A customer will not pay. Now what?
Short answer: before you do anything else, work out who actually owes you. A homeowner, another sole trader, or a limited company. That one fact decides what you can charge, what letter you have to send, how long you have to wait, and whether the fastest remedy in construction law is open to you or shut.
Almost every guide on this subject skips it. Two of the biggest, both written for tradespeople, tell you to charge 8% over base and add a fixed fee, without mentioning that those rights come from a piece of business-to-business legislation that does not apply to the homeowner sitting on your invoice. Here is the version that starts with your actual customer.
Start here, everything else follows
Who owes you?
Three kinds of debtor, three different sets of rules. Get this wrong at the start and you can charge interest you are not entitled to, send a letter that gets your claim stayed, or wait 30 days you never had to wait.
| Your customer | Interest and fees | Letter before court | Adjudication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homeowner | Nothing statutory. Ask the court for 8% when you issue | Debt protocol: 30 days, with the forms | No, excluded by law |
| Sole trader or partnership | 8% over the locked base rate, plus £40 to £100 | Debt protocol: 30 days, with the forms | Yes, if it is construction work |
| Limited company or LLP | 8% over the locked base rate, plus £40 to £100 | A clear letter, around 14 days | Yes, if it is construction work |
Check Companies House if you are not sure. “Smith Building Services” on a van tells you nothing: it might be a limited company, or it might be Dave, trading under a name. It changes which letter you send.
The rights that are not yours
What you can actually add to the bill.
The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 gives you interest at 8% above the Bank of England rate, plus a fixed sum of £40, £70 or £100 depending on the size of the debt, and it is genuinely powerful. The catch is in section 2: it applies only where the buyer and the supplier are each acting in the course of a business. A homeowner having a boiler swapped is not. On a domestic job, none of it exists.
Work out what a business customer owes you, using the rate that was actually locked in for your dates rather than today's, in our late payment interest calculator.
The mistake worth avoiding
The obvious fix looks like putting the same 8% into your domestic terms and conditions. Do not. The Competition and Markets Authority's own guidance on unfair contract terms flags interest “excessively above the clearing banks' base rates” as likely unfair against a consumer, and cites a case where a clause charging exactly 8% over base was held unfair even though it was a genuine pre-estimate of the loss. An unfair term is not binding, so you would be handing the customer a defence and getting nothing.
The safer route on domestic work is to say nothing about interest in your terms, and ask the court for it instead. Under section 69 of the County Courts Act 1984 the court can add simple interest to a judgment, and the rate it usually applies is 8%. You end up in much the same place, without the unfair terms argument. Adding a flat “admin fee” or “debt collection charge” to a homeowner's bill sits in the same risky territory as the interest clause.
Check this before you chase anything
Did you sign it up at their kitchen table?
This one is not on any other page about unpaid invoices, and it is the way trades most often lose the right to be paid at all. If you agreed a domestic job face to face somewhere that is not your own premises, which for most trades means the customer's house, that is an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. The customer gets 14 days to cancel, and you have to give them written notice of that right before they are bound.
Miss the notice and two things happen. The cancellation window stretches to twelve months rather than 14 days. And under regulation 36, if you started work inside the cancellation period without having given that information, the customer bears no cost for the work done in it. Not a reduced cost. No cost.
Failing to give the cancellation information is also a criminal offence carrying an unlimited fine. There are exceptions worth knowing: jobs the customer specifically called you out to as an urgent repair are outside the cancellation right, as are contracts under £42 and goods made to their specification. If you take work in people's homes and you have never issued a cancellation notice, fixing your paperwork today is worth more than anything else on this page.
The usual excuse
“I am not paying, the work is not right.”
Most non-payment in the trades is not a flat refusal, it is a quality complaint arriving the day the invoice does. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 handles this better than most trades realise, and it points the same way every time: they have to let you put it right first.
