Working days
Working days in a building contract exclude weekends and public holidays; they count EOT and variation windows, and are not the same as SOP business days.
Ask Chalkline about this →Working days in a building contract is a defined counting period that excludes Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays, and, depending on the contract, the Christmas and New Year shutdown. It is the unit the contract’s time windows are counted in, most importantly the notification windows for an extension of time (EOT) and for accepting or disputing a variation.
These windows are short and counting them right matters. Under HIA contracts the EOT notification window is 10 working days in NSW and 5 working days in the ACT after the builder becomes aware of the delay, and the owner typically has 5 working days to dispute an EOT claim. Miss the window and you can forfeit a valid EOT entirely, so working days are not a formality. Count them from the contract’s own definition of which holidays and shutdown days it excludes, not from a plain calendar of weekdays.
Working days is also not the same as a business day under the Security of Payment Acts, which is a separate statutory term with its own exclusions. A NSW SOP business day excludes weekends and NSW public holidays; the Victorian SOP Act also excludes the construction-industry shutdown (about 22 December to 10 January). So a payment-claim deadline under the SOP Act and an EOT deadline under the contract can fall on different days over the same holiday period. Read each clause’s own definition, because counting one by the other’s rule is a common cause of missed deadlines. See EOTs and variations.
Also known as: Working day, contract working days.
Category: Contracts / Time and deadlines.
Related
See also
References
- HIA: claiming extensions of time (verified 2026-05-16)
- NSW Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 1999 (verified 2026-05-16)
Last updated: 2026-05-30. Verified: 2026-05-16. Quarterly review for currency.