an evidence test — and runs both for you:

• The response window starts a timer the moment a claim is received, so the date that costs you the whole claim is never the date nobody was watching.
• Certificates are generated from approved dockets, retention rules, and the back-charge ledger — so the schedule you serve is already backed, not assembled in a panic on day 9.
• The substantiation packet exports on demand — every line's docket, variation, and record in one bundle, ready for adjudication before anyone asks for it.

The Act rewards the organised and bleeds the disorganised. Most of the money it moves isn't won on argument — it's won or lost on a date and a document. Get both right by default and the Act stops being a threat and starts being the thing that gets you paid.

This piece reflects the general shape of the Security of Payment regime in Australia and is not legal advice — confirm your state's timeframes and obligations against the current legislation. Book a demo and we'll walk the cycle on your own contracts.