Before you are bound by work agreed in your home, the trader must give you the main characteristics of the job, the total price including tax, their identity and geographical address, and written notice of your right to cancel — on paper or another durable medium. Withholding the cancellation notice is a criminal offence.
Which agreements does this cover?
The rules come from the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, and the category that matters here is the off-premises contract: one agreed somewhere that is not the trader’s business premises. A builder who measures up in your kitchen and you shake hands with in your kitchen has made an off-premises contract. So has the roofer who knocks on the door, and so has the fitter who signs you up in your driveway.
It does not matter whether anything was signed. It does not matter that you invited them. What matters is where you became bound.
Two limits are worth knowing. Regulation 7(4) says the information duties do not apply to an off-premises contract where the payment you make is not more than £42, so a very small job falls outside them. And if you went to the trader’s own premises to agree the job, or the whole thing was done at a distance by phone or website, a different set of rules in the same Regulations applies instead.
What exactly must the trader give you?
Schedule 2 of the Regulations sets out the list. The items that matter most on a domestic job are:
- The main characteristics of the goods, services or digital content — in plain terms, what the work actually is.
- The identity of the trader, including the trading name.
- The geographical address at which the trader is established, plus contact details, and the address to which you can send a complaint if it is different.
- The total price inclusive of taxes, or, where the nature of the work means the price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the manner in which it will be calculated.
- All additional delivery charges and any other costs, and where those cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the fact that they may be payable.
- The arrangements for payment, delivery and performance, including when the trader undertakes to do the work.
- The trader’s complaints handling policy, where there is one.
- The conditions, time limit and procedures for exercising the right to cancel, together with a cancellation form.
- That you will have to bear the cost of returning goods if you cancel, where that applies.
- That you may have to pay reasonable costs if you asked for work to start during the cancellation period and then cancel.
- A reminder that the law requires goods and services to conform to the contract.
- The existence and terms of any after-sales service or commercial guarantee.
- The existence of any relevant code of conduct and how to get a copy.
Read that list against the single-line scribble on the back of a business card that a lot of domestic work is still agreed on, and the gap is obvious.
Does it have to be on paper?
Effectively, yes — unless you agree otherwise. Regulation 10(2) says the information and any cancellation form "must be given on paper or, if the consumer agrees, on another durable medium and must be legible". Regulation 10(1) adds that it must be given "in a clear and comprehensible manner".
Durable medium is the phrase doing the work. An email or a PDF you can keep counts. A page on the trader’s website that they can silently edit next week does not, and neither does something said out loud in your hallway.
Regulation 12 goes further: the trader must give you a copy of the signed contract, or confirmation of the contract, on a durable medium, containing all of the Schedule 2 information unless they already supplied it. So there should be a document in your hands at the end of the visit, not a promise of one.
What happens if the trader gives you nothing?
Three things, and they stack.
The information becomes a term of the contract anyway. Regulation 18 says every contract of this kind "is to be treated as including a term that the trader has complied with" the information requirements. Separately, section 50 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes anything the trader said or wrote about themselves or the service binding, where you took it into account in deciding to go ahead. The promise about the tiles matching, made in your hallway, is not hot air — it is a contractual term you can enforce.
Your right to cancel gets longer. If the trader did not tell you about the cancellation right, the period does not simply run out after fourteen days. That is covered in full in our guide to the 14-day right to cancel.
It can be a criminal offence. Regulation 19(1) is blunt: "A trader is guilty of an offence if the trader enters into an off-premises contract to which regulation 10 applies but fails to give the consumer the information listed in paragraph (l), (m) or (n) of Schedule 2." Those are the paragraphs on the right to cancel, the cancellation form and the associated costs. This is enforced by Trading Standards, not by you personally, but it is a useful thing to know is true when a trader tells you the paperwork does not matter.
What the law does not require
It is worth being equally clear about the other direction, because plenty of confident claims circulate.
There is no legal requirement for a domestic quote to be on headed paper, to be witnessed, or to be on any particular form. There is no statutory maximum deposit. And for most trades there is no licence at all — nothing that a "certificate" in a van window has to be checked against. What the law gives you is information, a cancellation window, and a standard the work must meet. It does not give you a national register of approved builders, because no such thing exists.
What to do next
Ask for the Schedule 2 information before you agree to anything, in writing, and keep it. If a trader will not put the total price, the scope and the cancellation notice in an email, that refusal is itself the answer to whether you should hire them.
Then check what can actually be checked. A few trades have a statutory register and it is a criminal offence to work outside it; most have none, and the useful checks are different. Our guide to checking a UK trader is registered goes trade by trade. Every category page on this directory also states, for that trade specifically, what the law requires and how to verify it — worth reading before you contact anyone.