Ontario's Construction Act Changes (Bill 216): What Your Records System Must Now Do

What This Article Is and Isn’t

This is an operational summary of what changed and what your systems need to support — not legal advice. Bill 216 (the Building Ontario For You Act, 2024) amended Ontario’s Construction Act and came into force January 1, 2026. If a payment dispute, holdback release, or adjudication is live on your project, talk to construction counsel — this article is here to help you check whether your document and workflow systems can actually produce what the amended Act now expects, not to interpret the Act for your specific project.

Why This Matters for Your Systems, Not Just Your Lawyer

Recordkeeping and notice requirements only work if the underlying data is trustworthy and timely. Bill 216 didn’t just change legal obligations on paper — it changed what has to be producible, on a schedule, from whatever system is holding your invoices, contracts, and holdback records. A change like this exposes whether your document control is real or aspirational: can you actually generate what’s now required, or would someone need to reconstruct it by hand under deadline pressure?

What Changed, at the Operational Level

Three changes under Bill 216 have direct implications for how records and notices flow through your systems:

“Proper invoice” content requirements changed. A proper invoice now needs to include the contractual payment entitlement it’s based on, along with other information reasonably requested to operate the owner’s accounts-payable process. There’s a built-in grace period — an invoice missing a prescribed detail is still deemed proper unless the owner flags the specific deficiency within 7 days of receipt — but that 7-day window only helps if someone is actually positioned to review incoming invoices against the requirement that quickly.

Annual holdback release notices are now required on a schedule. Project owners must publish a Notice of Annual Release of Holdback within 14 days of each contract’s anniversary, specifying the holdback amount and intended payment date. That’s a recurring, date-driven obligation tied to individual contract dates — the kind of thing that’s easy to track for one contract and easy to miss across a portfolio of them without a system generating the reminder.

Adjudication decisions are now published, with identifying information removed, and can serve as informal precedent. This doesn’t change your recordkeeping directly, but it means the quality of the record you’d bring to an adjudication is now being measured against a growing public body of decisions — vague or incomplete records are a worse position to be in than before.

What a Compliant-Ready System Generally Needs

• Timestamped, auditable revision history on invoices, contracts, and holdback records — not “someone remembers when this changed.”
• Clear traceability from contract date → holdback anniversary → published notice, so the 14-day window isn’t tracked manually across every active contract.
• A defined review step for incoming invoices against the proper-invoice content requirements, inside the 7-day deficiency-notice window.
• Records that survive a change in project management software or a departing employee — if the only person who knows where the holdback schedule lives leaves, the obligation doesn’t leave with them.

Practical Next Step

Audit whether you could actually produce a clean, dated paper trail — proper invoices, holdback notices issued on time, contract-level revision history — for a live project today, this week, if asked. If the honest answer is “not confidently,” that’s the starting point. The compliance deadline already passed; what’s left is closing the gap between what the Act expects and what your systems can currently produce on demand.

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