Security of payment in Queensland: 15 business days to answer

Queensland took the New South Wales machinery and hardened it. The payment claim and payment schedule are recognisably the same instruments, but three things are different, and each of them changes how a Queensland job should be run.

Silence is an offence. The contract's payment terms may already be void. And the money may never have belonged to the party holding it.

Section 76: fifteen business days, and a penalty for saying nothing

"(1) If given a payment claim, a respondent must respond to the payment claim by giving the claimant a payment schedule within whichever of the following periods ends first — (a) the period, if any, within which the respondent must give the payment schedule under the relevant construction contract; (b) 15 business days after the payment claim is given to the respondent. Maximum penalty — 100 penalty units."

And immediately under it, in the Act itself:

"Note — A failure to give a payment schedule as required under this section is also grounds for taking disciplinary action under the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991."

No other Australian jurisdiction does this. Elsewhere, ignoring a payment claim is a civil misstep with a civil consequence. In Queensland it is a penalty exposure and a licensing exposure — the fifteen business days sits inside a wider patchwork of eight jurisdictions, eight sets of deadlines.

There is one way out, in s 76(2): the respondent need not give a schedule "if the amount claimed in the payment claim is paid in full on or before the due date". Paying is a complete answer; being late is not.

Section 76(3) adds a second duty most people miss: having given a schedule, the respondent "must pay the claimant the amount proposed in the payment schedule no later than the due date". Again, 100 penalty units.

What silence costs on top of the penalty

Section 77(2): "The respondent is liable to pay the amount claimed under the payment claim to the claimant on the due date for the progress payment to which the payment claim relates."

Section 78 then gives the claimant the choice of recovering "the unpaid portion of the amount owed from the respondent, as a debt owing to the claimant, in a court of competent jurisdiction" or applying for adjudication, plus the right to give written notice of intention to suspend work under s 98.

Section 73: the due date your contract may not be allowed to set

Section 73(1) reads permissively — the contract decides, or 10 business days if it does not. Then come the notes, and they are part of the Act:

"2 A provision in a construction management trade contract or subcontract providing for payment of a progress payment later than 25 business days is void, see the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991, section 67U. 3 A provision in a commercial building contract providing for payment of a progress payment later than 15 business days is void, see the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991, section 67W."

Section 67U of the QBCC Act, in its own words: "A provision in a construction management trade contract or subcontract is void to the extent it provides for payment of a progress payment by a contracting party to a contracted party later than 25 business days after submission of a payment claim." Section 67W does the same at 15 business days for commercial building contracts.

Then s 73(4) of the BIF Act closes the loop. A contract caught by 67U or 67W, and a contract containing a pay when paid provision, "are taken to be a contract to which subsection (1)(b) applies" — that is, treated as silent, so 10 business days applies.

That is a chain worth following once, slowly. A subcontract with 30-day terms in Queensland is not a 30-day subcontract, and it is not a 25-business-day subcontract either. The offending term is void, the contract counts as silent, and the money is due 10 business days after the claim.

The Queensland business day excludes the Christmas shutdown

Both 67U and 67W define a business day as a day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, public holiday, special holiday or bank holiday, or "a day in the period from 22 December in a particular year to 10 January in the following year, both days inclusive."

Twenty business days spanning the Christmas break is a much longer stretch of calendar than twenty business days in March. Anyone diarising Queensland deadlines from a generic business-day calculator will get December claims wrong. Victoria solved the same problem a different way in its 2025 rewrite, with two fixed service dates rather than an exclusion — see what the 2025 rewrite changed.

Interest

Section 73(2) gives the greater of the contract rate and the rate prescribed under s 59(3) of the Civil Proceedings Act 2011. But s 73(3) redirects building contracts to the QBCC Act's penalty rate, and s 67P(3) defines it as the sum of "10% a year" and "the rate comprising the annual rate, as published from time to time by the Reserve Bank of Australia, for 90 day bills" — or a higher contract rate if the contract provides one.

Ten per cent above the bill rate is not a nominal sanction. It is the strongest interest provision of any Australian security of payment regime.

Section 75: when you may claim, and the supporting statement

For a progress claim, s 75(2) gives you "the longest" of the contract period and "the period of 6 months after the construction work to which the claim relates was last carried out or the related goods and services to which the claim relates were last supplied."

Six months, not twelve. A Queensland claimant who waits eight months has lost the claim that a New South Wales claimant would still hold.

For the final payment, s 75(3) gives the longest of four periods: the contract period; "28 days after the end of the last defects liability period for the construction contract"; six months after completion of all construction work; and six months after complete supply of related goods and services.

Section 75(4) allows only one payment claim for each reference date, but s 75(5) confirms that "a payment claim may include an amount that was included in a previous payment claim."