Under section 55 the customer's first remedy is repeat performance, meaning you come back and do the work again at your own cost. Only under section 56 can they move to a price reduction, and only in two situations: where fixing it is impossible, or where you were asked and failed to do it in a reasonable time. A customer cannot skip straight to withholding the lot. And what they can hold back is what it would reasonably cost to put the specific defect right, not the whole invoice and not the parts of the job nobody is complaining about.
Send this the same day
Ask them to list each defect specifically. Offer two dates to attend and put it right, at your cost. State that you are offering repeat performance under section 55. If they refuse you access, write that down with the date. A documented, refused offer to fix the work is the strongest single document you can create, and it does two jobs: it undercuts their price reduction argument, and it shows the court who was being reasonable.
Cheapest first, not fastest first
The ladder, and what each rung costs you.
Every other guide sequences this by time: day three a reminder, day seven a chaser, day 21 a phone call. That is the wrong axis. What decides whether to climb another rung is what the next one costs against what you are owed.
| Rung | What it costs you | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| Phone call and a polite chaser | Nothing but your evening | Always. Most late payment is disorganisation, not refusal |
| Formal overdue notice, interest added | Nothing, and it costs a business customer real money | Business customers, once your terms have run out |
| Letter before action | An hour, and a stamp | Nearly always. It is the rung that gets most trades paid |
| Debt collection agency | A cut of whatever comes back | You want it off your desk and the sum justifies the slice |
| County court claim | £35 to £455 to issue, plus a hearing fee | The debt is clear and the customer has something to take |
| Adjudication | Four figures unless you use a capped scheme | Commercial or subcontract work only, and rarely under £5,000 |
Worth naming the obvious: nearly every well-ranked page on this subject is published by somebody who sells the last rung. Debt collection firms, insolvency practitioners, credit insurers and invoice finance companies all write helpful-looking guides that happen to end at their own front door. We build websites, so we are not selling you any of it. On a £400 call-out that has gone quiet, one firm letter and then writing it off is often the right commercial answer, and no collection agency is going to tell you that.
The rung most guides get wrong
The letter before action.
You will read “give them seven days” or “give them 14 days” all over the internet. Where your debtor is an individual, which includes a homeowner and includes another sole trader, that is wrong and it can cost you. The Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims applies, and it gives them 30 days to reply.
It also tells you what has to be in the envelope, and this is the part people skip. Alongside the letter itself you have to enclose an information sheet, a reply form and a financial statement form, all in the protocol's annexes, plus an up to date statement of the account. The letter has to be dated at the top and posted, and if the deal was oral it has to set out who agreed it, when, where, and as far as possible the words used. Issue early or without the enclosures and the court can stay your claim, order you to pay costs, or dock the interest you would have been awarded.
Against a limited company the protocol does not apply and the requirement is lighter: a clear letter setting out the claim and a reasonable time to respond, ordinarily around 14 days on a straightforward debt. That is the one case where the standard internet advice is roughly right.
Two fees, not one
What court actually costs and takes.
There is no such thing as “the small claims court”. It is the small claims track of the County Court, and anything up to £10,000 lands there. You can issue online. The fee to issue is only half the story, because a second fee falls due if it reaches a hearing.
| Claim value | To issue | Hearing fee |
|---|---|---|
| Up to £300 | £35 | £27 |
| £300 to £500 | £50 | £59 |
| £500 to £1,000 | £70 | £85 |
| £1,000 to £1,500 | £80 | £123 |
| £1,500 to £3,000 | £115 | £181 |
| £3,000 to £5,000 | £205 | £346 |
| £5,000 to £10,000 | £455 | £346 |
So a £6,000 claim that runs all the way is £801 before you see anything. You get both fees back if you win. You do not get your solicitor back: on this track the court can only order the loser to pay court fees, reasonable travel, loss of earnings capped at £95 a day and an expert capped at £750. That cap cuts both ways, and it is why the track works without a solicitor.
