SECURITY OF PAYMENT — VICTORIA

How to make a payment claim under the Victorian SOP Act.

If your job is in Melbourne or anywhere else in Victoria, the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002 gives you a statutory right to be paid for work you've done, and a fast adjudication process to chase it. The Act changed substantially on 15 April 2026, and most of what changed went your way.

This is general information, not legal advice

SubSync is not a law firm. This page explains how the Victorian SOP 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.

What changed on 15 April 2026

If someone told you a few years ago that Victoria was the worst state in the country to be a subcontractor chasing money, they were right at the time. That is no longer the position, and the change is big enough that advice you were given before 2026 may now be backwards.

Excluded amounts are gone

Sections 10A and 10B were repealed outright. The "claimable variations" and "excluded amounts" regime that kept disputed variations, delay costs and latent conditions out of adjudication no longer exists. You can now claim and adjudicate all of it.

Reference dates are gone

Replaced by a straightforward monthly entitlement to claim. You no longer have to work out whether a reference date exists before you can serve.

Six months to claim, not three

The long-stop after the work finishes doubled, so a final claim you would previously have lost has twice as long to be served.

Payment terms are capped

Payment is due within 10 business days unless your contract expressly says longer, and any clause pushing payment past 20 business days snaps back to 10 business days from the claim date.

One catch. The old rules still govern any payment claim served before 15 April 2026. If you have a claim or an adjudication on foot from before that date, it runs under the old regime — contractual reference dates, one claim per reference date, the three-month long-stop and the excluded amounts limits.

What the SOP Act actually does

Every Australian state and territory has a Security of Payment Act, and they all exist for one reason: to keep money moving down the contracting chain. The legislation sits on top of your contract. It gives anyone carrying out construction work a statutory right to progress payments and a quick, low-cost process called adjudication to recover them, without waiting years for a court. The Acts prohibit contracting out — so 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 Melbourne site and the Victorian SOP 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 Queensland, or read the state-by-state guide to Security of Payment before you assume the process is the same.

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, Victoria included.

Who can make a payment claim

Broadly: anyone who has carried out construction work, or supplied related goods and services, under a construction contract for a project in Victoria. That covers subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, suppliers of plant and materials tied to the work, and consultants providing related services. It does not depend on your contract being a formal signed document — a verbal or partly-written arrangement can still be a construction contract.

What the Act does not cover

Three carve-outs are worth knowing, because getting this wrong wastes the one process that was going to get you paid quickly:

Domestic building work. The Act does not apply to a contract to carry out domestic building work with a building owner, unless that owner is in the business of building residences and the contract is entered into in the course of that business (s 7(2)(b), read with the Domestic Building Contracts Act 1995). In practice: a builder's contract with an owner-occupier is out, but subcontracts on domestic projects are in. If you are a trade on a house, you almost certainly still have the Act.
Mining and resources. Drilling for or extracting oil or natural gas, and extracting minerals — including tunnelling or boring for that purpose — fall outside "construction work" (s 5(2)). Courts read this narrowly and focus on the extraction process itself, so mine infrastructure and development works can still be caught by the Act. Do not assume you are out just because the site is a mine.
Finance and insurance contracts. Section 7 also excludes construction contracts forming part of a loan agreement, a contract of guarantee, or a contract of insurance.

When you can claim: the monthly entitlement

Reference dates are history. You can serve a payment claim on and from the last day of the month in which you first carried out work, and then on and from the last day of every month after that. You do not need the contract to give you a claim date, and you no longer have to argue about whether a reference date exists.

Your contract can give you more — earlier claims, or more frequent ones — and if it does, take it. What it cannot do is push your entitlement later than the Act allows.

December works differently. Work done between 1 and 21 December is claimable from 22 December. Work done between 22 and 31 December is not claimable until 31 January the following year. Plan the Christmas shutdown claim around those two dates rather than the usual month end.

The long-stop. After the job finishes you have until the later of: the time your contract specifies, six months after practical completion of all the construction work, or six months after you supplied all the related goods and services. That was three months under the old Act, so a final claim that would once have been out of time may now be live.

What goes in a valid payment claim

A payment claim is not the same document as your usual invoice, although it can be built on one. Get the basics wrong and the claim can be worthless no matter how good the underlying entitlement is. At minimum, a payment claim identifies:

The construction work it relates to — enough detail that the respondent can tell what they are being asked to pay for.
The amount claimed, built up so it can be checked: contract works, variations, materials, retention released, GST.
The claim period it is made for.
Who it is served on and how — the person named in the contract, by a method the contract permits, with a record that proves it arrived.

The endorsement is mandatory in Victoria

This one is not optional and it is not a formality. Your payment claim must tell the respondent on its face that it is made under the Act (s 14(2)(e)), using these words:

This is a payment claim under the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002.

The trap is the wording, not the presence of it. A template borrowed from a Sydney job will carry an endorsement, but it will endorse the New South Wales Act — and that does not satisfy s 14(2)(e) on a Victorian project. Check the Act named in the line, not just that a line is there. It takes a second and it has decided real cases.

What you can claim now that you could not before

This is the part worth re-reading if you have been working in Victoria for a while. Under the old Act, an "excluded amounts" regime kept whole categories of money out of adjudication. Broadly, an adjudicator could not decide:

variations that did not qualify as "claimable variations";
time-related costs — delay damages and extension of time costs;
latent conditions;
changes in law or regulatory requirements;
damages for breach of contract;
claims that did not arise under the contract.

All of that is now claimable and adjudicable. If you have been carrying disputed variations, delay costs or a latent conditions claim on the basis that adjudication was closed to you in Victoria, that advice is out of date for any claim served on or after 15 April 2026.