The supporting statement — required, but not fatal

Section 75(7) requires a supporting statement where there is a subcontract under the construction contract and the contract is not itself a subcontract of another contract. Maximum penalty 100 penalty units.

Section 75(9) sets out what it must contain: a declaration that all subcontractors have been paid all amounts owed, or, where some have not, for each unpaid subcontractor the name, the amount still unpaid, the details of the unpaid payment claim, the date the work was carried out, and "the reasons the amount was not paid in full".

That second option does not exist in New South Wales, and it matters. Queensland lets you serve a truthful statement that some subcontractors are unpaid, with reasons. And s 75(8) then says: "A failure of the claimant to comply with subsection (7) does not affect the validity of a payment claim."

Adjudication: 30 and 20 business days

Section 79(2)(b) sets two windows:

• 30 business days where the respondent failed to give a payment schedule and did not pay the full claimed amount, measured from the later of the due date and "the last day the respondent could have given the payment schedule under section 76";
• 20 business days where a payment schedule was given but the scheduled amount was not paid in full, measured from the due date.

The first is the longest no-schedule window in the country, and it is measured from a date you can calculate the moment the fifteen business days expire.

The money that was never the head contractor's

Queensland's second layer is the statutory trust regime in Chapter 2 of the BIF Act, rewritten in 2020 and amended again in 2024.

A project trust is required for a contract where three things are true (s 12(2)): the contract is eligible under Subdivision 2, it is not exempted, and "the contracted party enters into a subcontract for all or part of the contracted work."

Eligibility is in s 14(1): the contracting party is the State, a state authority, a local government, an individual, a private entity or a hospital and health service; more than 50 per cent of the contract price is for project trust work; and the contract price is

"(i) if the contracting party is the State or a hospital and health service — $1 million or more; or (ii) otherwise — $10 million or more."

Section 11A then does the thing subcontractors should know about: "A subcontractor for a project trust subcontract for a project trust contract is a beneficiary of the project trust for the contract." You are a beneficiary of a trust over money held by the party who owes you, and s 11B gives you a beneficial interest in "all amounts the subcontractor is entitled to be paid in connection with project trust subcontracts".

Retention trusts are separate. Section 32(1) requires one "if — (a) the contract is a withholding contract at the time the retention amount is withheld; and (b) the retention amount is withheld by the contracting party in the form of cash." A withholding contract, under s 32(6), is a project trust head contract, a subcontract eligible for a project trust under s 14C or 14D, or a project trust subcontract for such a contract. Section 32(5) excludes retention withheld by the State, the Commonwealth, a state authority or a local government, and retention under a contract at or above the minimum contract price.

The practical effect for a subcontractor: on a large project, the cash retention taken from your progress claims is not simply an entry in the head contractor's ledger. It is trust money, and s 32(4) keeps the requirement running "until all of the retention amount has been released to the parties entitled to it".

And before any of this: are you licensed?

None of the above helps an unlicensed contractor. Section 42(1) of the QBCC Act: "Unless exempt under schedule 1A, a person must not carry out, or undertake to carry out, building work unless the person holds a contractor's licence of the appropriate class under this Act." Section 42(3) then removes the payment entirely:

"a person who carries out building work in contravention of this section is not entitled to any monetary or other consideration for doing so."

Section 42(4) allows a claim for "reasonable remuneration", but only up to what was actually paid for materials and labour, with no allowance for the person's own labour and no profit.

The threshold is low. Schedule 1, s 2 of the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Regulation 2018 takes "work of a value of $3,300 or less" out of the definition of building work — but only if it is not within the scope of a fire protection licence, not within certain listed licence classes, and not "carried out by a licensee as part of a contract for building work of which the total value is more than $3,300."

What to change on a Queensland job

• Check your contract's payment term against 67U and 67W first. If it is void, the due date is 10 business days after the claim, and everything downstream shifts.
• Use a Queensland business-day calendar that excludes 22 December to 10 January.
• Serve progress claims inside six months of the work, not twelve.
• If you are the respondent, answer within 15 business days even when you intend to pay nothing. The schedule is your entire case at adjudication, and silence is an offence and a licensing matter.
• If you are a subcontractor on a large project, ask whether a project trust exists. You are a beneficiary of it, and s 11A says so.

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Checked on 29 August 2026 against the in-force consolidations of the BIF Act, the QBCC Act and the QBCC Regulation on the Queensland legislation register. This is a description of the legislation, not legal advice.

What Zirko does: it records what was sent and when, keeps invoices and quotes on the project they belong to, and keeps time per person per day. What Zirko does not do: it does not decide whether your contract is a commercial building contract or a construction management trade contract, does not calculate the due date, and does not operate trust accounts.