Can my builder use the adjudication clause against me?

Yes. A JCT adjudication clause cuts both ways. It gives you a fast route to a decision, and it gives your builder the identical route against you, at a time of their choosing. RBH v James, above, is what that looks like from the receiving end, though there the right came from the statute rather than from a contract. Once a builder starts an adjudication, you have 28 days to answer it, whatever else is happening in your life, and the decision binds you straight away. Adjudication is a fast route to a decision, not a guaranteed fair fight.

What is a pay less notice, and how long do I have to issue one?

A pay less notice is how the paying party says it intends to pay less than the sum applied for. Under the JCT forms it must be issued no later than 5 days before the final date for payment. Under the statutory Scheme the period is 7 days. A payment notice is due no later than 5 days after the payment due date. The notice does not need an arithmetical calculation to be valid. It needs to set an adequate agenda for a dispute, which is the test the Court of Appeal endorsed in RBH v James.

Does the Consumer Rights Act protect me if I sign a JCT contract?

Yes, and it sits on top of the contract. A homeowner is a consumer under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 whatever the size of the job. Section 49 requires a service to be performed with reasonable care and skill, and the unfair terms rules mean an unfair term does not bind you. But the case law cuts a specific way. In Lovell Projects v Legg and Carver, a JCT Minor Works adjudication clause was held not to be unfair, because it was even-handed and the consumers had taken professional advice. In Domsalla v Dyason, a term was struck down where it had been imposed on a consumer who had no say in it and no adviser. The lesson is not that JCT is automatically safe. It is that a balanced standard form, signed with advice, is far harder to attack than a contractor's own document.

Can I be bound by an adjudication I never agreed to?

Yes. If you take part in an adjudication without reserving your position, you can be treated as having agreed to it, even where the statutory right never applied to you. That was the effect in ICCT Ltd v Pinto. Not knowing about section 106 is not a defence. So if you are a residential occupier and a contractor starts an adjudication against you, that is the moment to take advice, not after the decision lands.

I own my house through a company. Am I still a residential occupier?

Probably not, and it changes everything. Section 106 protects a party who occupies, or intends to occupy, the dwelling as their residence. A company cannot live anywhere. If the building contract is with your company alone, the exclusion does not apply, the Construction Act does, and both statutory adjudication and the statutory payment rules bite in full. You get the fast route. So does your contractor. It is not always that clean. The Act needs only one of the parties to the contract to be an intending occupier. In RBH v James a development company was in the picture, and the exception was still realistically arguable, because individuals were parties as employer and intended to occupy. What matters is who is actually a party to the contract, and what they intended on the day they signed it. In prime central London, where houses are routinely held through a company or a trust, that is not a technicality. It decides which rulebook you are playing by, and most people never ask.

JCT Contracts for a House Renovation

What a JCT contract actually is

A JCT contract is a standard building contract published by the Joint Contracts Tribunal, and it is what most of UK construction runs on. For a private house renovation the usual forms are Minor Works or Intermediate, both now in their 2024 editions. The one thing a homeowner should know before anything else: the statutory right to adjudicate does not automatically apply to you.

Adjudication is the fast route to settling a construction dispute. An adjudicator gives a decision in 28 days, and it binds both sides until a court overturns it. The law hands that right to almost everyone in construction. It does not hand it to you, because you live in the house. An unamended JCT form gives it back.

The forms are cheap. A Minor Works contract costs £47 on paper. Most private renovations in prime central London still run on no written contract, or on the contractor's own terms behind a smart cover. The contract is not the expensive part of a £500,000 job. Not having one is.

A JCT contract is a published standard form, not a bespoke document drafted for your job. The Joint Contracts Tribunal, usually shortened to JCT, writes and publishes the contracts the UK construction industry uses. You buy the form, fill in the particulars, and both sides sign terms that thousands of other projects have already run on.

That is the point of a standard form. The words have been used before, argued over before, and interpreted by the courts before. When something goes wrong, nobody has to work out from scratch what the contract means.

Most JCT forms used on a house renovation follow traditional procurement. Your team produces the drawings and the specification, the written description of the work and materials. The contractor prices that and builds it. The design is yours. The building is theirs. Design and build, where the contractor takes on the design too, is a different route with different forms.

