Payment Schedules in Victoria: What Has To Be In One Since April

Until this year, leaving something out of a payment schedule in Victoria was recoverable. If a respondent raised a new reason at adjudication the Act did not stop them, it simply required the adjudicator to notify the claimant and give them a short window to respond and then the argument went ahead more or less as it would have done anyway. It was untidy but it was survivable and most people who have worked in Victoria for any length of time have quietly relied on that at some point.

Since 15 April 2026 that is no longer the position. A respondent may not raise new reasons in an adjudication response and the adjudicator must not take into account a reason that was not set out in the payment schedule. A reason you did not write down is treated as waived.

That is a very small change in wording and a very large change in consequence.

What Actually Changed on 15 April

The Building Legislation Amendment (Fairer Payments on Jobsites and Other Matters) Act 2025 received Royal Assent in November 2025 and the substantive amendments commenced on 15 April 2026, which makes it the most significant reform to the Victorian regime since 2006. It applies to contracts that already exist rather than only to new ones, so there is no comfortable transition period where the old habits still work.

The headline change is that Victoria has abolished its excluded amounts regime, which was unique in Australia and which meant that claims for time related costs simply could not be determined by an adjudicator. Extensions of time, delay damages, acceleration, damages for breach, latent conditions and changes in regulatory requirements were all off the table. They are now on it.

The rest of it matters too. Reference dates are gone and a payment claim can be made on and from the last day of each month regardless of what the contract says. The window to claim has been extended to six months after practical completion, from three months previously. A respondent gets ten business days to provide a payment schedule. Payment terms are capped at twenty business days and any clause that tries to go beyond that is void. And the period from 22 December to 10 January no longer counts as business days, which quietly removes one of the more stressful annual scrambles in the industry.

Two Reforms That Need Reading Together

These changes tend to get reported separately and I think that is why the significance of them gets missed, because the interesting bit is what happens when you put them side by side.

Removing excluded amounts means that whole categories of claim which used to be parked can now arrive through adjudication and they are precisely the categories that are genuinely arguable, that turn entirely on what happened on site months ago and that need a considered response rather than a line item and a number. Delay costs. Acceleration. Latent conditions.

At the same time, whatever you write in that payment schedule is now the only response you are ever going to get. So the volume and the difficulty of what lands on you has gone up while the time you have to think about it has been fixed at ten business days and made final.

Victoria has effectively converged with New South Wales and Queensland here, so anyone who has worked across borders will already recognise the position. Anyone who has only ever worked in Victoria has spent their entire career under a regime that was more forgiving than they realised and the habits formed under it are the actual risk.

The Part That Is Not a Legal Problem

I am not a lawyer and none of this is advice on how to draft a payment schedule. Get that from someone qualified because the drafting is where the exposure sits.

What is worth saying something about is the bit sitting underneath the drafting, because that part is not a legal question at all. It is a records question and it always has been.

To set out every reason for withholding you have to actually know every reason for withholding and you have to know them inside ten business days. Not the reasons that are convenient to remember, or the ones that happen to have reached the person writing the schedule but the real ones, including the ones that were completely obvious on site three months ago to somebody who has since moved on to another job.

If a subcontractor claims for a delay in March, the reason you are not accepting it is almost always a fact about March. It was recorded or it was not. The person who knew about it is still around or they are not. The payment schedule is now the very last moment that fact is allowed to matter and it is being written by someone who was almost certainly nowhere near the site at the time.

That gap between where information gets created and where it eventually gets needed has always existed in construction. What has changed is that the consequence of the gap is now immediate and permanent rather than untidy and recoverable.

Three Things That Follow, None of Which Need a Lawyer

The first is that reasons have to exist somewhere another person can actually find them. A reason living in a supervisor's memory or halfway down a WhatsApp thread is not available to someone drafting a schedule under time pressure, which means that functionally it is not a reason at all.

The second is that reasons have to be specific enough to survive being read by a stranger. "Delay not accepted" is not a reason. "Preceding trade incomplete, recorded 14 March, area not released until 21 March" is a reason and the entire difference between those two sentences is what somebody bothered to write down on the day.

The third is that the ten business days are drafting time rather than thinking time. Anyone treating the schedule window as the point at which they work out their position has already lost most of it, because the position should be getting assembled out of a record that already exists.

What Has Not Changed

Worth saying, because reform coverage tends to leave the impression that everything is now different.

The amendments do not apply to payment claims served before 15 April 2026, or to adjudication applications made but not determined before that date. The obligation to respond in time has not changed in principle, only in what happens when you get it slightly wrong. And none of this alters what makes a good site record. It has simply raised the price of not having one.

There is a genuine upside in here too that is being underplayed. If you are the party making claims rather than the one responding to them, the abolition of excluded amounts means a whole category of legitimate entitlement that Victorian contractors have historically had to either litigate properly or quietly write off is now available through a considerably faster process.

The Uncomfortable Version

The reforms are aimed at getting subcontractors paid faster and on balance I think they will do exactly that. The mechanism though is that risk gets moved onto whoever is responding to a claim and it does that by taking a short administrative window and making it final.

Which means every business responding to payment claims in Victoria is now running a records operation, whether it thinks about itself that way or not. What your site team wrote down in March decides what you are allowed to argue in November.

Worth knowing that before November.

This is a general summary of publicly reported changes and is not legal advice. Sources: Ashurst, White & Case, Hamilton Locke, Maddocks.