When a Client Won't Pay a Deposit

The email comes back friendly and short. He likes the price, he wants to start in two weeks, and he would rather settle up when the work is finished. A refusal to pay a deposit is information about the job, not an obstacle to talk your way past. What you do next depends on which kind of refusal it is, and one question tells you.

Ask him what he has run into before. A client who was burned by somebody who took money and vanished is describing a previous job, not this one. A client who has never hired a trade before does not know that money up front is ordinary in this work. Both of those are answerable on a phone call.

The answer to the first one is specifics. Show him what the deposit is being applied to, name the supplier, and put the delivery date in writing. A client whose worry is disappearance is reassured by details that would be awkward to fake, not by a promise that you are not that guy.

The answer to the second one is arithmetic. Walk through the material that gets ordered against his job, the terms his own supplier is holding you to, and the week that comes off your calendar. A client who has never paid a deposit is not resisting the deposit, he is resisting a number that arrived without a reason attached to it.

There is a third version. A client who agrees to every line of the scope but will not put money behind any of it is asking you to finance his project, and he is not necessarily doing it on purpose, which is worse, because a client who says outright that money is tight has given you something to plan around and a client who simply prefers to pay at the end has given you nothing.

Lowering the deposit to save the job moves the money later without moving any of the work later. You will still order the material in week one. Restructuring is a different thing: a smaller first payment against a smaller first milestone keeps the money attached to something, and the something is what you are actually negotiating.

A milestone-based agreement changes what the ask is. The customer funds the contract before work begins. The money is held until each milestone is complete, and that portion releases to the provider. What changes for the provider is that the first payment stops being a question about his character.

Rules about deposits and advance payments vary by state, and some states regulate them directly. This article is about what people commonly do, not about what any law requires. For what a specific state's rules actually say, see the deposit guides in the knowledge base. For how the same conversation looks from the client's side of it, see is 50 percent up front normal.

You can lose this job over a deposit. You can also take it, order the tile, and find out in week six what the refusal was about.