It's Tuesday. The van didn't come Monday either. You texted at nine, then again at four, and both messages show as delivered. The blockwork is at head height with no roof on it and there's a stack of insulation under a tarpaulin that's already starting to lift.
You have two questions and you can't answer either of them. Is he coming back? And how much of your money is sitting in that half-built shell?
The advice you'll find online splits into two useless halves. Forum threads have the real detail and no structure, and half the replies say "cut him some slack" without ever saying how much. Magazine guides cover finding a builder, which is no help when you've already got one and he's gone quiet. What follows covers England and Wales: the legal routes in Scotland and Northern Ireland run through different courts and aren't addressed here.
Why builders actually go quiet
Before you decide how hard to push, you need to know what you might be pushing against. Most silences aren't abandonment. They're one of a small number of operational problems that look identical from your kitchen window.
Weather stops the job, and it stops his other jobs too. On a documented 55m² kitchen extension in Oxfordshire, work paused for Christmas in mid-December with a return pencilled in for early January, weather permitting. The groundworker didn't come back. It was too cold to lay bricks and it stayed too cold. By the second week of January his other two sites had stalled for the same reason, and brick deliveries were being disrupted because the merchant's drivers were off sick. External walls restarted in the first week of February. Seven and a half weeks with nothing happening, on a job that was never abandoned.
The lesson is sharper than "winter is slow". When the weather breaks, every one of his sites wants the crew back on the same morning. You're competing for your own builder. And material supply can fail independently of both.
A long-lead item nobody actually ordered. Later on the same build, the steels were described as "being readjusted" after a design query. The homeowner rang the fabricator directly to chase them. No record of the order. Several more calls established that the steels had never been booked against the site address and the work had been passed to someone the fabricator couldn't get hold of. Nobody on site was lying about progress. There simply wasn't any, and the person who should have known didn't.
A sub-trade fell over, and the main contractor is scrambling. Roofs are rarely one trade. On that build the roofer missed the day the roof windows went in, a lead specialist later produced a correction list for the tiling, and the roofer then said he couldn't finish after a car accident. A genuine reason. But from the homeowner's side it presented as the roof stalling and the builder having no clear answer about when it would move.
Overcommitment. This is the cause forum posters name most often, and it's rarely malice. A builder takes on more than the team can cover, cash gets stretched across sites, subcontractors get paid late and stop turning up, and the builder starts triaging. The customer least likely to make a fuss gets the least attention. Sometimes the original quote was too low and he's earning elsewhere to stay solvent enough to come back and finish yours.
Bad news he hasn't found a way to say. A cost overrun, a scope problem, a mistake in the setting out. Some builders go quiet because the next conversation is one they're dreading.
There are more. Another job overrunning (that Oxfordshire build started a month late for exactly this reason, before a spade went in). Personal circumstances that nobody discloses. A task that fell between two trades and that neither thought was theirs: the same build had a service trench that the groundworker was supposed to dig and never did, and it took weeks to notice that the gap was a gap rather than a delay.
None of these are visible from outside. Every one of them produces the same symptom as a builder who has walked away with your deposit. Which is why your threshold for acting cannot depend on guessing the cause.
Slippage or abandonment: the threshold
Here's the rule I'd use. Slippage is a missed day with a message. Abandonment starts with a broken re-commitment.
First no-show: ring him. Don't text. A text is easy to leave on read and a call forces an answer or a visible refusal to give one. Get a new date. Then send one message that pins it: "As discussed, back on site Thursday 14th. Please confirm." Now there's a promise in writing that he made, not one you imposed.
If Thursday comes and goes with no builder and no message, that's your trigger. Not because two missed dates amount to a breach in law (there's no such rule; the Consumer Rights Act 2015 measures "reasonable time" as a question of fact, decided case by case). It's your trigger because a builder who is merely stretched will almost always pick up a direct call and offer a date. Silence after a re-commitment is the one thing every legitimate cause above still leaves room to avoid. Winter stopped bricklaying on that Oxfordshire build for seven weeks. It never stopped the phone working.
One more thing about the "cut him some slack" advice. It's fine as a relationship policy and terrible as a records policy. Give slack on the escalation. Give none on the log. Your written record starts at the first no-show, not the second, because writing down a date costs nothing and burns no goodwill, and because if this does turn into a dispute the record is the whole case.
Before you escalate: three jobs for this week
Build the record. A dated log of every day he was due, whether he came, and for how long. Every call, text and email, with times. Photos of the site each morning, with the date visible in the metadata. The contract or quote, and every payment with the date and method. Where there's no fixed completion date in the contract, the Act implies that the work must be done within a reasonable time, and what counts as reasonable is decided on evidence of what actually happened. Your log is that evidence.
