You've picked a builder. The quote is in, the contract is being drafted, and somewhere in the last fortnight you've read that the government has cracked down on cowboy builders with an app that holds your money until the work is done. So the question, before you send the deposit: does any of this change how you should pay?
A bit. Less than the headlines suggest. And the parts that matter most are the ones nobody has explained properly yet.
Two Schemes, and Who Actually Runs Them
The 28 August 2026 announcement bundled two separate things together, and most coverage has kept them tangled.
Trusted Payments is the app. It is government-backed and privately operated: the company behind it is Trusted Payments Limited, working in partnership with TrustMark, the government-endorsed quality scheme. Ministers named it and stand behind it. They don't run it, and on one trade-press account they won't have access to its data either. Describe it as run by the government and you've already misunderstood who you'd be dealing with if something went wrong.
Worth keeping in mind either way: the app went live on 1 September 2026, so there is no track record to inspect yet. Nobody has run a £60,000 extension through it and written up what happened.
The Approved Code is the conduct standard. It's run by the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI), which administers the government-backed Approved Code Scheme on behalf of the Consumer Codes Approval Board. The general scheme already exists, with almost 45,000 businesses across cars, funeral plans, new-build housing and the rest. What's new is a code written specifically for home improvement work. The first businesses were due to join by the end of September 2026, with the code fully live by December.
Both are voluntary. Neither creates a builder licence. A trader who doesn't sign up carries on trading, legally, exactly as before.
How the Money Actually Moves
This is where the announcement was thinnest and where the detail matters most. Here is what four independent outlets agree on, and where the picture rests on a single account.
The headline mechanism is a 10% completion payment. When the job starts, the app asks you to lodge 10% of the contract value, and that money stays held until the project is complete and you have signed it off. GOV.UK, TrustMark's partner announcement and two trade titles all describe it the same way, so treat the 10% as settled.
Around that hold, the rest of the contract releases in stages. You and the builder agree scope, price and milestones in the app before work starts. The builder can request funding to buy materials. When a stage is finished, the builder uploads evidence (photos and notes) and you review it before the money releases. One detailed trade analysis puts that review window at 24 hours. No other source confirms it, so plan around "short" rather than "a day".
If you and the builder can't agree, the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman steps in. A consumer-rights writeup close to the scheme says a dispute has to have been open with the trader for 45 days before the Ombudsman engages. Single-sourced again, but if it's right, that is a long time to sit with a half-finished kitchen and a frozen payment.
The same writeup describes £20,000 of insurance cover behind each job, underwritten by an A-rated insurer, covering walk-offs, scams and a trader ceasing to trade, as well as repair and consequential damage. It also says any portion paid in cash forfeits that cover for that portion. How long the cover runs is unclear: the scheme's own published material has been read as both "project plus two years" and "one year", and no source resolves it.
Warning
The 10% completion hold is not retention, and it does not replace it. Trusted Payments releases the 10% when you sign the job off. Retention, typically 2.5-5% of each stage payment, is held for 6-12 months after completion so the builder comes back for the defects that show up once you're living in the room. Keep the retention clause in your contract whether or not you use the app. The deposits and stage payments guide covers how to write it.
Who is holding your money?
Unresolved, and you should know that before you lodge anything.
Neither the scheme's own materials nor the government announcement state what regulatory permission applies to the money while it is held. TrustMark's homeowner FAQ calls the arrangement "an escrow agreement" but names no holding entity and no permission. GOV.UK says nothing about the regulatory position at all. One detailed trade analysis has questioned whether "escrow" is the right word, noting that a third-party processor handles the payments and that retained funds are described as sitting in a trust tied to the Ombudsman rather than in a conventional client account.
None of that means anything is wrong. Where a regulated processor handles the payments, the platform sitting on top of it may have no need of its own permission, which is a common and perfectly ordinary arrangement. The point is narrower: the arrangement has not been spelled out publicly, so you cannot yet look it up and satisfy yourself.
So there are two published descriptions of the same pot of money and they don't match. Neither is an official statement. Until Trusted Payments or TrustMark publishes the terms, the honest position is: privately operated, TrustMark partnership, regulatory basis for the held funds not yet disclosed. If you're asked to lodge more than a few thousand pounds, ask in writing who holds it and under what protection, and keep the answer. You can also check any firm yourself on the FCA Financial Services Register, which is the authoritative source and free to search.
What it costs
Also not settled. One outlet reports a homeowner fee of £45 to £85 per job, or £25 for jobs up to £2,500, foldable into the quote. Another says around £35 per project plus processing fees, and flags its own figure as provisional. TrustMark's site separately advertises a "Protect Your Payments" escrow product at "as little as £6 per party", and it is genuinely unclear whether that is the same product, an older one, or a parallel offering. Nothing about the trader's side of the fee has been published; the FMB was still waiting for detail a day after launch.
Best reading of the published figures: somewhere between roughly £25 and £85 for the homeowner, depending on job size. Nobody should quote you a single number as if it were on a price list, because there isn't one yet.
Can You Check Whether Your Builder Is In?
