Anonymised, illustrative composite. A British Columbia landscaping subcontractor finished an $86,000 hardscape and planting package on schedule, then waited fourteen weeks to be paid — because its subcontract said the general contractor only had to pay once the owner paid the GC, and nothing in BC’s construction statute says that clause can’t stand.
At a glance
The landscaper had worked for this GC on three prior jobs without incident and treated the fourth the same way — price the scope, do the work to schedule, invoice on completion. It finished the hardscape and planting package, including irrigation tie-in and a retaining-wall feature, on the agreed date and submitted its final invoice for $86,000. The GC did not dispute a single line of it. The quality was accepted, the quantities matched the tender, and the site super signed off without a deficiency noted.
What the landscaper had not fully absorbed, because it had never come up on the first three jobs, was the exact wording buried in its standard-form subcontract: the GC’s obligation to pay was expressly conditioned on the GC first being paid by the owner for that scope of work. On this job, the owner was withholding a much larger sum from the GC over a deficiency claim against an entirely different trade — the building envelope contractor, not the landscaper. The landscaper had done nothing wrong and had no visibility into that dispute, but its payment was tied to its outcome anyway.
The landscaper assumed a provincial statute would step in the way it understood happens in other provinces — a fixed clock that starts on a proper invoice and runs regardless of what else is unresolved upstream. It did not. British Columbia is the one major province in this comparison without that kind of statutory prompt-payment regime, and the landscaper’s subcontract carried no cap on how long a pay-when-paid clause could run.
The BC Builders Lien Act runs to dozens of sections covering holdback (s.4), the holdback account (s.5), the holdback’s expiry (s.8), the statutory trust over money received on account of the contract price (s.10), and lien filing and priority (ss.20–22) in real detail. Nowhere in it does a “proper invoice” start a payment clock the way it does under Ontario’s Construction Act or Alberta’s Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act. The Act protects security — liens, holdback, a share of the trust fund — and says nothing about how quickly an invoice has to be paid once it is submitted and undisputed.
The contrast with the rest of the country is not theoretical. Alberta's Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act came into force province-wide on August 29, 2022, and the Ontario's Construction Act adjudication and prompt-payment provisions have applied since October 1, 2019, with further amendments taking effect January 1, 2026. Both regimes give a contractor a statutory payment timetable that can override exactly this kind of clause, forcing the payer to either pay on the clock or deliver a formal notice explaining why not. British Columbia currently has neither piece of legislation.
$86,000 invoiced, and undisputed on the merits from the day it was submitted. Fourteen weeks passed between substantial completion of the landscaping package and the invoice actually being paid, while the owner and GC worked through the unrelated envelope-trade deficiency dispute. Zero interest or damages were recovered for the delay itself, because the clause that caused it was enforceable exactly as written — there was no separate legal wrong to claim against, only a contract term the landscaper had agreed to.
This is the bind worth sitting with: the same clause, on a job governed by Alberta or Ontario law, would have been overridden by a statutory payment timetable running independently of the owner’s separate dispute with the GC — the contractor pays each subcontractor within a fixed window of being paid itself, or must deliver a formal notice of non-payment inside that window explaining why not, regardless of what else is unresolved upstream. In British Columbia, nothing forces that timetable to exist at all. The Act is silent on payment timing by design; it protects the security a subcontractor holds, not the speed at which it gets paid.
The landscaper was paid in full once the owner and GC resolved their unrelated dispute, fourteen weeks after substantial completion, with no recovery for the delay itself and no forum in BC that would have shortened it. Going forward, the firm rewrote its standard BC subcontract to cap any pay-when-paid clause at a fixed number of days regardless of upstream disputes, and now asks every GC on a BC job what dispute-resolution timeline the head contract itself carries, since the province’s own statute won’t supply one. See how a pay-when-paid clause is defined and used, and how a different BC payment dispute reached a fast resolution through a mechanical contractor used adjudication instead of waiting on someone else’s timeline.
For how a firm keeps cash flow visible when a clause like this is in play, see how AI helps forecast contractor cash flow.
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