Mediation is now compulsory on claims of £10,000 or less. It is free, it is done over the phone, it lasts about an hour, and refusing to engage can get your case struck out or leave you paying costs even if you win. Treat the mediation appointment as part of the process, not an optional extra.
On timing, the honest picture is better than the scary one. A defended claim that goes to trial took a median of 37.6 weeks from issue in the first quarter of 2026. But of roughly 450,000 money claims issued in that quarter, only about 72,000 were defended at all. Most trades never see a hearing, because the customer never files a defence and judgment goes in by default in weeks.
The bit the guides stop before
Winning is not the same as getting paid.
A judgment is a finding that you are owed money. It is not money. Whether it turns into money depends entirely on what the customer has, and that is the question worth asking before you pay the issue fee rather than after.
Sending in bailiffs costs £96 and only works if there are goods worth taking. An attachment of earnings costs £139 and is useless against anyone self-employed, which describes a fair few trade debtors. A third party debt order costs £139 and is a snapshot of their bank on one day. A charging order also costs £139 and secures the debt against a property they own, which does not pay you now but is usually the strongest option against a homeowner, because it has to be dealt with when they sell.
One quirk worth knowing before you choose: a county court judgment under £5,000 carries no interest at all, and enforcing through the county court stops interest running even on larger judgments. Taking a writ to the High Court instead keeps it running. And there is a counter-intuitive point about the pressure a judgment puts on people: against a homeowner it wrecks their credit and their mortgage prospects for six years, which is exactly why naming it in a properly done letter before action so often produces payment without you ever issuing. Against a limited company that will simply be dissolved, it is worth close to nothing.
Where trades turn a debt into a charge
Do not rip your work back out.
You will find this advice on both sides of the internet. One debt collection firm's blog tells tradesmen to go and remove their materials and put the place back as it was. A trade body tells you never to remove anything you have installed, without saying why. So here is the why, because it settles it.
Once materials are fixed to a building they stop being your goods and become part of the land, owned by whoever owns the property. That happens by operation of law, whether or not you have been paid, and a retention of title clause in your terms does not stop it. The leading cases are blunt about this: an agreement between the person fitting the item and the landowner cannot prevent the item becoming part of the land once it is fixed.
Which means going back to take it out is not recovering your property. Severing something that forms part of land you are not in possession of is theft under the Theft Act 1968. Damaging the wall you take it off is criminal damage, which covers buildings as well as goods and carries up to ten years. If the customer has told you not to come back, you are entering as a trespasser intending to remove or damage something, which in a dwelling is burglary, and the offence is complete the moment you step inside whether you take anything or not.
Where you do still own it
Unfixed materials are different. A pallet of tiles sitting in the hallway that you have not laid yet can still be yours, if your terms retain title and you can identify them as your stock. What a retention of title clause cannot give you is the right to walk into someone's house to collect them. Get the clause into your terms by all means, but understand it protects materials on site before the install, not the bathroom you have already fitted.
Three more that trades reach for and should not. Telling a customer you will have them prosecuted or that you are calling the police about a civil debt is itself a criminal offence, because it is a false representation that criminal proceedings follow. Repeated aggressive phone calls or doorstep visits to an individual can be harassment, which is both a crime and something they can sue you for. And serving a statutory demand on a debt the customer genuinely disputes is an abuse of process that ends with you paying their costs.
The last one is withholding certificates. Where you self-certify under a competent person scheme, the compliance certificate has to reach the occupier and building control within 30 days, and gas defects have to be notified straight away. None of it is conditional on payment. Hold it back and you are risking your registration, and a criminal offence, over one invoice. Your own workmanship guarantee, an insurance-backed warranty you arranged, and any future goodwill are all yours to withhold. The statutory paperwork never is.
If a main contractor is the one not paying
The fast route that only exists on commercial work.
