SECURITY OF PAYMENT — QUEENSLAND
If your job is in Brisbane or anywhere else in Queensland, the Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 gives you a statutory right to be paid for work you've done, and a fast adjudication process to chase it. Queensland runs the most claimant-friendly version of this legislation in the country — if you know how to use it.
SubSync is not a law firm. This page explains how the BIF Act works so you know what questions to ask and what dates to diarise. It is not advice about your contract, your claim or your project. The timeframes below are the ones in the Act, but how they apply to a particular claim turns on the facts and the drafting — if real money is riding on it, get advice from a construction lawyer.
If you learned Security of Payment in another state, Queensland will surprise you in four ways — three of them in your favour:
The endorsement was abolished. A written document that identifies the work, states the amount and requests payment is a statutory payment claim — no magic words required. Your ordinary invoice, done properly, already carries the Act's full force.
A respondent who doesn't pay in full and doesn't serve a payment schedule in time isn't just liable for the whole amount — they've committed an offence, and it's grounds for QBCC disciplinary action against their licence. No other state polices this the way Queensland does.
In Victoria and NSW, a respondent who ignored your claim gets a statutory second chance to put in a schedule before adjudication. Queensland removed it. No schedule means you proceed straight to adjudication or court — and they've lost their say.
A subcontract cannot push payment past 25 business days after your claim, and a commercial head contract past 15. If the contract is silent, payment is due within 10 business days. Clauses that try to stretch further don't survive.
Every Australian state and territory has Security of Payment legislation, and it all exists for one reason: to keep money moving down the contracting chain. The BIF Act sits on top of your contract. It gives anyone carrying out construction work a statutory right to progress payments and a quick, documents-only process called adjudication to recover them, without waiting years for a court. Contracting out is prohibited — whatever your subcontract says, the head contractor cannot sign those rights away on your behalf.
The Act that applies is the Act of the state where the construction work is carried out. Not where your company is registered, not where the builder's head office is, and not what the contract nominates. Work on a Gold Coast site and the BIF Act governs your payment claim even if you are a Sydney business. Working over the border? See the guides to payment claims in NSW and payment claims in Victoria, or the state-by-state guide to Security of Payment.
One thing is uniform across the country: pay-when-paid is void. A clause making the builder's obligation to pay you conditional on the builder first being paid by the principal is unenforceable under every Security of Payment Act, Queensland included.
You can give a payment claim at the times your contract states or, at latest, from the last day of each month in which you carried out work. Your contract can give you more — earlier or more frequent claims — but cannot take the monthly entitlement away.
The long-stops. An interim (progress) claim must be given within the later of the period your contract allows or 6 months after the work it covers was carried out. A final payment claim gets longer: the later of the contract's period, 28 days after the end of the last defects liability period, or 6 months after completion of the work. Diarise these — work that ages past its window generally cannot be claimed under the Act.
Queensland abolished the endorsement: you do not need to state that the claim is made under the Act, and every document that meets the requirements is automatically a statutory payment claim. Those requirements are short, and worth checking on every invoice you send:
The flip side of "every invoice is a payment claim" is that the statutory clocks are always running — yours and theirs. Send a sloppy invoice that understates the month's work and that is the claim the Act enforces. Build each invoice as if an adjudicator will read it, because one day one will.
If the respondent doesn't intend to pay the full amount by the due date, they must serve a payment schedule — the amount they propose to pay and their reasons — within your contract's period or 15 business days after receiving the claim, whichever is earlier. Business days here exclude weekends, public holidays and 22 December to 10 January inclusive, so the clocks pause over the Christmas shutdown.
Payment itself is due by the date your contract states, capped at 25 business days after the claim on a subcontract (15 on a commercial head contract) — or within 10 business days if the contract is silent.
Silence costs the respondent three ways. They become liable for the full amount you claimed on the due date, recoverable as a debt. They lose the right to lodge reasons in adjudication — Queensland gives no statutory second chance. And they have committed an offence, which is also grounds for QBCC disciplinary action against their licence. From there you choose: recover the debt in court, or go straight to adjudication.
Adjudication is a documents-only determination by an independent adjudicator, lodged through the QBCC Registry. It decides who holds the money while any wider dispute continues, and the determination is enforceable in the meantime. Queensland splits claims at $750,000: at or under is a standard claim, over is complex, and the response and decision windows stretch for complex ones. The timetable:
Adjudicators decide on documents, so the subcontractor with the organised project file usually wins: notices, delivery dockets, written directions, site instructions, dated photographs, timesheets. Nothing you say at the time will carry weight if it is not written down somewhere with a date on it.
Queensland also runs a statutory trust framework: on projects it covers, contract payments sit in a project trust account and cash retention must be held in a retention trust account rather than the builder's operating account. The framework has been rolled out in phases by contract value and party type, so whether it applies to your project depends on the head contract — ask, and check the QBCC's current thresholds. Our guide to retention in subcontracts covers how to get retention back wherever it is held.
Your contract's notice clauses interact with the statutory timeline, and the interaction is where good claims die. A variation that never got a written direction, or an EOT notice served two days past the contractual window, is not rescued by the BIF Act — adjudication will hear the claim, but it will hear it on your paperwork. That is why SubSync's contract notices module tracks deadlines from the contract you actually signed, in business days, and drafts the notice against the clause rather than a generic template. Our guide to getting paid for variations walks through the direction-notice-price sequence that keeps a variation claimable.
And the best time to find hostile payment terms is before you sign them, not when the first payment schedule comes back at nil.
Upload a subcontract and SubSync flags the payment, notice and variation clauses that decide whether you get paid on this job.
