Prompt payment and adjudication in Ontario

That second qualification is the one that decides whether the first matters to you. In August 2026 nearly every Ontario project carrying a mature delay claim sits on a contract signed between 1 July 2018 and 31 December 2025, inside the middle of Ontario's three date-keyed regimes, where adjudication exists but time is not on the list of things that can be adjudicated. The reform is prospective, and on real delay claims it will not bite for another one to three years. So the regime table comes first, before any of the machinery.

One evidential warning governs everything below. No Ontario statutory text was read from the consolidated statute and no Ontario judgment was read in original form for this article. CanLII, the Supreme Court portal, ontariocourts.ca and Ontario e-Laws were all inaccessible to the research behind it. Statutory content comes from enacting bill texts and firm bulletins, case content rests on firm bulletins. Every section number and every neutral citation here should be checked against the consolidated statute or the judgment before it is pleaded, and the two places where the sources positively conflict are marked in the text.

For the wider Ontario picture see the Ontario extension-of-time hub, for the pan-Canadian backdrop, the Canadian extension-of-time hub.

Which of Ontario's three regimes is your contract on?

Ontario runs three delay-and-payment regimes simultaneously, keyed to the contract date, and the answer changes whether adjudication exists at all and whether time can be referred to it. Ask this before the merits. A contract signed on 20 December 2025 and a contract signed on 20 January 2026 are on different statutes for these purposes, and nothing about the project distinguishes them.

Layer, jurisdictional, and the authority is statute rather than case law. The rows rest on secondary sources: no consolidated Ontario statutory text was read for this corpus, so treat the section references as directional and check the transition provision itself.

The transition machinery is section 87.4 of the Construction Act, introduced by Bill 216, the Building Ontario For You Act (Budget Measures), 2024, Schedule 4 and subsequently amended by Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025, Schedule 2 specifically for project agreements. Section 88 confers Ministerial transitional regulation-making power, which means the boundary can move by regulation without a further bill. Bill 216 was the substantive overhaul, it followed Duncan Glaholt's 2024 independent review and rewrote or introduced more than thirty provisions, including ss 13.5, 13.12.1, 13.17.1, 13.18, 13.19, 26 to 27.1 and 87.4, but its commencement was by proclamation, so Bill 216 by itself commenced nothing. Bill 60 was corrective: it re-wrote s 26, replaced s 31(6) to (8) with the 7-day notice of termination, added a definition of "Minister", and touched ss 13.2, 13.4, 87.4 and 88. Bill 60 does not affect any of the adjudication amendments.

Two things about Bill 216 are commonly misreported. First, its original proposal to re-tie lien expiry to the annual holdback release notice did not survive. Lien preservation, perfection and expiry timing are unchanged at 60 and 90 days, and 2024–25 commentary describing a new Ontario lien regime is describing a dropped proposal. Second, the operative instruments are the four regulations that came into force on 1 January 2026, O. Reg. 264/25 Adjudications Under Part II.1, 265/25 Procedures for Actions Under Part VIII, 266/25 General and 267/25 Forms not the bill. O. Regs 302/18 and 304/18 were also amended. The reported filing date of 27 November 2025 is unverified.

Transitional jurisdiction is already being litigated. In Caledon (Town) v 2220742 Ont. Ltd. o/a Bronte Construction 2024 ONSC 4555 the Divisional Court considered jurisdiction under the transitional provisions and upheld it. That is the practical warning: the date question is not a formality that the other side will concede, and it is litigable in its own right. The deadline architecture that follows from the answer is set out in the Ontario delay claim clocks.

What actually became adjudicable on 1 January 2026

Three matters were added to the adjudicable list on 1 January 2026, and time is one of them. O. Reg. 264/25, Adjudications Under Part II.1 s 19 prescribes the scope of work to be performed under a contract, a request for a change in the contract price. And (the headline) "a request for an extension of time to complete the work prescribed by the contract". Each is adjudicable only where resolving it is "reasonably necessary" to make a subsequent determination.

Two qualifications on the citation itself. The section number carries a [CONFLICT, minor]: one firm refers to s 19.1 while ODACC, the Ontario Association of Architects and Cassels refer to s 19, and the corpus behind this article prefers s 19. And the whole content of the regulation rests on firm bulletins, the regulation itself was not read.

