What belongs in a contract before you sign it
The disputes on this site turn on a handful of clauses far more often than on the work itself. This is what each one has to say to be worth anything.
Why the contract and not the work
Almost every argument is about what was agreed
A business defending itself rarely claims the work is excellent. It claims the work is what was agreed, that the extra was approved, or that no date was ever promised. Each of those is a claim about the document, and the document either answers it or it does not.1
That is why this is the last cheap moment in a job. Every clause below costs a sentence to add now and a dispute to establish later.
The clauses
Eight things the document has to settle
Who the parties are
The full legal name of the business, matching its license, and your own name and the property address. A contract with a trading name and no entity behind it names nobody you can pursue.
What the work is, to the point of boredom
Materials by brand and grade, quantities, areas, and what is excluded. Scope is the single most argued clause, and a line reading the agreed works is not a scope.
A start date and a completion date
Both, as dates. Duration alone floats, because a job that takes four weeks starting whenever the crew is free has no date to have missed.
What a change order looks like
That changes are priced and agreed in writing before the work happens, and who may approve one. This clause is what stops a final invoice being the first you hear of an extra.
The payment schedule, tied to stages
Each payment attached to a completed stage rather than a date, so money follows work. The amounts and the deposit belong here too.
Permits, and who pulls them
Named explicitly. A contractor who asks the owner to pull the permit is moving responsibility for compliance onto the owner, and the contract is where that becomes visible.
The workmanship warranty
How long, what it covers, and who honours it. Distinct from any manufacturer warranty on the products, which covers a different thing and is not the contractor's promise.
What happens when there is a disagreement
Notice, an opportunity to cure, and what comes after. A clause requiring written notice before anybody walks is protection for whichever of you is in the right.
The test for any clause
Could a stranger tell whether it was met?
Everything above reduces to one question, and it is the question a board, a surety or a judge will actually ask. A clause somebody who was not there can check, such as a date, a brand, a stage or a signature, is worth having. A clause that turns on what both of you understood at the time is worth nothing at the moment it matters, however reasonable it sounded when it was written.
Most often missing
Three absences that decide the outcome
A completion date
Present as a conversation and absent from the document. Without one there is no date that has been missed, so there is nothing to have breached and nothing to escalate.
A change-order clause
Its absence is what turns every verbal adjustment into a line on the last invoice, argued after the work is done and the leverage is gone.
Payment tied to stages
Calendar payments release money for elapsed time. When a job stalls at sixty per cent, the schedule keeps paying and the only remedy left is to stop and argue.
Next
The money half
The payment schedule is the clause with the most at stake and it has its own page: deposits, progress payments and holdback. If you have not yet checked who you are contracting with, the three public records come before any of this.2
Disclosures
- 1.Satisfy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, and nothing here is a contract or a substitute for one. This page describes clauses commonly found in home improvement agreements. It does not review any contract or say whether one is adequate.
- 2.What a home improvement contract must contain, what a deposit may be, what notice is required, and what warranty is implied by law are set by each state, and several states require terms not mentioned here. Nothing on this page states a requirement, because none of them is the same in any two places.