If you are a subcontractor owed money by a main contractor, you have a remedy no domestic trade has. Under the Construction Act you can refer the dispute to adjudication at any time and get a binding decision in 28 days. It applies to ordinary trade work, including heating, electrics, drainage, plumbing and even decorating, and since 2011 it applies to oral contracts too. There is also a hard-edged payment notice regime: if the payer serves neither a payment notice nor a pay less notice in time, the sum you notified becomes payable in full.
The catch is section 106, and it is absolute. The Act does not apply to a construction contract with a residential occupier, meaning someone who lives or intends to live in the property. So the homeowner who owes you money is precisely the customer this route cannot touch. Any guide telling a domestic trade to adjudicate has not read it. Your route is the county court.
Cost is the other catch. Adjudication is priced for commercial disputes, and on a typical reference the adjudicator's fee alone runs well into four figures, which makes it absurd for a small invoice. The exception worth knowing is that several nominating bodies now run capped low-value schemes for smaller claims, which brings it back into range. Check the current cap and fee with the body direct before you commit, because they change.
Where you actually hold the cards
Stopping the next one.
The standard prevention advice is written for offices: run credit checks, tighten your terms, automate your invoicing, buy credit insurance. None of it fits a sole trader fitting a bathroom. The trade version is shorter and it comes down to when in the job you hold the cards.
Take a deposit. Get materials paid for up front, so you are never financing someone else's kitchen out of your own account. Stage the payments against milestones rather than invoicing everything at the end, because you hold the cards right up until the final fix and hold none of them the moment the last radiator goes on. And put your terms, including the cancellation notice, in writing before you start, which is the cheapest insurance on this entire page.
One more that costs nothing. If a customer ever admits the debt, get it in writing. A signed note or an email saying they know they owe you restarts the six year clock from that date. A phone call saying the same thing does nothing at all.
The rest of the admin nobody enjoys
Getting paid is one part of it.
If the customer is a business and you want the exact figure to put in the letter, run it through our late payment interest calculator, which uses the rate locked in for your dates rather than today's. Chasing as a sole trader or through a company changes more than just the letter you send, and the real numbers on that decision are in sole trader or limited company? The other box-ticking exercise that only matters once something goes wrong is cover, and what is actually required versus merely expected is in what insurance do tradesmen need? And if the books are the thing keeping you up, the thresholds and deadlines are in Making Tax Digital for tradesmen.
Straight answers
Questions people actually ask.
- Can I charge a homeowner 8% interest on a late invoice?
- Not under the late payment legislation, no. The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 only applies where both sides are acting in the course of a business, so it does not reach a homeowner having a bathroom fitted. Copying that rate into your domestic terms is worse than useless: the Competition and Markets Authority points to a case where a clause charging a consumer 8% above base was held unfair, which makes it unenforceable. Say nothing about interest in your domestic terms and claim it from the court instead when you issue.
- Do you legally have 30 days to pay an invoice in the UK?
- Only for business customers, and only when no payment date was agreed. Between businesses, if nothing was agreed, payment falls due 30 days after the later of you finishing the work or the customer receiving the invoice. If you agreed 14 days, 14 days applies. There is no equivalent statutory 30-day rule for a homeowner at all: payment is due when your contract says, and if it says nothing, within a reasonable time.
- Can I take my materials back if the customer has not paid?
- Once they are fitted, no. The moment materials are attached to the building they become part of the land and belong to whoever owns it, whether or not you have been paid, and no retention of title clause changes that. Unfixed materials still stacked on site are a different question, but you would still need a lawful right to enter and collect them. Going back and removing fitted work is dealt with in full further up this page, and the risk is far worse than most trades assume.
- Can a customer refuse to pay because they are unhappy with the work?
- They can withhold what it would reasonably cost to put the specific defect right, not the whole invoice, and not the parts of the job that are fine. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 their first remedy is to let you come back and fix it. They only get to a price reduction if that is impossible or you fail to do it in a reasonable time. So the strongest thing you can do is offer, in writing and with dates, to return and put it right.