The enabling change on the statutory side is that section 13.5 of the Construction Act no longer contains a list at all. As amended it reads: "Subject to subsection (3), a party to a contract may refer a dispute with the other party to the contract respecting any prescribed matter or any matter agreed to by the parties to adjudication." Scope now lives in the regulation, which is why the regulation, not the Act, is where an Ontario practitioner looks to see whether a delay dispute is referable.

Three conditions decide cases, and they are worth separating.

"Reasonably necessary" is a jurisdictional gate, not a preamble. A pure extension-of-time referral is still not available in Ontario. EOT is an ancillary head, so the referral has to be drafted with the time question instrumental to a money determination, the value of a disputed change, the amount payable under a disputed invoice, the amount wrongly withheld. Or it will be attacked as outside the prescribed matters. Attacked, and possibly successfully: the third ground in the closed judicial review list is that the determination was of a matter that may not be the subject of adjudication.

The objection has to be taken in the adjudication. Under section 13.12.1 a party may object that the adjudicator lacks jurisdiction, or has exceeded it, with the timing tied to when that party first makes submissions or as soon as the matter is raised. A jurisdictional objection not raised before the adjudicator cannot ground judicial review unless the failure was justified. Object now or lose it, and note the mirror-image consequence for a referring party, which is that a respondent who says nothing at first submissions has largely conceded the gate.

And the largest projects get nothing. The three new heads are not available for adjudication on public-private-partnership projects, reported at s 19(1)6, but UNVERIFIED on the mechanism: the exact provision effecting the P3 / special-purpose-entity exclusion could not be read for this corpus, and one firm notes that certain P3 exemptions depend on the project agreement falling within types prescribed by regulation, with no such prescribing regulation issued as at the date of that bulletin. A related but distinct carve-out sits in the transition provision: project agreements entered with a special purpose entity under an AFP or P3 arrangement before 1 January 2026 are exempt from mandatory annual holdback release.

The very largest Ontario projects. The ones where extension-of-time claims are worth eight figures, are the ones where the new EOT-adjudication head does not apply. The first question in an Ontario delay file is therefore not "when did the delay start" but "is this an IO or AFP project agreement with a special purpose entity".

If the answer is yes, the reform gives you nothing on time and you are back inside the Infrastructure Ontario Project Agreement architecture, where a Delay Event gives time only, a Compensation Event gives time and money, and a Relief Event gives neither, only relief from performance and from default remedies. There is no CCDC analogue to a Relief Event, and an EOT claim on an IO project is won or lost at the classification step rather than in the delay analysis. The notice periods in those articles are project-specific, sit partly in the Articles and partly in the Schedules, and were not surfaced for this corpus, read the specific project agreement and never assume a period from CCDC or from another IO job.

One negative belongs here rather than in a footnote, because practitioners arriving from another province look for an equivalent and there is none. No Canadian equivalent of Ontario's O. Reg. 264/25 s 19 ancillary EOT head exists anywhere else. In Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the federal regime and Quebec, a delay or EOT question reaches an adjudicator only by being embedded in a change-order valuation or a payment dispute, or by consent. The Northwest Territories has prompt payment and no adjudication mechanism at all.

Alberta has to be split in two, and the second half is the one Ontario practitioners get wrong. Under the Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act, RSA 2000, c P-26.4 and the Public Works Act, RSA 2000, c P-46, Alberta runs two regimes. On private and municipal work the PPCLA has the widest consent catch-all in Canada, "any other matter in relation to the contract or subcontract that the parties to the dispute agree to, regardless of whether or not a proper invoice was issued" allows referral up to 30 days after final payment under s 33.4, permits adjudication to run concurrently with litigation, both since 1 April 2025 under Bill 30 (2024), and imposes no cap. On provincial Crown public works none of that is available: PPCLA s 1.1 excludes public works as defined in the Public Works Act, and agreements with the provincial Crown or a Crown agent, from the PPCLA entirely, and Public Works Act s 14.3(2), also Bill 30 (2024), contracts from 1 April 2025: makes delay not adjudicable at all, excluding schedule changes, completion and milestone dates, relief events, designated changes in law, remedial actions and force majeure by name. A cap applies to Public Works Act adjudication only, and its figure is CONFLICT between $200,000 and the $100,000 Alberta Court of Justice civil limit in force since 1 August 2023. Describing Alberta simply as a consent-only jurisdiction is now wrong in both directions.

