Signed up in your kitchen on Tuesday and regretting it by Friday? For most home building contracts the law gives you an exit, one that surprisingly few homeowners, and a fair number of builders, know exists.
Where the right comes from
The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give consumers a 14-day cancellation right on contracts made:
- off-premises, signed or agreed anywhere that isn’t the trader’s business premises: your home, over your garden wall, at a home show; or
- at a distance, agreed wholly by phone, email or online.
Since building work is almost always sold at your property, most builder, kitchen, window and driveway contracts qualify. Contracts signed at the builder’s own office or showroom don’t attract the right (though showroom sales concluded later by email often do).
The 14 days: and the 12-month extension
The clock runs 14 days from the day the contract is made. The trader must give you a written notice of your cancellation right, including a model cancellation form. If they don’t, the cooling-off period doesn’t end, it extends until 14 days after they finally provide the notice, up to a maximum of 12 months. In practice: a builder who never mentioned cancellation may have handed you a year-long exit. Tribunals and trading standards treat missing cancellation notices seriously precisely because the industry so routinely omits them.
What about work already started?
Two clean rules:
- If work starts within the 14 days at your express request (get this in writing either way), and you then cancel, you pay a proportionate amount for what’s been properly done, no more.
- If work started early without your express request and you cancel in time, the regulations’ starting position is that you owe nothing for it, the risk of jumping the gun sits with the trader.
Materials made specifically to your specification (bespoke joinery cut, made-to-measure windows in production) fall outside the cancellation right once personalised, the regulations exempt genuinely custom goods. Standard materials the builder can return do not.
How to cancel properly
- In writing, within the window, email is fine; the model form is not compulsory. “I am cancelling the contract dated 4 March under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013” leaves no ambiguity.
- Keep proof of sending.
- Refunds are due within 14 days of cancellation, including deposits, see deposit protection if the money is slow coming back.
Outside the cooling-off window
After 14 days (or where the right never applied), cancellation becomes a question of contract law, not consumer regulations. You can still end the contract, but the builder is entitled to losses genuinely caused, typically work done, materials ordered, and sometimes a margin element. Negotiate: most builders would rather part with a modest settled figure and a free diary slot than force an unhappy client through the dispute process. And if your reason for leaving is their breach, abandonment, persistently defective work, you may owe little or nothing; that’s termination for cause, covered in the contracts pillar.
For the avoidance of cold feet
The cooling-off right is a safety net, not a planning tool. If you’re signing under time pressure, “this price is only good today”, the price pressure itself is the red flag, and the best use of the fortnight is to check the things you skipped: references, insurance, Companies House, and a proper contract.
This guide is general information for homeowners in England and Wales, not legal advice.