For the new home-improvement Approved Code: no. Not today. There is no register, search tool, logo or validation page for it, because the code isn't live yet. Homebuilding & Renovating flagged the same gap in its coverage, so this is the state of the scheme in early September 2026, not a gap in anyone's research. When onboarding completes this autumn, the place to look will be the CTSI Approved Code directory, which for existing codes lets you click a member's logo through to a live validation page. Until an entry for the home improvement code appears there, a builder claiming membership under the new scheme is making a claim you cannot verify.
For Trusted Payments: ask the builder directly. Traders are expected to be TrustMark-registered first, and TrustMark registration you can check today on the TrustMark website. Vetting the builder more broadly, including what TrustMark and FMB membership actually mean, is in how to find a builder you can trust. None of that changed on 28 August.
One trap while you're searching. "Trust Payments" is an unrelated, FCA-regulated card processor that has been around since the 1990s. It is not the scheme. Search results mix the two up constantly. The scheme is "Trusted Payments", with the "ed".
| How you pay | If the trader folds mid-job | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | Nothing beyond a creditor claim in the insolvency | Whether any assets exist to claim against |
| Bank transfer | Nothing beyond a creditor claim in the insolvency | Same |
| Debit card | Chargeback, at the bank's discretion | Bank staff knowing the scheme exists, and asking inside the time limit |
| Credit card | Section 75, a legal right against the card issuer | The item's price falling inside the Section 75 band |
| Trusted Payments app | Unreleased funds stay held; reported £20,000 insurance cover | Terms not yet published; regulatory basis of held funds undisclosed |
What It Would Have Fixed on a Real Build
Take a documented 55m² kitchen extension in Oxfordshire. In May 2022 the bifold doors and five tall windows were ordered from a glazing supplier, £10,339.55 paid across three payments. By October the supplier had stopped answering and then entered liquidation. The manufacturer whose product it was could do nothing for homeowners directly. The money had gone ahead of the goods, to a company that no longer existed.
That is the exact failure mode Trusted Payments is built for: money paid forward to a business that folds before delivery.
What actually rescued it was Section 75. The payments had gone on a credit card, the order value sat inside the band (over £100 and not more than £30,000), and the card issuer refunded £10,623.55 in January 2023. More than was paid, because the claim included the cost of boarding up the open aperture so the house stayed weathertight while a replacement was sourced. A proof of debt filed in the liquidation as a backstop was never needed. Net position: a £284 credit rather than a loss.
Read that carefully, because it is the honest way to size the new scheme. Trusted Payments is not solving a problem that had no solution. For anything paid by credit card inside the Section 75 band, the solution already existed and worked. What Trusted Payments covers is the money Section 75 doesn't touch: bank transfers and cash, where the same order would have been an unsecured claim in an insolvency and almost certainly a total loss. Pay that glazing order by transfer and the app would have been the only thing between you and £10,339.55 gone.
Two caveats. The card route needs the item to be separately priced inside the band; a whole extension contract above the upper limit sits outside it, which is why the glazing deposit went on a card and the builder's stage payments didn't. The mechanics, and what to do when a supplier goes quiet, are in what to do when a builder stops turning up. And nobody has yet explained how Trusted Payments handles a supplier-direct order placed weeks ahead of installation, which is precisely what this was. The milestone model assumes the builder is the one being paid.
What It Would Not Have Touched
The same build's builder quoted £45,500 in June 2021. By the end, that builder's invoices came to £52,657. The whole-project construction cost of £122,150 is a different denominator entirely, covering every trade on the job, so don't set it against the £45,500. The like-for-like comparison is the builder's own quote against the builder's own invoices.
No money went missing. The builder didn't vanish, wasn't paid ahead of work, and never took a deposit and stopped answering the phone. The gap opened because the job grew, item by item, most of it traceable in the paperwork:
- a mid-build design change that removed a structural corner post, driven by the kitchen design rather than any supplier failure
- a full steelwork redesign around a cantilever detail, processed properly as a variation with a £315 drawing-modification invoice
- an existing RSJ nobody knew was there, which had to be integrated
- a roof window that turned out on site to have been ordered too small
- Building Control requiring 150mm of insulation where 100mm had been quoted, another £773
- a timber-for-steel ridge beam substitution the builder made without telling anyone, which Building Control caught and required reinstating
Put that list next to the mechanism above. A 10% hold released at sign-off prevents none of it. A code-of-conduct badge prevents none of it. Milestone evidence would have shown a roof going on, not that the ridge beam under it was the wrong material. The insulation uplift was a legitimate regulatory demand that any builder would have invoiced. The corner post was the homeowner's own choice.
This isn't a quirk of one build. Citizens Advice's "Built to Fail" report (July 2026, over 3,000 UK adults who had hired a trader in the previous 18 months) found 28% hit a problem on their most recent job. Among those who lost money, the median loss was £750, and 11% of that group lost more than £5,000. The problems themselves: 20% poor-standard work, 18% work that didn't fix the issue, 16% product or material problems, 14% charged more than quoted without approval. Payment fraud isn't a category. And the finding that should sit in every article about these schemes: people who used accredited or big-brand traders were no less likely to have a problem than people who used sole traders.