Reconcile the money. Three columns: what you've paid, what's been built, what materials are physically on site. Do this honestly and against your stage payment schedule, if you have one. If you've paid for foundations and walls and have foundations and walls, your exposure is smaller than it feels. If you've paid a roof stage and there's no roof, you know your number. The contracts and payment schedules guide sets out how stages should have been tied to completed work; use it as the yardstick even if your own arrangement was looser.
Capture who you're dealing with. Trading name exactly as it appears on the quote. Any company number. The address on the paperwork. The van registration. This sounds paranoid and it's the opposite: more than one forum thread ends with a homeowner who cannot start a claim because they have no address to serve papers to. Why the legal identity matters so much is covered below, and it's the section most people skip until it's too late.
The escalation ladder
Rung one: a direct conversation. In person if you can. Lay out every concern, calmly, and ask for a written programme to completion. Builders on the BuildHub forum who've been on the receiving end of this say it sometimes resolves things outright, and when it doesn't it usually makes a mutual parting obvious. Either outcome beats another fortnight of texts.
Rung two: written notice with a deadline. A letter, sent by recorded delivery to the address on the quote, stating what was agreed, what has happened, and a date by which you expect work to resume. Keep it factual. If you signed a written contract, read how it says notices must be served and follow that to the letter, including the delivery method. Contracts sometimes specify post or hand delivery, and an emailed notice can fail on that alone.
If your contract is a JCT Home Owner contract, the HO/B form is the one used without a consultant and HO/C the one with. The clause wording is behind JCT's paywall so read your own copy rather than anything summarised online. Worth knowing: homeowner contracts fall outside the Construction Act, so you don't get the statutory adjudication rights a commercial client has, but JCT builds an adjudication provision into the homeowner forms anyway.
Rung three: a letter before action. This is the formal precursor to a court claim and courts expect to see one. Citizens Advice publish a template. Head it "Letter before court claim". Reference the earlier letters and calls with dates. State the remedy you want and its legal basis. Offer alternative dispute resolution. Say you intend to issue county court proceedings without further notice if you don't get a satisfactory response, refer to the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct (paragraphs 13 to 16 set out the sanctions a court can impose on a party who ignores it), and enclose the contract and payment records. The Citizens Advice example gives 14 days to respond. That's a template figure rather than a statutory minimum, but for a builder who has simply stopped attending it's defensible.
Rung four: formal routes. If the builder is TrustMark registered there's a mandatory three-stage complaints process: the business, then their scheme provider, then the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman. Skip a stage and you lose the right to the next one, and you must start within 12 months of first raising it with the business. If he's an FMB member, the FMB run a free conciliation service where they give the member 14 days to respond before referring to mediation, but only for clients of actual members. Neither is a court. Trading Standards, reached through Citizens Advice, can investigate conduct but won't get your money back. The county court can.
The two doors that close exactly when you need them
Read this section before you rely on any of the routes above.
TrustMark's ombudsman cannot help if the trader has entered administration or liquidation, or has simply ceased trading. That's their published eligibility rule. And Citizens Advice put the court position bluntly: "When a limited company stops trading, you can't go to court." Once a company is dissolved there is no legal person left to sue. The two routes homeowners are always told to use both evaporate at the precise moment a builder disappears rather than merely slows down.
Now the counterweight, and it's the most useful thing on this page.
Most residential builders aren't limited companies. They're sole traders or small partnerships. And a sole trader or partnership that stops trading remains personally responsible for work that's been paid for. The business ending doesn't end the debt. That's why the first practical question isn't "what are my rights" but "what legal entity did I pay?"
Look at the quote or invoice. "Ltd" or "Limited" after the name, or a company number in the footer, means you're dealing with a company. Search it on Companies House to see whether it still exists and is still trading. No "Ltd" means a sole trader or partnership. For those, search the Insolvency Register, and search both the person's own name and the trading name, because either one may be what's recorded. Citizens Advice warn that it can take a few weeks for a new insolvency to appear on either site, so a clean search today isn't a guarantee.
If the builder is in a formal insolvency, get the name of the administrator or official receiver and register as a creditor through GOV.UK. Be realistic about the odds. You'll rank as an unsecured creditor, banks get paid first, and Citizens Advice say plainly that you might not get anything back. Which is why the money routes below matter more than the insolvency queue.
Do the entity check now, this week, whatever state the job is in. Better still, do it before you hire. The finding a builder guide covers what to check at the quoting stage, and this is near the top of the list.
Getting your money back
How you paid decides which of three routes you have.
