Who Pays for Snagging When You Subcontracted the Work

Who pays for snagging when you subcontracted the work? To the client, you do. You hold the contract, so their snagging list is yours to close whoever did the work. Whether you can recover the cost from the subcontractor depends on your subcontract and on whether you can evidence the defect was theirs.

That is the short answer, and most of the money is in the second half of it.

You won the work. You priced it, you subbed the labour out, you invoiced, and you moved on. Then the client sends a list. Eleven items, photographs attached, some of them fair and some of them opinions. The question everyone asks first is the wrong one. It is not "is this my fault". It is "who is paying to close this list, and how fast can that happen without losing the client or the sub".

To the client, it is always you#

This is the part people running the model for the first time get wrong. You hold the contract with the client. You are the main contractor. Their snagging list is addressed to you and it is yours to close, whoever actually held the trowel.

That is not a flaw in the model, it is what you are being paid for. The whole point of winning work and subcontracting it out is that the client buys one company to be accountable for the whole job. If your answer to a defect is "that was the plasterer, take it up with him", you have handed back the exact thing that justified your margin.

So the client-facing answer is simple: you own the list. What is genuinely open is whether you also absorb the cost.

Whether you can pass the cost down is decided long before the list arrives#

You can only recover a snag from a subcontractor if two things are true. Your subcontract obliges them to put right their own defects, and you can show the defect is theirs.

Most operators fail on the second one. They have a perfectly good clause and no evidence, so every callback becomes a negotiation with a subcontractor who genuinely believes it was fine when they left and was damaged by whoever came after them. Very often they are right. On a job with four trades running through the same rooms, the plasterer's finish gets marked by the joiner, and whoever is asked last pays.

Three things stop that, and none of them are complicated.

• A written subcontract with a defects clause. Not a text message. See what contracts you actually need for the short version of what has to be in it.
• A payment position that survives the argument. A retention or a final payment released on sign-off. Agreed in writing up front, and released fast once the work is done. A retention you drag your feet on is how you end up with a database full of subcontractors who will not answer your calls.
• A dated record of what the work looked like when that trade left it. This is the one almost nobody does, and it is the one that settles arguments.

The record is the whole game#

Hadri said something to me years ago that I still think about, back when I was one man on the tools and losing money on callbacks I could not prove. He said the operators who win are not the ones who argue better, they are the ones who made the argument unnecessary. If you can put a photograph on the table with a date on it, nobody has to be called a liar. The conversation stops being about character and becomes about a defect.

That is the whole discipline. Walk the property when a trade finishes. Photograph the work. Record what you saw and when. It takes minutes and it converts the worst conversation in this business into an administrative one.

He built systems for all of it, which is the thing that separates him from people who talk about this model without running it. If you want the longer version of how he got there, it is in who is Mo El Hadri.

Doing it without adding an evening of admin#

The reason the record does not get made is not that people disagree with it. It is that walking a property, taking forty photographs and then typing them up into something you could actually send is an hour you do not have after a full day.

I use Sayscope for this now. You walk the property, photograph each thing, circle it on the picture with your finger and say out loud what is wrong. It writes the list for you, grouped by room and by trade, and you send the PDF before you have left the drive. Three visits are free, so you can try it on a real job rather than take my word for it.

The point is not the tool. The point is that the record has to happen at the property, on the day, or it does not happen at all. Anything that moves the writing from your kitchen table to the moment you are standing in front of the defect is worth more than a better spreadsheet.

If you are running jobs you never physically attend, the same logic applies harder, and managing subcontractors remotely covers how to get that evidence without being there yourself.

Price the snagging in, because it is coming#

Every job has a list. Pricing as though it will not is how a healthy margin turns into a thin one on the last invoice.

Build a small allowance into the price for closing out the job. Not a contingency you tell the client about, just an honest acknowledgement that finishing work generates snags and closing them costs somebody a day. If your subcontractor absorbs it, that allowance is margin. If they will not, or if the defect turns out to be nobody's fault in particular, you have already paid for it. How to price construction jobs when you are subbing the work out goes through where that sits in the build-up.

The new build exception worth knowing (UK)#

If you are working anywhere near new build housing in the UK, the snagging conversation has a legal shape that ordinary refurbishment does not. Everything in this section is UK specific. The principle travels, the rules do not: if you are in the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, look up your own new home warranty scheme rather than assuming these dates apply.

Under an NHBC Buildmark policy, the first two years after legal completion are the builder warranty period, and the developer is responsible for putting right defects caused by failure to build to NHBC standards. From year three the cover becomes insurance against specified structural defects only, and cosmetic snagging falls outside it. NHBC also runs a free resolution service during those first two years. (NHBC)

Separately, the New Homes Quality Code was updated to Version 2 in March 2026. Buyers of a home from a registered developer have a right to a pre-completion inspection, and can now either appoint a professional from a recognised body or carry the inspection out themselves using the New Homes Quality Board's own checklist. Where what they find breaches warranty technical standards, the developer addresses it, ideally before legal completion or within thirty days. (New Homes Quality Board)

What that means for you, practically: buyers are getting more organised and better evidenced, and the lists coming your way are going to get longer and better photographed. That is not a threat. If your own records are as good as theirs, a well evidenced list is the easiest kind to close.

What good looks like#

A job where snagging is handled properly is boring, and boring is the goal.

The subcontract said what happens when there is a defect. A final payment sat against sign-off. Somebody walked the property when each trade finished and photographed it. When the client's list came in, it was matched against those records in twenty minutes, the four items that belonged to the plasterer went back to the plasterer with the photographs attached, he came and did them without a row because it was obvious, and the rest cost you a day you had already priced for.

Nobody fell out. The client got a company that took responsibility. The subcontractor got paid on time and will pick up the next job. And you kept your margin, which is the only reason any of this is worth doing.

Last checked: 2 September 2026.