A missed prompt-payment deadline doesn't cost you the money you're owed — it costs you the fast, statutory route to collecting it. The clock that matters depends on which province the contract sits in, and in Ontario, the length of that clock isn't published anywhere at all.
Key takeaways
Every contractor tracking payment deadlines eventually builds the same spreadsheet: invoice date, days to pay, due date, flag if late. It works right up until a second province enters the picture, because “prompt payment” is not one clock in Canada — it's a different clock in every jurisdiction that has adopted it, and Ontario, the province where the concept originated, is the one that publishes the least about how long its own clock actually runs.
Ontario's Construction Act ties payment to a defined trigger — a “proper invoice” — and the Ontario Dispute Adjudication for Construction Contracts (ODACC), the body the Act itself designates to run adjudications, is the natural place to look for how long the payer then has. ODACC's own prompt-payment page does not publish that number. Its substantive text on the subject amounts to two sentences: a pointer back to the Act itself, and a plain “No” when asked whether ODACC provides a template of a proper invoice. Treadstone Law publishes the commonly-cited figures — 28 days for the owner to pay, 7 days for the contractor to flow it down to a subcontractor — but hedges both explicitly: “as of writing,” with an instruction to verify with a lawyer before relying on either number, because the Act was itself amended again on 1 January 2026. Build the file around the mechanism — a proper invoice starts a fixed statutory window, and a notice of non-payment has to go out before that window closes — and treat any specific day count you write down as something to reconfirm, not something to trust from memory.
Cross the border into Alberta and the picture flips. Alberta's own guidance page states plainly: “Project owners must pay the amount payable to contractors within 28 calendar days of receiving a proper invoice,” a dispute requires the owner to “give notice to the contractor within 14 calendar days,” and “contractors must pay each subcontractor the amount owed within 7 calendar days of receiving payment from the owner.” The Act backs the outer numbers up directly: Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act s.32.3(1) sets the 7-day flow-down, and s.32.3(4) adds a backstop — if the owner never pays, the contractor must still pay each subcontractor no later than 35 days after giving the proper invoice to the owner. That 35-day backstop is not an arbitrary number: it is exactly 28 plus 7, the full chain the Act expects to run even when the first link breaks.
Worked example: the same invoice date, two provinces
A firm issues a proper invoice on March 2, 2026 on two separate jobs — one under an Alberta prime contract, one under an Ontario one.
Alberta: the owner's 28-day payment window runs out March 30, 2026. If the owner disputes the invoice, the 14-day notice-of-non-payment deadline is March 16, 2026 — two weeks before payment would otherwise be due, so the notice has to be drafted well before the file even looks late. If the owner pays in full on March 30, the contractor's own 7-day clock to its subcontractors closes April 6, 2026. If the owner never pays at all, s.32.3(4)'s backstop still requires payment to the subcontractor by April 6, 2026 — the same date, because 28 and 7 are designed to add up.
Ontario: the same March 2 invoice starts a fixed statutory clock too — but this file can't put a verified date against it, because the regulator that would confirm it doesn't publish one. What can go in the file is the fallback: if the invoice goes unpaid and no notice of non-payment arrives, the next real, dated milestones are ODACC's own adjudication timings, covered below.
Alberta's regulator lists eight required elements for a proper invoice: the contractor's name and business address; the invoice date; the period during which the work was done or materials supplied; a description of the work or materials; the amount requested for payment; payment terms broken down; the name, title and contact information of the person to be paid; and “a statement indicating that the invoice provided is intended to be a proper invoice.” That last line is easy to leave off a standard invoice template and is exactly the kind of gap that gives a payer an argument that the clock never started in the first place. A tracking system built around invoice dates is only as reliable as the invoices feeding it — a template audit is a one-time fix that protects every date logged afterward.
Where Ontario's prompt-payment window is a blank, its adjudication process is fully dated. ODACC's own adjudication-process page lays out the chain step by step: an agreed Registry Adjudicator must consent within four days of the Notice of Adjudication or the claimant requests an Authority appointment; the Authority then appoints one within seven days; the claimant's supporting documents are due five days after that; the Adjudicator has thirty days from receiving those documents to issue a Determination; ODACC certifies it within seven days; and “the payment must be made within fifteen days of the issuing of the Determination,” regardless of when certification happens. Run every deadline to its worst case and a file moves from a Notice of Adjudication to a paid Determination in roughly six to nine weeks — slow next to a healthy invoice cycle, but genuinely fast next to a lawsuit, and the only Ontario clock in this whole process a firm can put an exact date against in advance.
The fee is dated too: ODACC's fee schedule, approved by the Attorney General on October 1, 2025, sets a flat $2,700 for a claim between $25,000 and $34,999, split equally between the parties under s.13.10(3) unless the Adjudicator orders otherwise — on a $30,000 subcontractor dispute, that's $1,350 each, known before the Notice of Adjudication is even filed. The whole adjudication route only exists because it runs on Ontario's most recent Construction Act amendment, in force January 1, 2026 — a file dated before that has different transition rules under s.87.4.
The fix isn't a better spreadsheet column — it's a per-contract record that carries the jurisdiction, the trigger event, and which numbers on the file are confirmed versus which are a mechanism with no confirmed length. A file governed by Alberta's Act gets real dates the day the invoice goes out. A file governed by Ontario's Act gets a flagged, unconfirmed window and a second, fully-dated fallback plan the moment a dispute looks likely. Holdback sitting against the same invoice runs on its own separate clock again — see how trust obligations attach to that same payment once it's received, and what a lien claim package needs if the invoice clock runs out with nothing collected.
No. ODACC's own prompt-payment page states only that the reader should review the Construction Act's provisions directly — it publishes no day count of its own. Figures circulating elsewhere are unofficial and explicitly hedged by the source that publishes them.
The regulator's list treats all eight as required, including the statement that the invoice is intended to be a proper invoice. Leaving one off gives the payer grounds to argue the document wasn't a proper invoice at all, which can delay when the payment clock is even considered to have started.
Run every published deadline to its maximum — four days for adjudicator consent, seven for an Authority appointment, five for the claimant's documents, thirty for the Determination, then a mandatory fifteen-day payment window — and the worst case is roughly six to nine weeks from Notice of Adjudication to a paid Determination.
In Alberta, yes in principle — s.32.6 of the Act says interest accrues on unpaid amounts, but at “the prescribed rate,” which is set separately and isn't a fixed number the Act itself states. No comparable published figure exists for Ontario in this material; don't assume one.
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