UK Service Contract Template

You have agreed a job and you want something signed before you start — the works, the dates, the price, what happens when the job grows, and what happens if either side pulls out. This builds that agreement in your browser: pick the options, fill the fields, print it or save it as a PDF. No signup, no email wall, nothing saved to a server.

It is a UK agreement, not an American one with the spelling changed. Four things decide what the document says, and none of them exist on a US template.

Where the agreement was made changes your customer’s rights

This is the one that catches people out. If a consumer agrees the job away from your business premises — standing in their kitchen, at their front door, at their workplace — or at a distance by phone, email or online, they can cancel within 14 days of the day the agreement was made, without giving a reason. Agree the identical job across your own trade counter and no statutory cancellation period applies at all. A business customer never gets one.

The trap is what happens when you say nothing. If you do not tell the customer about that right, the cancellation window runs for up to 12 months instead of 14 days — and failing to tell them is itself an offence carrying an unlimited fine. Putting the clause in the signed document is the cheapest way to close that off.

There is a second half most templates drop: if the customer wants you to start inside the 14 days, they have to ask you in writing. Making that express request does not remove their right to cancel, but it does mean they must pay a reasonable amount for the service already supplied if they then cancel mid-job. Without that sentence you can end up having done three days’ work you cannot bill. The tool prints it whenever the statutory right applies.

One carve-out: the cancellation rules do not apply to goods and services worth £42 or less, so the builder quietly flags jobs at or under that figure rather than making you carry a clause you do not need.

VAT is a twin, not a checkbox

Registration is compulsory once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any 12-month period, which leaves a large share of sole-trader operators outside VAT entirely. So there are two correct versions of the price clause, and printing the wrong one looks careless either way.

If you are not registered, the agreement says so in a sentence — no VAT is charged on this price and none can be reclaimed on it — and the customer stops wondering whether 20% is about to appear. If you are registered, the document carries your VAT number and shows the VAT element separately from the price of the works, because that is what a VAT invoice has to do. You can type the figure either inclusive or exclusive of VAT and the split is done for you; consumer-facing totals have to be the amount actually payable, VAT included, so inclusive is the default. That split is the only arithmetic on this page. If you want the maths behind the number before you commit it, quote the job first using the same VAT rules this agreement carries, or use the trade-neutral quote generator for a faster line-item build, and check the hourly rate you actually need.

The wording is drafted against the unfair-terms rules

The CMA’s guidance for businesses is explicit about terms that are never binding and terms that are unlikely to be fair, and the clauses here are shaped to it rather than to US precedent:

• Liability never excludes death or personal injury caused by negligence, and is limited only where the fault is not ours — a blanket “liability excluded so far as the law permits” is exactly the kind of unexplained disclaimer the guidance warns against.
• Your customer’s statutory rights are stated, not written down. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 the works must be carried out with reasonable care and skill and must match what was agreed; if they do not, the customer can ask you to put them right, and where that is not practical, ask for an appropriate reduction in the price. A term that takes those away is void anyway, so the agreement says plainly that nothing in it removes them.
• Delay carries a capped window and a remedy rather than “dates are estimates only and time is not of the essence”. After the number of days you set, the customer can nominate a date; miss that and they can cancel and be refunded. That structure is drawn from the regulator’s own worked example of a clause more likely to be fair.
• Deposits and cancellation charges have to be a genuine estimate of what you actually lose, after taking reasonable steps to reduce that loss, and a non-refundable deposit is meant to be a small percentage of the price. The builder flags anything above our own 25% rule of thumb — that figure is ours, not a legal threshold — so you can decide whether you could defend it.
• Recurring work rolls on and ends on notice, rather than auto-renewing for a fresh fixed term, because automatic renewal sits on the list of terms most likely to be found unfair.

Late payment splits by customer. Against a business you can claim statutory interest at 8% plus the Bank of England base rate, plus reasonable recovery costs — but only where the contract does not state its own rate, so typing one in replaces it rather than stacking on top. Against a consumer none of that exists, and any charge has to reflect the real cost of the delay. For the arithmetic on the clause itself, use the late-fee calculator.

Trade, jurisdiction, and what each one actually changes

Pick a trade and the agreement gains one clause about the registration the work legally needs — never how to do the work:

• Garden maintenance — access, and who takes the green waste. Removing it from site means you are transporting waste, which needs a waste carrier registration; the clause names the right regulator for the jurisdiction you chose and points the customer at the public register.
• Domestic cleaning — access, keys and alarm codes, who supplies materials, and same-day reporting of breakages.
• Gas and heating — gas work is carried out by an engineer on the Gas Safe Register, which is a legal requirement, and where the property is let the clause picks up the landlord’s annual safety check on each appliance and flue.
• Electrical — notifiable work self-certified under a competent person scheme, with the local authority notified for the customer and the certificate issued within 8 weeks.

Jurisdiction is not decoration. England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are three legal systems, and the choice moves the governing-law clause, the waste regulator, and whether Approved Document P is even the right thing to name — it is the electrical safety guidance for dwellings in England, not a UK rule. The same four-way split runs through other UK trade compliance too; the glue-trap licensing rules by nation are a worked example of how far apart the four nations can sit on one subject.

What it is, and what it is not

The price, deposit and notice lines are descriptive contract text. Nothing is saved: no agreement list, no customer database, no e-signature of record — that is field-service-management territory. Both parties sign the printed copy.

Working in the United States instead? The US service contract template is the same document under American law, with state governing law, trade clauses for HVAC, plumbing and electrical, and a change-order process in place of variations. For what each clause in an agreement is actually doing, the service agreement clauses guide walks through them one at a time, and when a signed job grows, the change order template amends it. Bill it afterwards with the invoice template generator. The whole paperwork set lives in the templates and forms library.

This template is a starting point, not legal advice. Have it checked for your business, and check your own trade’s licensing and certification rules, before you rely on it.