Can a final account dispute go to adjudication?
Yes: on a construction contract covered by the Act, a dispute can be referred at any time, often better aimed at one head of the account than the whole of it.
Updated: 22 August 2026
The answer
Yes. On a construction contract covered by the Construction Act 1996, either side can refer a dispute to adjudication (the fast 28 day process in which an independent adjudicator decides the dispute and the decision binds the parties unless and until a court or arbitrator later overturns it) at any time, and that includes a dispute about the final account. The right does not expire when the job ends, so a final account dispute is just as referable as an interim payment dispute during the works. The real question is not whether you can, but how wide to make it. A referral of the whole account asks a great deal of a 28 day timetable, because the adjudicator has to grasp and decide every disputed head within a few weeks. A referral confined to the largest or cleanest single head, one family of variations, one schedule of set-offs, one retention balance, is far easier to decide well, and a clear decision there tends to reset the value of everything still in dispute and push the rest towards settlement. So usually pick your strongest head and refer that, rather than throwing the entire account at the process.
Example
Picture a cladding subcontractor whose final account has been stuck for eight months, long after the building was handed over. Talks have gone nowhere, and the whole account, dozens of variations, a delay claim, two set-off schedules and a retention balance, is in dispute over a spread of about £90,000. It could refer the entire account, but asking an adjudicator to master all of that in 28 days is a stretch and risks a rushed decision. Instead it picks its cleanest, largest head: a single retention balance of £25,000 that plainly fell due when the defects were signed off and for which the contractor served no withholding notice. That narrow question is easy to decide, and the subcontractor wins it inside a month. The £25,000 is recovered, and just as usefully, the decision changes the mood of the whole negotiation, so the remaining heads that seemed frozen start to move towards settlement.