Credit card: Section 75. Under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 the card issuer is jointly and severally liable with the supplier for breach of contract. The financial limits are widely misquoted, so here's the precise test: protection applies where the supplier attached a cash price to the single item of more than £100 and not more than £30,000. The band attaches to the price of the thing you bought, not to the amount you put on the card. A deposit on a credit card is enough to trigger it for the whole item, even if the rest was paid by transfer.
The flip side of that test is that a whole extension priced above the upper figure sits outside the band. A separately priced order that falls inside it (a window package, a kitchen) is a different matter, and that's the reason to pay deposits on those by card. Pay the builder or supplier directly: routing a payment through a third-party processor can break the chain the Act requires. The issuer can't refuse merely because the trader has vanished or gone bust, and if they reject the claim the Financial Ombudsman Service is your free escalation.
Debit card: chargeback. Not a legal right but a card-network scheme. Your bank might decline. Citizens Advice note that many bank staff don't know the scheme exists and you may need to ask for a manager. Ask anyway.
Cash or bank transfer: the small claims track. The county court's small claims track handles claims up to £10,000. You can issue online or by post through Money Claim Online, and the court will point you towards mediation as a quicker, cheaper alternative to a hearing. Issue fees on GOV.UK as at 3 September 2026 run on a scale by claim value: £35 for a claim up to £300, £50 up to £500, £70 up to £1,000, £80 up to £1,500, £115 up to £3,000, £205 up to £5,000 and £455 for anything between £5,000.01 and £10,000. Above the small claims limit the fee becomes 5% of the claim. These fees are revised periodically, so check the current table before you issue. And remember the earlier point: a judgment is only worth having against someone who still legally exists and can be found.
Materials you've already paid for
Anything fixed into the building is yours. Once bricks are laid, timber is nailed and insulation is fitted, they become part of the land, and that holds even if the builder never paid his merchant and the merchant's terms had a retention-of-title clause. The unpaid supplier becomes an unsecured creditor of the builder, not a claimant against your house.
Materials sitting unfixed on your drive are less certain. Under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, title passes when the contract says it does, and the default rules only apply where the contract is silent. Those defaults are more favourable than most people expect: ownership can pass before payment or delivery, and a seller who delivers goods without reserving a right of disposal is taken to have appropriated them to the contract. In plain terms, materials delivered to your site with no retention-of-title clause behind them are very probably yours. Not certainly. Check whether the builder's supplier holds such a clause before you assume.
Two practical steps. Photograph and list everything on site today, with delivery notes if you have them. And for any long-lead item you've paid towards but can't see, ring the supplier yourself and ask for the order reference and the site address it's booked against. That call is how the missing steel order on the Oxfordshire build was found. Consumables count too: a roll of window lead went unaccounted for on the same job and had to be netted off a final bill. Lead is valuable and easy to lose.
Getting the job finished
Know your handover point. In an extension the natural one is a weathertight shell: roof on, building in the dry. During the steel dispute on that Oxfordshire build the homeowner had a second contractor visit, and they agreed the sensible point to take over would be once the roof was on, with a quote covering everything from the remaining steels onwards. The handover never happened. The original builder finished the job. But having a priced alternative changed the conversation, and it cost nothing but time.
Approach a second contractor carefully while the first is still engaged. A partly built structure with an unresolved design question is not an attractive job to inherit, and a builder who hears you've had someone else round may down tools for good. Do it discreetly and do it after rung one, not before. Expect the takeover quote to carry a premium: the new firm is accepting liability for someone else's undocumented work. Have your building control inspection record to hand, because whoever takes over will want to see what's been passed.
Don't terminate before the replacement is lined up. Get the quotes first. If there's a written contract, end it the way the contract says. If the builder has gone into a formal insolvency, that doesn't automatically end the contract either, and instructing a new firm before it's properly closed can complicate things.
Use the money you haven't paid. Once a builder is on site, staged payment against completed work is the only real hold a homeowner has, and the Oxfordshire build used it twice: part of one invoice held back until further progress was made, and a roof payment declined until the roof was complete. It worked because the stages were agreed up front and the position was stated plainly at the point of payment, not sprung as a punishment. Keep a retention against the final stage. Never pay ahead of the work for a discount. If your builder is currently absent and you're holding money for work not yet done, that's the strongest position you'll have. Say so in the written notice.
So, the two questions from Tuesday morning. Is he coming back? You'll know by the second missed date, and you'll have a paper trail either way. How much of your money is exposed? Less than it feels if you've reconciled it, and recoverable through one of three routes if you paid in a way that protects you and the person you paid still legally exists. Check that last part today.