Three roles run it. The employer is you, the person paying. The contractor is the builder. The contract administrator is the person named in the contract to run it, usually the architect, though not always.

One more thing about the form itself, and it is the question to ask first. Which edition is it.

JCT withdrew the 2016 suite on 31 March 2026. The 2024 editions replaced it, and 2024 is the current edition for any new project. There is a transitional window: the 2016 forms remain available until 31 December 2026, for jobs already tendered or under way when the withdrawal took effect. That is a wind-down, not a choice.

From April 2026 you cannot buy a 2016 form new. So if a contractor produces one for a job starting now, either they are working through old stock, or they have not looked at the contract they are asking you to sign since before it was withdrawn. Neither is a reason to walk away. Both are worth a question.

Which JCT contract fits a £150,000 to £1,000,000 house

For a renovation in that range, the form is almost always Minor Works or Intermediate. Which one you need is decided by how complicated the job is, not by how large the budget is.

One thing to be clear about before the table below. JCT sets no value limit in any of these forms. Not one of the figures in it comes from JCT. They are bands that commentators and consultants quote, from firms such as Trowers and Hamlins, C-Link, Sypro and Designing Buildings, along with a historic RICS survey. Treat them as a rough guide. What decides the form is complexity.

That matters here, because of the buildings. Victorian and Georgian houses in Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair, Belgravia and Marylebone almost always involve structural alteration and named specialists, meaning trades the contract identifies by name because their work is specialised. Minor Works handles neither well. It has no machinery for named specialists, no provision for handing the job over in phases, and only the simplest treatment of delay and extra cost.

So a £300,000 renovation of a Georgian terrace can easily need the Intermediate form, while a £300,000 job on a simpler building sits comfortably on Minor Works. The number is identical. The right contract is not. That is the mistake people make: they read the value band, pick Minor Works, and then find the form cannot carry the job they are running. Where Minor Works does fit, it is covered in detail here.

The D in MWD and ICD marks the version used where the contractor designs a defined part of the work, such as a joinery or glazing package.

Which form, and where it stops

Form	Typical band (industry commentary)	Where it stops working
Minor Works MW 2024, MWD 2024	£150,000 to £350,000	Named specialists, phased work, structural work
Intermediate IC 2024, ICD 2024	£400,000 to £1,000,000	Genuinely complex projects
Standard Building Contract SBC 2024	Over £1,000,000	Over-specified below that
Home Owner HO/B, HO/C 2021	Small domestic work	Structural, phased or high-value renovation

Bands are industry commentary, not JCT thresholds. JCT sets no value limit in any of these forms.

Payment, retention and the defects period

A JCT contract pays the contractor in stages as the work proceeds, not in one lump at the end. These are interim payments, made on account while the job runs.

The contract sets the timing. Payment becomes due 7 days after the interim valuation date, the date the work done so far is measured. The final date for payment, the day the money must actually reach the contractor, is 14 days after that due date. The figures can also move where the contract carries a provisional sum, an allowance for work not yet defined well enough to price, which is adjusted to the real cost as the job proceeds.

Retention is the money you keep back. It is a percentage of each payment, held as security against defects, commonly 5 per cent, or 3 per cent on higher-value contracts. Half is released at practical completion, the point at which the work is complete enough for you to take the building back. The rest is released on the certificate of making good, the document confirming any defects have been put right.

Between those two moments sits the rectification period, also called the defects period. It is the time after practical completion during which the contractor must return and fix faults that appear. Minor Works defaults to a short one, commonly 3 months. Most other JCT forms default to 12 months, and residential work often runs to 24. Those are defaults, and all can be changed. Read the contract particulars. Never assume.

When a construction manager runs the job

Construction management is a different structure, and it changes who you contract with.

Under the JCT construction management route you sign a Construction Management Appointment, form CM/A 2024, with the construction manager. Then a separate trade contract, form CM/TC 2024, with every single trade contractor: the groundworkers, the joiners, the electricians, each one.

The construction manager is your agent. They coordinate the trades, run the programme and administer the trade contracts on your behalf. What they are not is the counterparty to the building work. You are. Every trade contractor's contract is with you.

That means you carry the coordination risk, and the risk of a trade contractor going insolvent, directly. There is nobody standing between you and them. Under traditional procurement the main contractor carries all of that. They hold the trade contracts, absorb the coordination problems, and take the hit when a subcontractor fails. That is what a main contractor's margin buys.