A vendor survey of 200 UK builders (Renno, via Pollfish, April 2026) points the same way from the other side of the table. Unforeseen additional costs led their dispute causes at 48%, disagreement over scope was a separate 19%, and late or missed payment sat at 26%. It's commissioned research, so hold the exact percentages loosely. The ordering is what matters, and the deposits and stage payments guide takes it further.
£10.3bn
The figure in every announcement is total consumer detriment across home and garden maintenance in 2024, from a CMA-commissioned survey. It adds losses, overpriced work and unfair practices together. It is not the amount rogue builders stole, and any article that presents it that way has misread the source.
What to Do This Month
You're about to pay a builder, so here is the position for late 2026, in order of how much each step is worth.
Keep every protection you'd have used before 28 August. A written contract (JCT Homeowner or FMB), stage payments tied to building control inspections, a retention clause, a variations log from day one. The schemes sit on top of these, not instead of them. GOV.UK and the trade press are unanimous on that.
Pay separately priced supplier orders inside the Section 75 band on a credit card. Glazing, kitchen units, steel fabrication, roof windows. This is the protection that actually worked on the build above, it costs nothing, and it needs nobody to sign up to anything.
Ask your builder two questions, in writing: are you TrustMark-registered, and are you enrolled in Trusted Payments? A yes to both is a genuine positive signal. A no tells you little for the first year, because a builder booked through to spring may simply not have got round to it. Don't rule anyone out on it.
If the builder is enrolled, use the app for the portion you'd otherwise send by bank transfer, and pay no part in cash, since cash reportedly forfeits the insurance cover. Ask who holds the funds and get the answer in writing. Keep your own retention clause running alongside, because the app's 10% goes back to the builder at sign-off and your defects window starts after that.
Expect the schemes to change. Pricing is provisional, the Approved Code register doesn't exist yet, the regulatory description of the held money is contested, and the trade bodies are split on whether any of it goes far enough. CTSI's own leadership has said it wants mandatory licensing. The FMB says voluntary schemes have never filled the gap left by regulation. The National Federation of Builders says it duplicates existing accreditation and would rather see a searchable building passport. The HomeOwners Alliance has said the real value is in changing how money moves rather than adding another badge, which is about right.
Once a dispute has actually started, the response ladder is the same as it was before any of this launched: when a builder job goes wrong walks through it.
Where This Fits in Your Build
Payment protection is a pre-construction decision, made before anyone digs. It sits alongside the contract, the insurance checks and the payment schedule in the kitchen extension task tree, which you can browse for free to see every task in order. The working detail on all of them, including the payment schedule template, is in the Access Pass for £49.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Trusted Payments work?
You and the builder agree scope, price and milestones in the app. A 10% completion payment is lodged at the start and held until you sign the finished job off; the rest releases stage by stage after the builder uploads evidence and you approve it. Disputes go to the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman.
Is Trusted Payments run by the government?
No. It is government-backed, not government-run. The operator is a private company, Trusted Payments Limited, working in partnership with TrustMark. Ministers announced and endorse it; they don't operate it.
How much does Trusted Payments cost a homeowner?
Published figures conflict. Reports put it anywhere between about £25 for small jobs and £45-£85 for larger ones, with one outlet quoting around £35 plus processing fees. None of these comes from an official price list, and the trader's fee hasn't been published at all.
How do I check if a builder is in the Approved Code?
For the new home-improvement code you can't yet: as of September 2026 there is no register, search tool or logo, because the code goes fully live in December. Check the CTSI Approved Code directory once onboarding completes. TrustMark registration, which Trusted Payments traders are expected to hold, is checkable today.
Does Trusted Payments replace Section 75?
No, and do not assume you get both on the same payment. Section 75 covers credit card payments on items priced inside its band and needs no sign-up, but it depends on a direct link between you, your card issuer and the supplier, and routing money through an intermediary can break that chain. Whether funding a held payment by card preserves it is not addressed in the scheme's published materials, so ask before you assume it does. Trusted Payments covers money that would otherwise go by bank transfer, where no equivalent recovery route existed. Use them on different payments: card for separately priced supplier orders, the app for builder stage payments if your builder is enrolled. What each route recovers when a trader folds goes through the mechanics.
Is Trusted Payments the same as Trust Payments?
No. Trust Payments is an unrelated, FCA-regulated card processor. Trusted Payments is the TrustMark-partnered scheme that launched on 1 September 2026.
External resource
GOV.UK: the 28 August 2026 announcement
The primary source for the 10% completion payment, the milestone structure and the September and December rollout dates.
gov.uk
External resource
CTSI Approved Code directory
Where the new home improvement code should appear once autumn onboarding completes. Existing codes list here with click-through validation.
approvedcode.tradingstandards.uk
External resource
TrustMark: find a tradesperson
Check TrustMark registration today. Traders are expected to hold it before enrolling in Trusted Payments.
trustmark.org.uk
External resource
Citizens Advice: Built to Fail
The July 2026 report behind the 28% and £750 figures, including the finding that accredited traders were no less likely to cause problems.
citizensadvice.org.uk