- Do I need a written contract to take a customer to court?
- No. A verbal agreement is a contract and is enforceable. What you need is evidence of it: the quote you texted over, the WhatsApp thread where they approved an extra, dated photos of the work, supplier delivery notes, and any message where they talk about the job as done. If the deal was oral, the letter you send before court has to set out who agreed it, when, where, and as far as you can manage, the actual words used.
- How much does it cost to take someone to the small claims court for an unpaid invoice?
- Two fees, not one. Issuing costs from £35 on a claim up to £300, rising through £205 for a claim up to £5,000, to £455 for a claim up to £10,000. If it reaches a hearing there is a second fee, from £27 up to £346 on anything over £3,000. So a £6,000 claim that goes the distance is £801 out of your pocket before you see a penny. Both are recoverable from the customer if you win.
- How long does a small claims case take?
- Where it is defended and goes to trial, a median of 37.6 weeks from issue to hearing, per the Ministry of Justice figures for the first quarter of 2026. But most claims are not defended: of roughly 450,000 money claims issued that quarter, about 72,000 were defended. For most trades the realistic outcome is a default judgment in weeks because the customer never files a defence.
- Do I need a solicitor for small claims?
- Rarely worth it, because you cannot recover their fees. On the small claims track the court can only order the loser to pay court fees, reasonable travel, loss of earnings capped at £95 a day, and an expert capped at £750. Your solicitor is not on that list. That is why the track works for a litigant in person, and why paying a solicitor to run a £4,000 claim usually costs more than it recovers.
- Can I refuse to hand over the electrical certificate or gas paperwork until I am paid?
- No, and it is the worst idea on this page. Where you self-certify under a competent person scheme, the Building Regulations require the compliance certificate to reach both the occupier and building control within 30 days, and the gas regulations require defects to be notified straight away. None of it is conditional on payment. Withhold it and you risk your scheme registration and a criminal offence, over one invoice. Your guarantee and your future goodwill are yours to withhold. The statutory paperwork is not.
- How long do I have to chase an unpaid invoice before it is too late?
- Six years from the date the debt fell due, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland is five years and works differently: the debt is extinguished altogether rather than just becoming unenforceable. One useful wrinkle: if the customer acknowledges the debt in writing and signs it, or makes any part payment, a fresh six years starts running. A phone call saying the same thing does nothing, so get it in writing.
- Should I use a debt collection agency?
- It is an option once you have exhausted the free rungs, and the trade-off is simple: you swap a slice of the money for not having to do it yourself. Agencies typically take a percentage of what they recover. Worth knowing that if your debtor is a business, the late payment legislation lets you claim reasonable recovery costs above the fixed sum, so some of that fee can be passed on. Against a homeowner it cannot.
- Can I threaten to call the police or have them prosecuted?
- No, and doing so is itself an offence. Telling a customer that criminal proceedings follow from an unpaid bill is a false representation, because an unpaid invoice is a civil debt. Repeated aggressive calls or doorstep visits to an individual can also amount to harassment, which is both a crime and something they can sue you for. Chase hard by all means, but chase in writing and stick to what you can actually do.
About this page
Where these figures come from.
Written in August 2026 and checked against primary sources rather than other guides. Court fees are from the HM Courts and Tribunals Service fee list EX50 as published on 13 July 2026. The timings and the defended-claim figures are from the Ministry of Justice civil justice statistics for January to March 2026. The rights and duties described come from the legislation itself: the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, the Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims, the Theft Act 1968, the Criminal Damage Act 1971 and the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996.
This covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run different court systems with different limits, and Scotland's time limit is five years rather than six and works differently again, so check locally before relying on the procedural parts.
It is general information about how the rules work, not advice on your particular job. On a small invoice the whole point is that you can handle it yourself. Once the sum gets large, or the customer has a solicitor, or there is a real argument about the quality of the work, paying for an hour of proper advice is cheap next to getting it wrong.
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