Builders Retention

crisp

The labour cost is £45,000 split over 6 payments of £7,500 over 4-months of work.

What level of retention should I hold back and for how long?

a.turner

Whatever you've agreed to or is in the contract.

Tom99

What contract?

Syman

as a rule of thumb for my larger contracts the retention is 5%, payable after 12 months

Doozergirl

The stage payments should be split as a valuation of the work actually done on each agreed date, not a pre-prescribed amount paid on specific dates. That's how jobs run into trouble - because you aren't tracking the value.

We don't play the retention game anymore, but the suggestion of 12 months is excessive for what isn't a massive job. The last time we agreed a retention, it was 5% with 2.5% payable on practical completion and 2.5% three months later. That backfired on us and we never got the last money, so we simply don't do it - it's us running the credit line to the customer for most of the job, after all.