UK Construction Payment and Retentions Tracker

The Commercial Payments Bill [HL] was introduced in the House of Lords on 19 May 2026, had its second reading on 9 June 2026, completed Committee stage on 21 July 2026, and completed Report stage on 15 September 2026. As checked directly against Parliament's own stages page and official Lords minutes on 16 September 2026, the Lords received the report and agreed amendments 15 to 18, 30 to 32 and 36 to 45, with the Bill as amended printed as HL Bill 55. As rechecked on 20 September 2026, UK Parliament schedules third reading in the Lords for 20 October 2026; that is a future parliamentary date, so treat it as provisional. After that come all stages in the House of Commons, then Royal Assent, before any of it becomes law. The Bill remains proposed legislation: it has not received Royal Assent, and any future date given for when it takes effect should be treated as provisional until it actually happens.

The retention ban does not switch on the moment the Bill becomes law. Under the Bill text as amended in Committee (HL Bill 45), the Act comes into force on a day the Secretary of State sets by regulations, and no such day has been set yet. Once the retention provisions are commenced, the Bill provides for a two-year transition period before the fuller ban on agreeing new retention clauses applies. So "no confirmed date" describes when that clock starts, not whether a transition mechanism exists once it does. After Report stage (15 September 2026) the Bill was reprinted as HL Bill 55. A government written answer dated 7 September 2026 (Commons question 21159, answered by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade) says the retention ban "will only come into force through Commencement Regulations following Royal Assent of the Bill" and describes a two-year transitional period. It gives no commencement date, and none has been set. We have not compared the commencement clauses of HL Bill 55 line by line against the Committee-stage text.

The current Bill text still includes this construction-retentions chapter alongside its other measures. As it stands, the provisions most relevant to construction businesses are:

• ▸A maximum 60 day payment term for most business to business contracts, with strictly limited exemptions.
• ▸Statutory interest at the Bank of England base rate plus 8% made compulsory, removing a contract's ability to offer a lower rate instead.
• ▸A future ban on agreeing new retention clauses under construction contracts, with the two-year transition period described above once it is commenced.
• ▸Wider powers for the Small Business Commissioner, including investigating and fining persistent late payers, resolving payment disputes with binding interim decisions, and enforcing against reporting-requirement breaches.

These figures are economy-wide. They come from Late Payments Research, published 31 July 2025 by the Department for Business and Trade and the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, carried out by London Economics. They describe UK small businesses in general, not construction specifically, and should not be read as a trade-specific measurement.

Retention is money a main contractor holds back from a subcontractor, typically 3% to 5% of the contract value, usually released in two halves: once at practical completion, and the rest after a defects liability period that typically runs 12 to 24 months. Retention clauses remain permitted under current law, subject to the contract and existing construction-payment rules.

The £3.2 billion to £5.9 billion estimate of retentions held across the industry in England traces to a 2017 study for the then Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, carried out by Pye Tait Consulting. That study describes the figure as an estimate of retentions held over the course of a given year, in 2015 prices, not an amount held at one point in time. We did not identify a more recent official industry-wide equivalent in our source review.

The figures Parliament and government have used more recently in debate on this Bill are different: about £223 million lost to insolvency each year, and about £4 billion to £6 billion held in retentions across the industry at any given time. Both are credited to the Construction Leadership Council and were repeated in the Bill's House of Lords second-reading debate on 9 June 2026. The £223 million figure appears in a CLC press release dated 9 December 2019, the earliest publication of it we could verify. We did not find a primary CLC source establishing exactly how the £4 billion to £6 billion "at any given time" figure was calculated or first published, so we are not claiming a precise trace for that figure beyond its citation in Hansard.

The government's 2025 consultation received 867 responses in total. 87% of responses on the retention proposal favoured reform. That is not the same as 87% of all 867 responses, and the published government response does not confirm the exact number of responses to that specific question, so the two figures are kept separate here rather than combined.

None of the above changes what you're owed today. Retention clauses remain permitted under current law, and the Commercial Payments Bill is not in force. If a qualifying business debt, including a retention payment your own contract says should already have been released, is paid late, you may be able to claim statutory interest and recovery compensation under the current late-commercial-payment rules. Contract terms and genuine disputes can affect what applies, and the full detail is in TBV's existing guide, not repeated here.

TBV's existing guide covers exactly this: working out who actually owes you the money, the statutory interest calculator, and what to do next if a business, a homeowner or a public body will not pay. See "Where to go next" below rather than repeating that calculator here.

This page is a TBV synthesis of official and reputable public sources. It is not a TBV survey, and none of the figures on it were collected by TBV. Where a figure describes UK small businesses generally, it is labelled economy-wide. Where a figure is specific to construction retentions, it is labelled as such, with its original research date shown alongside the date it was most recently repeated in Parliament or government material.

We looked at whether to add a small panel of company-reported construction payment and retention data from GOV.UK's Payment Practices reporting service. We have held that back from this first version rather than publish a sample that is not yet properly scoped. If it is added later, it will be clearly labelled as company-reported, government-published information, not TBV research, and as illustrative rather than an industry average.

Separately, ONS publishes industry-to-industry payment-flow data. That measures the value of payments flowing between industries, not whether invoices were paid late, so it is not used on this page as late-payment evidence.

Next review: after the Bill's next Parliamentary stage, or within 30 days of the date below, whichever comes first.