What to check before hiring a contractor comes down to two questions, and most clients only ask the first. Whether the firm may lawfully do the work, which five registers will tell you. And how your money leaves your account, which no register anywhere covers.
South Africa is unusually well equipped on the first question and poorly protected on the second. The law tells a contractor what not to do with your deposit, but it does not hold the money for you. Britain announced a scheme for each question in August, and both are voluntary.
What Britain announced in August
The British government announced on 28 August 2026 that a government supported scheme called the Approved Code would open from September 2026, to help people identify and hire trusted traders. It is delivered by the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman in partnership with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. Businesses that sign up demonstrate higher standards of customer service, transparency and dispute resolution.
The government said it would be live with its first businesses by the end of September and fully live by December 2026. The Ombudsman's own wording is looser: a launch "during the autumn". On 29 September its code site was still pre-launch, saying the code would be available to retailers from the end of September.
The numbers behind it are the government's own. More than one in four UK adults who carried out home improvement work in the past 18 months had problems with it. In 2024, on the same figures, people lost over £10,3bn on home and garden maintenance through losses, overpriced work or unfair practices. That is about R225 billion at R21,85 to the pound on 31 August 2026.
Read the mechanism rather than the branding, which the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, put plainly. The changes mean "you'll now have the option to make sure your money is held safely and released bit by bit as the work gets done." That is not a register. It is a separate scheme called Trusted Payments, which holds the customer's money and releases it against project milestones. That is the half of the problem South African law deals with only after the money has gone.
Read the limits too, because they are the honest part. Neither scheme is compulsory. A builder who joins neither can carry on trading legally, and nothing here creates a builder's licence. It is a better default for a homeowner who uses it, not a floor under the whole market.
The register half, where we are already ahead
A South African client has more to work with here than a British one has ever had. The cidb runs a Register of Contractors, with a search by company name or CRS number and filters on province, city, status, designation and class of work. Status is the field to read: it distinguishes active from deregistered, expired and suspended, and those are four different answers. When we opened the search on 24 September 2026, it returned a permissions message rather than records. If it does the same for you, ask the contractor for its CRS number and confirm the registration with the cidb directly.
The cidb separately publishes the contractors it has removed from that register as dated Government Gazette notices. The most recent, as at 24 September 2026, removed contractors with effect from 24 July 2026.
National Treasury runs two more, the Database of Restricted Suppliers and the Register for Tender Defaulters. The fifth check is who the directors actually are, at the CIPC, because a restriction attaches to people as well as to company names. All five are set out in our piece on the five registers.
That is a better starting position than the one Britain's new code is only now starting to build. It is also not what goes wrong most often.
The money half, where the law arrives late
Every one of those registers answers a question about the past. None of them answers the question that decides whether you lose money, which is what happens between your deposit and the last day the contractor is on site.
The Consumer Protection Act does say something about that. Section 65 requires a supplier holding a consumer's deposit or prepayment not to treat it as its own. It must look after the money with the care expected of someone managing another person's property, and it is liable for the loss if it does not. That is a right to claim once the money has gone. It is not a mechanism that keeps the money safe while the work is done.
A firm that was compliant on Monday can be short of cash by Friday, and a clean register entry does not stop a deposit being spent on somebody else's job. That is the failure mode behind most abandoned sites. Not a contractor who was never allowed to work, but one who ran out of money and moved your deposit to the job that was shouting louder.
So the check that matters most is not another register. It is your own payment schedule, and you write it before anyone starts.
How much deposit should you pay a contractor?
Pay only enough deposit to buy the materials the job needs first, and pay everything after that against finished stages of work. Three rules, and they hold from a R60 000 bathroom to a R4 million tenant installation.
- Pay against work in place, never against a date. A payment triggered by a calendar date pays for time. A payment triggered by a finished stage pays for work. If your quote says 50% on signature, you are handing over half the contract value against nothing.
- Make the deposit buy something you can see. A deposit should cover materials the contractor has to order before starting, and it should be sized to those materials. Ask for the supplier quote it is based on, and for proof of the order once it is paid.
- Hold the last slice past the end. Keep 5% to 10% back for a defined period after the work is finished, written into the contract and released when the snag list is closed. It is the only thing you still hold after handover, and how long retention can be held is set out separately.
Arithmetic makes the point faster than the argument does. On a R400 000 job, a 50% deposit puts R200 000 at risk on day one. The same job on a 10% deposit and four stage payments never has more than R40 000 exposed at any moment, and that R40 000 has materials standing behind it.
Where verification still earns its place
A payment schedule protects the money. It says nothing about whether the firm can build, and a bad roof paid for in perfect stages is still a bad roof.
Arabella Infrastructure Solutions is a Johannesburg-based vetted contractor panel that verifies contractors once and keeps that verification current. A client commissioning work is choosing among firms whose registration, class of works and standing were read from the client's side rather than presented from the contractor's. What that covers is on the client page.
On Monday
Pull out the quote for the job you are about to start and find the payment clause. If any payment is triggered by a date rather than by a stage of work being finished, change it before you sign, and put the change in writing.
Then run the contractor's CRS number through the cidb register and read the latest removals notice on the cidb site. If your payment schedule is right and the register is clean, you have done more for yourself than the scheme Britain is launching will do for a British homeowner.
