The Victorian SOP rules changed on 15 April. Your subcontracts didn’t.

Victoria rewrote its Security of Payment Act on 15 April 2026, and every payment claim served since then runs under the new rules. Most subbies haven’t read it. Most builders’ contract templates haven’t caught up either. That gap is where money gets lost.

What actually changed

1. Variations, delay costs and latent conditions can now go to adjudication. They used to be “excluded amounts”, and the only route for a disputed one was court. Sections 10A and 10B are gone; now they can sit in a payment claim like anything else.
2. Long payment terms don’t hold any more. Payment is due within 10 business days unless the subcontract expressly says longer, and a clause pushing payment past 20 business days snaps back to 10 business days from the claim. A 45-day term is now 10 business days.
3. Reference dates are gone. You can claim every month. No more working out whether a reference date exists before you can serve.
4. Six months to claim, not three. The long-stop after the work finishes has doubled, so a final claim you’d have lost now has twice as long.

One catch: a payment claim served before 15 April 2026 still runs under the old rules.

What this means for the next subcontract on your desk

Builders will keep issuing the old clauses. Some won’t have updated their templates. Some will leave the clauses in and hope you sign. Either way, the clauses that used to be a dead loss are now worth pushing back on, and the ones you sign without reading are now a bigger problem, not a smaller one, because the builder’s lawyers know the new rules better than you do.

The things worth checking before you sign:

• Notice periods on variations and EOTs, and what happens if you miss them
• Payment terms and any pay-when-paid wording
• Retention percentage, release triggers and where it’s held
• LD rates and caps against the contract sum
• Set-off rights and how wide they are

What SubSync does with it

Upload the subcontract. SubSync reads every clause, scores the risky ones out of ten, benchmarks them against what’s normal for your trade, and gives you the wording to push back with. It’s built for Australian commercial subbies and it knows the difference between a standard AS 4902 departure and a clause that will cost you the job’s margin.

It is not legal advice. It’s the review you’d do yourself if you had a spare four hours on every tender.

Book a 20-minute walkthrough. Bring a live subcontract.