How an Ontario EOT adjudication actually runs

An Ontario adjudication is fast, front-loaded and unforgiving on dates. The notice of adjudication must be given within 90 days of completion, abandonment or termination, a jurisdictional objection must be taken at first submissions, the adjudicator has 30 days to determine. The losing party has 10 days to pay, and an applicant for judicial review has 30 days to move for leave. Every one of those except the objection is a hard date.

The window is the change that matters most to a delay practice. Section 13.5(3) of the Construction Act makes adjudication of a contract dispute unavailable where the notice of adjudication is given more than 90 days after the date on which the contract is completed, abandoned or terminated. For a subcontract, s 13.5(3.1) runs the 90 days from the earliest of contract completion, abandonment or termination, certification or declaration of subcontract completion, and the date the subcontractor last supplied services or materials which for a subcontractor pushed off site early can be a long way before anyone considers the project finished. The parties may agree to extend either period.

That is a genuine reversal. Delay and EOT disputes almost always crystallise at or after completion, which is precisely the point at which adjudication used to become unavailable. The gate is now open for 90 days after completion, and then it shuts hard. Note also the 30-day tail against the lien clock: lien preservation is 60 days and the adjudication window is 90, so a contractor whose lien has already expired can still commence an adjudication for another 30 days. The two are independent starting an adjudication does not preserve a lien, and a determination lacks the property security a lien carries. Preserve on the 60-day clock and adjudicate in parallel or in the tail. The interaction is worked through in liens, holdback and security in Ontario.

A further new provision, s 13.5(3.2), enables regulations permitting cross-contract or multi-party adjudication between parties to different contracts on the same improvement. A delay chain, owner to general contractor to subcontractor, is the paradigm case for that power, and it is the enabling hook to watch.

One open point is worth flagging because it is available as an argument in either direction. Whether a contractual limitation clause valid under section 22 of the Limitations Act, 2002 and Ontario is the only Canadian jurisdiction where a commercial party may lawfully shorten or exclude a limitation period, can cut down or extend the 90-day adjudication window is undecided. Logically s 13.5(3) is a statutory precondition to a statutory remedy rather than a limitation period, which would put it outside s 22, but the express power to extend the window by agreement invites the contrary argument. The distinction is developed in the Ontario limitation periods note.

Once the referral is in, the clocks run as follows.

Layer, jurisdictional, and the authority is statute. No consolidated Ontario statutory text was read for this corpus, and the last two rows are in express conflict between sources, the 61% figure is from the ODACC annual report and not from the statute.

Get the two section numbers the right way round, because the inversion is common and it is a corpus-flagged error. Section 13.18 is Setting aside on judicial review: "An application for judicial review of a determination of an adjudicator may only be made with leave of the Divisional Court", the leave motion filed no later than 30 days after the determination is communicated, on a closed list of seven grounds at s 13.18(5), legal incapacity. The contract being invalid or having ceased to exist, the determination being of a matter that may not be the subject of adjudication or entirely unrelated to the subject of the adjudication, the adjudication having been conducted by someone other than the appointed adjudicator, the procedures not according with those prescribed and the failure having prejudiced the applicant's right to a fair adjudication, reasonable apprehension of bias, and fraud. A motion for leave "may be dismissed without reasons". Section 13.19 is Amounts payable, payment no later than 10 days after communication, subject to any Part IV holdback requirement, with interest at the prejudgment rate or the higher contract rate. 13.18 is judicial review, 13.19 is amounts payable.

Both of those day counts are CONFLICT. They are the Bill 142 numbers, an automated read of Bill 216, Schedule 4 reports the leave deadline moving from 30 to 35 days and the payment period from 10 to 15 days, and no firm bulletin repeats it. Because a missed leave deadline is fatal and unrecoverable, the safe course on a post-1-January-2026 determination is to work to the shorter number, 30 days for leave, and verify against the consolidated statute before relying on either.

What the FY2025 data says about the pace is worth having in front of you when deciding whether to refer a delay question at all.

Those figures are from the ODACC 2025 Annual Report for the fiscal year 1 August 2024 to 31 July 2025: 324 adjudications commenced, 143 determinations and 116 matters terminated before determination, $205,597,884.82 claimed in total against $26,610,365.85 determined payable. Two operational points follow. The 30-day determination period is aspirational in practice, nearly four determinations in ten were late in FY2025. So a party planning a cash-flow sequence around it should build slack. And the amounts are mid-market: the average claim has risen from $90,828 in 2020 to $277,168 in 2022 to $634,561 in FY2025, and the transportation and infrastructure sector accounted for 36 adjudications and $8.26 million with the highest median at $149,449. Private adjudicators are now permitted alongside the ODACC roster, which may change the throughput picture from FY2026.

