Construction Finance Director

FD Capital recruits Finance Directors and CFOs for UK construction businesses — housebuilders and residential developers, main contractors, civil engineering and infrastructure businesses, specialist subcontractors, and construction materials and products companies. Construction finance is a specialist discipline: the combination of long-term contract accounting under IFRS 15, complex project cost reporting, retentions management, CIS compliance, and the cash flow dynamics of a sector where payment timing between clients, main contractors and supply chain can determine whether a profitable business survives — all require a Finance Director who has worked in the sector before. Adrian Lawrence FCA, founder of FD Capital and a Fellow of the ICAEW, leads our senior finance recruitment practice.

Call 020 3287 9501 or email recruitment@fdcapital.co.uk. Shortlists within three to five working days.

Adrian Lawrence FCA — Founder, FD Capital
Fellow of the ICAEW | ICAEW-Registered Practice | Construction finance placements since 2018

The construction sector has one of the highest rates of business failure of any UK industry — and the majority of construction company failures are financial rather than operational. A business can be winning work, delivering projects and growing headcount while simultaneously heading toward a cash crisis driven by retentions withheld, variations disputed, and payment terms that mean the business finances its clients’ projects for months before receiving payment. The Finance Director who understands this dynamic — who has lived through a retention dispute, managed a WIP-heavy balance sheet, and navigated a main contractor insolvency — is a genuinely different candidate from one who has only managed finance in less operationally complex sectors. FD Capital’s construction finance network includes Finance Directors with direct sector experience across contracting, housebuilding, development and infrastructure.

What Makes Construction Finance Distinctive

Long-term contract accounting and IFRS 15

Construction contracts — particularly those spanning multiple financial years — require careful application of IFRS 15 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers). The Finance Director must determine the correct basis for revenue recognition across each contract: identifying distinct performance obligations, estimating variable consideration (including variations, claims and incentive payments), applying the appropriate measure of progress (typically input-based cost-to-complete or output-based milestone completion), and recognising contract assets (amounts due for work completed but not yet invoiced) and contract liabilities (advance payments received in excess of revenue earned) on the balance sheet. For businesses with significant variation and claims activity — common in infrastructure and civil engineering — the judgements around variable consideration can materially affect reported profitability and require robust documentation to withstand audit scrutiny.

Project cost reporting and WIP management

Accurate project cost reporting is the financial foundation of a construction business. The Finance Director owns the cost reporting framework — ensuring that labour, plant, materials and subcontractor costs are allocated to projects accurately and promptly, that work-in-progress (WIP) is valued correctly at each month end, and that the cost-to-complete estimates used to assess project profitability are reliable. A WIP position that is poorly understood or optimistically estimated is one of the most common causes of unexpected profit deterioration in construction — and one of the most difficult problems for an incoming Finance Director to untangle once it has accumulated across multiple projects.

Retentions management

Construction payment retention — the practice of withholding a percentage of contract value (typically 3–5%) until practical completion and expiry of a defects liability period — creates a significant asset on the balance sheet of any contracting business. The Finance Director must track retention receivables by project and client, ensure they are collected promptly at the appropriate trigger points, and manage the relationship between retention receivables owed to the business and retention payables owed to subcontractors. Retention debt that is poorly tracked or aggressively extended by clients can represent a material proportion of a contractor’s net assets — and in the event of a client insolvency, unrecovered retentions can be the difference between a solvent and insolvent outcome. The government’s ongoing retention reform programme is also a regulatory development that construction Finance Directors must monitor.

CIS — Construction Industry Scheme

The Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) requires construction businesses to deduct tax at source from payments to subcontractors and make monthly returns to HMRC. The Finance Director is responsible for ensuring CIS compliance — verifying subcontractor registration status before making payments, applying the correct deduction rate (20% for registered, 30% for unregistered, 0% for gross payment status), and submitting monthly returns accurately and on time. CIS non-compliance is a common trigger for HMRC investigation in the construction sector, and the penalties for errors — particularly for businesses using a large number of subcontractors — can be significant.

Cash flow and payment chain dynamics

The construction sector’s payment chain — client to main contractor to specialist subcontractor to materials supplier — creates cash flow dynamics unlike any other industry. A main contractor may have 60–90 day payment terms with its client while being contractually obligated to pay subcontractors within 30 days. A specialist subcontractor may be owed payment for work completed three months ago while simultaneously needing to fund the next phase of the same project. The Finance Director manages this cash flow challenge through active debtor management, disciplined subcontractor payment scheduling, and the working capital facilities — overdraft, invoice finance, bonding lines — that allow the business to bridge payment timing gaps without compromising operational performance.

Housebuilder and developer-specific finance

Residential housebuilders and property developers have additional financial complexity beyond the contracting model — land acquisition and financing, planning gain accounting, shared ownership and Help-to-Buy administration (where applicable), deferred land payments and overage obligations, and the tax structuring of development profits. The Finance Director of a housebuilder or developer must understand both the construction finance and the property development finance disciplines, including the accounting for land and WIP under IAS 2, the tax treatment of trading versus investment property, and the financial modelling that underpins site appraisals and development finance applications.

Construction Finance Director and CFO Salary Guide UK 2026

Business Type / Scale	Typical Salary
Finance Director — specialist subcontractor (£5m–£30m turnover)	£75,000 – £100,000
Finance Director — main contractor / regional builder (£30m–£150m)	£95,000 – £130,000
Finance Director — housebuilder / developer (£30m–£200m)	£100,000 – £140,000
CFO — large contractor / infrastructure (£150m+)	£130,000 – £200,000+
Fractional FD — SME contractor or developer	£400 – £600/day
Interim FD — construction	£450 – £700/day

Related Sector and Senior Finance Services

Find a Construction Finance Director or CFO

FD Capital recruits Finance Directors and CFOs for UK construction businesses — contractors, housebuilders, developers and infrastructure companies. Candidates with genuine sector experience in contract accounting, retentions, CIS compliance, and construction cash flow management. Permanent, fractional and interim. Shortlists within three to five working days.

📞 020 3287 9501
✉ recruitment@fdcapital.co.uk

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