The paperwork still decides the outcome. A variation with no written direction, or an EOT with no notice served inside the contractual window, is just as hard to recover as it ever was — the Act opened the door to adjudication, it did not create the entitlement. Our guide to getting paid for variations walks through the direction-notice-price sequence that keeps a variation claimable.

After you serve the payment claim

The payment schedule

The respondent replies with a payment schedule: the amount they propose to pay and, where that is less than you claimed, the reasons why. It is due within the time your contract requires or 10 business days after you served the claim, whichever comes first (s 15(4)). Read it the day it lands, because a schedule that comes back short starts the adjudication clock immediately.

Payment itself is due within 10 business days unless your contract expressly provides for longer — and a clause that stretches payment beyond 20 business days is cut back to 10 business days from the date of the claim.

If no payment schedule arrives

Silence costs the respondent. If they do not serve a payment schedule in time, they become liable for the full amount you claimed on the due date. From there you have two routes:

Recover it as a debt in court (s 16). This is the quick one — summary judgment, no adjudication needed — and in that proceeding the respondent cannot raise a defence or a cross-claim arising under the contract. They have to pay first and argue later.
Serve a notice of intention to apply for adjudication (s 18(2)). You have 10 business days after the due date to serve it, and it gives the respondent a 2 business day second chance to put in a payment schedule.

The debt route is usually the stronger play when the respondent has simply ignored you. It is also the reason serving a proper payment claim every month, as routine rather than only when the relationship sours, is worth the ten minutes it takes.

Adjudication

Adjudication is a documents-only determination by an independent adjudicator. It decides who holds the money while any wider dispute continues, not who is ultimately right, and the determination is enforceable in the meantime. One thing before the timetable: "business days" under the Act exclude weekends, public holidays and the period from 22 December to 10 January inclusive — the statutory clocks pause over the Christmas shutdown. The timetable:

Applying. You lodge with an authorised nominating authority that you choose — unless your contract names three or more, in which case you must use one of those. Where you received a payment schedule, you have 10 business days from receiving it. Where the scheduled amount simply was not paid, you have 10 business days from the due date.
Serving the application. You must serve a copy on the respondent within 3 business days of lodging. This is a new requirement and an easy one to miss.
Appointment. The nominating authority refers the application to an adjudicator. If the adjudicator has not notified acceptance within 4 business days of the application being made, you can withdraw it and start again with another.
The response. The respondent has the later of 5 business days after receiving the application or 2 business days after notice of the adjudicator's appointment — and only if they served a payment schedule in the first place. Critically, they can only rely on reasons that were in that schedule. New reasons cannot be raised at all.
The determination. 10 business days after the adjudicator accepts the nomination, extendable by up to 5 business days with the claimant's agreement.

Where no payment schedule was served at all, the sequence runs differently: you have 10 business days after the due date to serve the s 18(2) notice, the respondent gets its 2 business day second chance, and you then have 5 business days from the end of that notice period to lodge the adjudication application (s 18(3)(d)). Three short windows back to back — diarise all of them the day the due date passes.

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.

Where the claim is really won: the contract you signed

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 SOP Act — adjudication will now 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.

And the best time to find hostile payment terms is before you sign them, not when the first payment schedule comes back at nil.

Common questions

Which Security of Payment Act applies to a Melbourne project?

The Victorian Act — the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002. The Act of the state where the construction work is carried out governs, regardless of where your business is registered or what the contract says.

When can I serve a payment claim in Victoria?

On and from the last day of the month in which you first carried out work, and then on and from the last day of each following month. Reference dates were abolished on 15 April 2026. Your contract can allow earlier or more frequent claims but cannot push you later. December is the exception: work done 1–21 December is claimable from 22 December, and work done 22–31 December from 31 January.

Does my payment claim have to say it is made under the Act?

Yes. In Victoria the endorsement is mandatory (s 14(2)(e)). The claim must state: "This is a payment claim under the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002." The trap is the wording: a template borrowed from a New South Wales job will carry an endorsement, but it endorses the New South Wales Act, which does not satisfy s 14(2)(e) here. Check the Act named in the line.

Are excluded amounts still a thing in Victoria?

No. Sections 10A and 10B were repealed with effect from 15 April 2026, abolishing both "claimable variations" and "excluded amounts". Disputed variations, delay and extension of time costs, latent conditions, changes in law and damages for breach can all now be claimed and adjudicated. Claims served before 15 April 2026 are still governed by the old rules, and any guidance still citing s 10B as current law is out of date.

What happens if the builder ignores my payment claim?

If no payment schedule is served in time, they become liable for the full claimed amount on the due date. You can then either recover it as a debt in court, where they cannot raise a contractual defence or cross-claim, or serve a notice of intention to apply for adjudication, which gives them 2 business days to put a schedule in. The payment schedule itself is due within the contractual time or 10 business days after service, whichever is earlier.

How long do I have to claim after the job finishes?

The later of the time specified in your contract, six months after practical completion of all the construction work, or six months after you supplied all the related goods and services. That doubled from three months on 15 April 2026, so a final claim you were told was out of time may not be.

Does the Act cover me on a house?

If you are a subcontractor, almost certainly yes. The domestic building carve-out in s 7(2)(b) applies to a contract with the building owner, not to the subcontracts underneath it — so a builder's contract with an owner-occupier is outside the Act, but your subcontract on that same house is inside it.

Is this page legal advice?

No. SubSync is not a law firm and this is general information about how the Victorian SOP Act works, current as at the 15 April 2026 amendments. It is not advice about your contract or your claim. How a timeframe applies to a particular claim turns on the facts and the drafting, and a wrong date can cost you the money — so take advice on anything significant.