Progress claims and payment stages: how to get paid faster

On any decent-sized job, one invoice at the end means you are the bank. You buy the timber, pay the crew every week, and carry the lot for a month or more until handover. Progress claims fix that: you bill in stages as the work hits milestones, so the client funds the job instead of you.

What a progress claim actually is

Three terms get mixed up on site. A payment stage is a line in your quote or contract: a milestone and the amount due when you reach it. A progress claim is what you send when you hit that milestone, saying the stage is done and the money is owed. An invoice is the tax document that asks for payment. On most small jobs the claim and the invoice are one piece of paper: a tax invoice for the stage amount that names the stage.

The difference matters once the security of payment laws come into it. A claim served the right way under those Acts starts a set process if the other side does not pay or disputes the amount, ending in adjudication. A bare invoice that never mentions the contract or the stage may not carry that weight. So set the stages in the quote and claim against them by name.

Why one invoice at the end hurts

A $40,000 job with a 10% deposit leaves you nearly $36,000 out of pocket at some point before you see the balance. Materials and wages don't wait for handover. If a client goes quiet or slow to pay at the end, you have already spent the money and you are chasing your own cash. Staged payments keep the gap between what you have spent and what you have been paid small the whole way through.

A payment schedule that works

Match your stages to real, visible milestones and put them in the quote up front, so there is never an argument about whether a claim is due. A common structure for a build:

1. Deposit on acceptance: enough to cover your first material order and the first week or two of labour
2. Frame or set-out complete: a chunk once the structure is standing
3. Lock-up: another chunk once it is closed in
4. Practical completion: the balance, minus any small retention if agreed

How to structure stages on a small job

Here is one way to split a $40,000 renovation into four stages. Treat it as an example, not a rule: the percentages should follow your own cost curve, and a job that is heavy on materials early needs a bigger early claim.

Two checks before you lock it in. First, add up what you will have spent by each trigger and make sure the paid-to-date column keeps pace; if lock-up costs $28,000 to reach and you have claimed $14,000, you are the bank again. Run it through the job profit calculator so the stages sit on real costs. Second, check your state's rules: Queensland's regulator says progress payments must be relative to the amount of work completed, and Victoria fixes the stage percentages for new home contracts by law (base, frame, lock-up and fixing).

The same logic scales. A builder might run six or eight stages; a concreter doing the slab might have two, a deposit for the pump and mesh and the balance once it is poured and stripped. TrackYaTradie is built for builders and built for concreters with that in mind.

Getting the claims paid

A progress claim gets paid faster when it is easy to say yes to. Send it the day the stage is done, itemise what the stage covered, and attach a photo of the finished milestone so the client can approve it from the couch instead of waiting for a site visit. The less friction, the sooner the money lands.

• Claim the same day you hit the milestone, not at the end of the month
• Show what is paid, what is due now, and what is still upcoming so the client sees the whole picture
• Back each claim with a photo or a short note on what was completed
• Keep the terms short: 7 days beats 30 for cash flow

Security of payment: the state-by-state picture

Every state and territory has a security of payment Act for the building and construction industry. The detail varies, but the core is the same: if you carry out construction work under a contract, you have a statutory right to progress payments and a fast-track process to have a disputed claim decided by an adjudicator rather than a court. NSW's page puts it plainly: that right applies whether a contract is verbal, written or absent, even if the contract says you cannot claim.

The Acts give you a statutory right to claim and to adjudicate a dispute, but the mechanics differ: what a claim must say, the dates you can claim from, how long the other side has to respond, and which contracts are excluded. Do not run a claim off another state's template. Read your own state's page, linked in the sources below, before you serve a claim you intend to enforce.

Deposits: what you can ask for

For domestic building work, most states cap the deposit a contractor can take before work starts. These are the caps each regulator publishes for home building contracts.

• NSW: 10% of the contract price, for contracts of $5,000 and above. Builders must not request or accept more
• Victoria: 10% if the total contract price is under $20,000, and 5% if it is $20,000 or more, under the Domestic Building Contracts Act 1995
• Queensland: 20% for work valued at $3,300 or less, 10% for $3,301 to $19,999, and 5% for $20,000 and above; up to 20% where more than half the contract price is customised work or prefabrication done off site
• Western Australia: 6.5% of the contract price for home building contracts valued between $7,500 and $500,000, under the Home Building Contracts Act 1991
• South Australia: $1,000 where the value of the work is up to $20,000, and 5% of the value of the work where it is over $20,000, under the Building Work Contractors Act 1995 and its regulations. The threshold for a regulated domestic building work contract rose from $12,000 to $20,000 on 10 November 2025

If your state is not listed, check with your building regulator first. The deposit is the one stage you cannot tie to work done, so keep it inside the cap and bring the first claim forward. WA's regulator spells out the flip side: once work starts, progress payments should only be for work actually done or materials already supplied.

Variations and how they hit your claims

A variation is any change to the scope after the price is agreed: the client adds a deck, the engineer wants a bigger beam, the slab needs more fill than the plans showed. If it is not priced and signed off, it does not exist as far as your claims go. That is why quote vs estimate is worth reading before you sign anything big.

Price a variation as its own line, get the client's written yes before you do the work, then claim it with the stage it lands in, shown separately: 'Stage 3: lock-up, $16,000' plus 'Variation 2: extra bracing, $1,850'. Roll it into the stage amount with no explanation and you invite a dispute on the whole claim, not just the extra.

• Price every variation before the work, not after
• Variations change the contract sum, so adjust later stage amounts set as a percentage of the total
• If a client will not sign off, do not do the work and hope

Variations are also where jobs quietly lose money: unpriced extras eat the margin you quoted. How to quote a carpentry job covers pricing from the ground up; job costing for tradies shows the real number per job once the extras are in.

Doing this on paper across several live jobs is a headache, which is why, in our experience, a lot of tradies default to one invoice at the end and wear the cash-flow pain. TrackYaTradie splits any job into payment stages, tracks what has been paid versus what is owing, and lets you send each claim from site, so the money comes in as you build instead of all at the end.