And there is no delay dataset, in Ontario or anywhere in Canada. ODACC does not track delay, extension-of-time or change-order disputes as a category, change orders are folded into "payment under a contract", which accounted for 72 of the FY2025 determinations. There is no line item for time at all. No Ontario dataset on adjudicated delay claims exists, and none can until the FY2026 report, which will be the first period in which an extension of time was adjudicable.

The review case law. And it is the whole Canadian body

Ontario's judicial review jurisprudence on adjudication is the entire Canadian body of law on the subject. No reported judicial review of an adjudicator's determination exists in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba or federally, Alberta prescribes a 30-day window and no decided case has surfaced. Two Ontario decisions carry the delay content, and one of them is the only adjudicated-EOT authority in the country.

Ledore Investments Ltd v Dixin Construction Ltd 2024 ONSC 598 is the first successful judicial review of a determination in Canada. It is a procedural fairness case, not a jurisdictional-error case, and it is regularly miscited as the latter. The adjudicator decided the matter on a dispositive issue that neither party had raised, judicial review was granted for breach of procedural fairness and the matter remitted. The underlying dispute was a delay set-off, steel supplied roughly five months late, termination, and payment refused. It is the limit on adjudication's rough justice: speed does not licence deciding a case on a ground the parties never argued.

Sayers Foods Ltd v Gay Company Ltd 2026 ONSC 918 is the first Ontario delay adjudication to survive judicial review, and its holding is the one an owner needs to hear: "complexity in the defences raised does not deprive an adjudicator of jurisdiction." A family grocery store had engaged the contractor under a CCDC 2 contract to rebuild after a fire, said the contractor missed a March 2023 completion date, claimed roughly $900,000 in delay damages and later asserted a delay credit exceeding $1.2 million as a set-off against payment. The contractor commenced two adjudications totalling about $851,000. On review the Divisional Court held that the adjudicator may decide all issues necessary to resolve the single matter before them, including complex delay arguments, that the owner's set-off failed on the contract rather than on jurisdiction, because the contract contained no binding completion date, no delay-damages mechanism and no contractual set-off right, so the delay claim could not defeat the payment entitlement "even if the issues were complicated". And that the standard of review is reasonableness for the adjudicator's factual and contractual findings, correctness for procedural fairness, with judicial review "not a re-hearing de novo". Jurisdictional error, procedural unfairness, irreparable harm, fraud and reasonable apprehension of bias were all argued and all rejected. Sayers Foods displaces Pasqualino (2022) on the complexity point. The neutral citations for both Sayers Foods and Pasqualino are unverified.

The rest of the line supplies the procedural architecture rather than delay content.

Layer, jurisdictional. Every decision listed is first instance or Divisional Court, there is no appellate authority on Ontario adjudication in this material. No Canadian judgment was read in original form for this corpus and the holdings rest on secondary sources.

Stacked together, those cases make review far narrower than "correctness on jurisdiction, reasonableness on the merits" suggests. An applicant faces, in order: the closed s 13.18(5) list, then leave, on the Anatolia two-part test and the SOTA precondition of payment or a stay, then the standard, reasonableness for factual and contractual findings and fairness for process, with fairness itself running through the conjunctive s 13.18(5)5 test that requires both a procedural failure and prejudice. And finally the near-total displacement of jurisdiction as a ground by s 13.12.1. An owner that loses a delay set-off in an adjudication has almost no route back, notwithstanding that the determination is legally interim (Arad).

Ontario's adjudicated-EOT case law is, as at August 2026, one case deep. Before Sayers Foods no Ontario judicial review had addressed delay or extension of time at all, and the reason is structural rather than accidental: pre-2026 s 13.5(1) contained a closed list that did not include time, so a delay dispute could only reach an adjudicator dressed as something else.

One collateral risk belongs with the forum question. A delay claim tried inside a lien action rather than an ordinary action carries appeal-route risk that the ordinary action does not, on the s 110 Courts of Justice Act uncertainty left by Castle Homes Design Inc v McKenzie 2026 ONCA 98. That is a reason to think about the procedural vehicle at the outset rather than after a determination has been handed down.

