Retention is the one number a contractor reliably loses track of. A percentage of every certified claim, held back per job, released in stages that depend on a date nobody diarises. On one job you remember it. Across nine you do not, and the client has no reason at all to remind you.
Most of what is written about retention in South Africa is written by law firms, and it answers a different question — what your rights are when it goes wrong. This answers the one that comes first: what is being held, and when does it come back.
The first surprise: JBCC 6.2 doesn’t really call it retention
Builders talk about retention because that is what the older contracts called it, and because it is what everyone still says on site. Under the current JBCC Principal Building Agreement the mechanism is security, and the contractor chooses between two forms of it at the outset. The choice is recorded in the contract data, which is why two jobs on the same standard form can behave completely differently.
| Security option | How the money behaves |
|---|---|
| Variable security | Reduces to 4% of the contract sum once practical completion is certified, and to 2% until final payment. Built around guarantees rather than cash held out of your certificates. |
| Fixed security | Expires at practical completion, and carries a payment reduction of 5% which halves to 2.5% after practical completion. This is the one that feels like retention, because it is cash withheld from what you are certified. |
Check which option your contract data records before you assume what is being held. A contractor who has priced for a 10% retention released in two halves, on a contract that runs the variable option, has mispriced their cash flow in both directions.
The dates that actually release the money
Release is tied to certified events, not to elapsed time, and the sequence is fixed:
- Practical completion. The works are substantially complete and can be used for what they were built for. This is the certificate that starts everything else, and the first release usually hangs off it.
- The defects liability period. Ninety calendar days from practical completion. Items on the list for completion must be rectified, and the contractor is expected to have them done at least ten working days before that period expires — not on the last day.
- Final completion. Certified once the listed defects are made good. The balance follows this.
- Latent defects. Five years from final completion. This is liability, not money held — but it is the reason the paperwork from a job you finished four years ago still matters.
Two payment periods sit alongside those, and they are the ones that decide whether a release actually arrives:
- The employer pays within fourteen calendar days of the principal agent issuing a payment certificate.
- You pay your subcontractors within twenty-one calendar days of that same certificate being issued — not within twenty-one days of being paid yourself. The gap between those two numbers is deliberate and it is yours to carry.
Why the register is a register and not a column
The instinct is to put a retention figure in a column on each job’s spreadsheet. It does not work, for a reason that only shows up at about the fourth concurrent project: retention is not a number, it is a schedule. Each job has a percentage, a cap, a completion date that has not happened yet, and two or three release events in the future. What you need to see is not “how much is held” but “what is due this month, and from whom”.
A register that is worth keeping has one row per job and answers four questions on sight:
- What has been certified to date, and what percentage of it is held.
- Which completion events have been certified, and on what date.
- What is releasable now, and what is still locked behind a date.
- What is overdue — the release event has happened and the money has not arrived.
That last line is the one that pays for the exercise. Most retention is not lost in a dispute. It is lost because practical completion was certified in March, the release was never invoiced, and by the time anyone looks the relationship has moved on.
Before you chase it
Two things worth checking, because they change what you should do next:
- Has the release event actually been certified? Practical completion happening on site and practical completion being certified are different things, and only the second releases money.
- Are your own subcontractor releases lined up behind it? If you are holding retention on your subcontractors, their release dates run off the same certificates. Chasing yours while sitting on theirs is how a subcontractor stops taking your calls.
This is practical guidance on tracking money, not legal advice. Where retention is genuinely in dispute — withheld without a certificate, or held long past final completion — that is a conversation for a construction attorney, and there are good ones in South Africa who do nothing else. Where your contract differs from anything on this page, your contract wins.