Both things are true at once. Construction management gives you cost transparency, because you see every trade price, and it lets early packages start on site before the later design is finished. It also puts you in twelve contracts instead of one. Whether that is a good trade depends on the project and on who is coordinating it, which is the difference between construction management and a main contractor.

The clause that decides whether you can fight back

The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, known in the trade as the Construction Act, gives anyone in a construction contract the right to refer a dispute to adjudication at any time. The adjudicator must decide within 28 days. The decision binds both parties straight away, and stays binding until a court or arbitrator says otherwise. It is fast, and it is why most construction disputes never reach a courtroom.

Section 106 of that Act takes the right away from you.

The wording is narrow and it is deliberate. If the contract principally relates to a dwelling that one of the parties occupies, or intends to occupy, as their residence, the Act does not apply. That party is a residential occupier. You are the residential occupier of your own house, so the Act's machinery, both the right to adjudicate and the statutory payment rules alongside it, does not reach your contract.

Parliament wrote that exclusion to protect homeowners, on the reasoning that a consumer should not be dragged into a rushed 28-day process about their own home. It is not a foolish rule. But it has an edge nobody points out at the start of a renovation: the fastest way to force a decision out of a builder is the one thing a homeowner does not automatically have.

An unamended JCT form puts it back. The JCT forms carry their own adjudication clause as a matter of contract, so when you sign one you get by agreement the right the statute withholds.

In 2026 the Court of Appeal considered the residential occupier exception for the first time, in RBH Building Contractors Ltd v Ashley James and another, [2026] EWCA Civ 511. Coulson LJ set out the test. The homeowner must have a genuine intention to occupy the property as a residence, and there must be a realistic rather than a fanciful prospect of that happening. The intention is judged at the date the contract was made, not by what happened afterwards. The burden of proving it sits on the homeowner who wants to rely on the exception.

On the facts, a plan to let the house on Airbnb for roughly a quarter of the year did not take the owners outside the exception. A letting plan does not automatically cost you the protection. But it is a question of fact, and the burden is yours.

What happens when there is no contract

The forms cost almost nothing. From JCT's 2025 price list, a Minor Works contract is £47 in hard copy and £94 digital. Intermediate is £83 and £166. The Construction Management Appointment is £66 and £132. All of those are before VAT.

On a £500,000 renovation, the contract document is somewhere between 0.01 and 0.04 per cent of the money you are about to spend. Cost is not why people do not have one.

Be clear about what that £47 buys. It is the price of the form, not the price of running it. Somebody has to administer the contract and value the work, and those are real professional fees. The form is the cheap part.

Not having one is the expensive part, and RBH v James is what that looks like.

RBH Building Contractors was engaged by Mr and Mrs James to provide site and project management services on a large luxury house in North Devon. The Court of Appeal described the arrangement as something like a construction management contract. It was an oral contract. There was nothing in writing at all.

The relationship broke down with the work unfinished. The homeowners had by then paid £1,310,039. RBH served a payment application, without warning, for a net £663,016.16 that had apparently never been invoiced before, supported by a spreadsheet of 527 line items, much of it vaguely described. The homeowners were given 17 days to respond. RBH then ran what the court called a smash and grab adjudication, arguing that their response was not a valid pay less notice. The adjudicator awarded RBH the full sum.

The homeowners did not pay. RBH went to court to enforce the award and failed. The judge held that their notice was valid, and that they had a realistic prospect of proving they were residential occupiers, which would leave the adjudicator with no jurisdiction at all. The Court of Appeal dismissed RBH's appeal, unanimously.

That is where it sits. The award cannot be enforced. Whether the exception applies is still to be decided at a full trial. Two years of work, three tribunals, a dispute over £663,016.16, and no resolution, because there was no written contract: no adjudication clause, no payment mechanism, nothing to fall back on but a statute that may not even apply.

The document costs £47.

This is not a story about one careless firm. Every firm in this trade, Myrmex included, has at some point started work on less paper than it should have had. The client is the one who pays for that, in money, in years, and in a house that stays unfinished while the lawyers work out who owes what.

JCT Contracts: What a Homeowner Needs Before Work Starts