How prompt payment changed the leverage on a delay claim

The 2026 package systematically removed the money an Ontario owner used to hold against a delay claim. An invoice is now deemed proper unless the owner objects within 7 days, the 28-day payment clock runs from the proper invoice, annual holdback release is mandatory. And s 27.1. The owner's notice of non-payment of holdback is repealed. An owner that wants to withhold against delay now needs an express contractual mechanism and must prove it, fast.

Take the deeming rule first. Section 6.1 of the Construction Act deems an invoice to be a proper invoice unless the owner gives written notice of the deficiency within 7 days of receipt. Because the 28-day prompt-payment clock runs from the proper invoice, the deeming rule converts owner silence into a running clock: an owner that says nothing for a week has started a 28-day obligation it may not have intended to start. For a contractor with a live delay claim that is a scheduling tool it forces the owner to articulate its objection in writing, early, and in terms it will have to live with.

Then the holdback. Sections 26 to 27.1 now require the owner, on a contract running more than one year, to publish a Notice of Annual Release of Holdback in Form 6 within 14 days of each contract anniversary, and to pay the released holdback not less than 60 and not later than 74 days after publication a fixed 14-day payment window that opens on day 60. There is a 14-day cascade to subcontractors on receipt. And the owner's escape hatch is gone: s 27.1, the notice of non-payment of holdback, is repealed, so the statutory power to refuse release for incomplete or deficient work no longer exists.

For an owner that historically ran delay damages as a set-off against holdback, the practical consequence is precise. Holdback used to be the money that sat there while the parties argued about whether the contractor was late. The owner could decline to release it by giving a statutory notice, and the burden of doing something about that fell on the contractor. Now the release is mandatory and calendar-driven, the contractor's invoices are self-proving after seven days, and if the owner wants to keep the money it must rely on a contractual delay-damages and set-off mechanism which, on Sayers Foods, it will have to substantiate inside a 30-day adjudication rather than by simply holding the cash and waiting.

None of this touches the contractual notice clock, and that is the trap for a contractor who reads the reform as a general loosening. CCDC 2 – 2020 GC 6.5.4 still requires Notice in Writing of the cause of delay to the Consultant not later than 10 Working Days after the commencement of the delay, not of its effect, with one notice sufficing for a continuing cause, and Ontario courts treat that as a condition precedent without requiring the owner to prove prejudice. A statutory adjudication does not revive an entitlement that a missed contractual notice has already extinguished. The condition-precedent question across the standard forms generally is set out in the neutral treatment of notice and time bars.

The open question on every IO and AFP project, can an arbitration clause oust adjudication?

Whether an arbitration clause ousts statutory adjudication has not been decided in Ontario. The scheme strongly implies that it cannot be contracted out of, a party "may refer" a dispute to adjudication, and section 4 of the Construction Act bars waiver of the Act's provisions, but no Ontario court has said so. The question is expressly open, and it is not academic: IO and AFP project agreements all contain bespoke arbitration regimes.

The interaction with the P3 carve-out is what makes it live. On a P3 project entered before 1 January 2026 the position is straightforward in the sense that nothing helps the contract predates the reform and the new heads would not apply to it anyway. On a P3 project entered after that date the EOT head still does not apply, but adjudication of a payment dispute is not carved out. And it is there, on a payment dispute between a special purpose entity and its contractor under an agreement with a multi-tier arbitration clause, that the ouster question will eventually be argued.

There is a second reason it will take time to answer. Ontario's largest delay disputes generate no citable law. IO and Metrolinx project agreements resolve confidentially, and no public judgment or published award on Ontario Line delay exists. The disputes most likely to produce an answer on arbitration versus adjudication are the disputes least likely to be reported. Until one surfaces, a practitioner on an IO or AFP job should plan on the arbitration route, treat any adjudication as an argument to be made rather than a right to be exercised, and, on the classification question that actually decides these claims: go back to Articles 31, 32 and 33 of the project agreement.

Sobre este material El contenido de la biblioteca es información general sobre la práctica de las reclamaciones de construcción, no asesoramiento jurídico. El derecho a reclamar, los plazos y el procedimiento se rigen por su propio contrato y por el derecho del lugar donde se ejecuta la obra. Revisado el 8 de agosto de 2026 · Informar de una corrección