When a client goes silent mid-project

A client who stops answering mid-project is not withdrawing attention, they are extending their payment terms without telling you. Every day you keep working into the silence converts your capacity into an unsecured loan at 0%, with no invoice, no due date, and no statutory clock running in your favor.

That last part is what makes mid-project silence a different defect from post-delivery non-payment, and why the response has to be different too.

Silence before an invoice gives you fewer rights, not more

Once you have delivered and invoiced, the amount is fixed and the machinery is on your side. There is a document, a due date, and in the UK and EU a statutory entitlement to interest and a fixed recovery sum the moment the date passes. If you are past that point, the escalation ladder for a client who has stopped paying is the post you want.

During delivery none of that exists. The amount owed is still growing, no invoice has been issued, so no due date has been missed, so no interest accrues and no recovery costs are claimable. Your exposure rises daily and your legal position does not improve at all. The single objective of everything below is to convert accruing work in progress into an issued invoice as quickly as the contract allows, because an invoice is the only instrument that starts a clock.

The clock starts at the last substantive reply

Pick the date deliberately, because every threshold below counts from it. A substantive reply answers a question you asked, approves something you sent, or supplies something you were waiting on. An acknowledgment, a thumbs-up reaction, or "will look at this properly next week" is not substantive; it is a deferral, and the deferral date is not the reply date.

Then separate the two kinds of silence, because they cost differently:

• Blocked silence. You cannot proceed without something from them: assets, access, sign-off, a decision. Your cost is idle capacity you have already reserved and can no longer resell at short notice.
• Unblocked silence. You can keep going. Your cost is unbilled work in progress that grows every day and is entirely unsecured.

Blocked silence is the more expensive of the two and the one people tolerate longest, because nothing appears to be accumulating. Reserved capacity you cannot fill is a cost you have already paid.

Price the silence before you decide anything

Two numbers, both of which you should be able to produce in under five minutes.

The first is hours logged since the last paid milestone, multiplied by your rate. That is your exposure. If you cannot produce it quickly, that is its own finding, and it is worth fixing before the next project rather than during this one. A timer whose output is a weekly report tells you how you spent the week; a timer whose output is an invoice line tells you what you are owed, which is the distinction behind comparisons like Worklyn versus Toggl. Worklyn's project view carries budgets, time logs and files against the same project, so the unbilled figure is a lookup rather than a reconstruction.

The second is the number of days until you next owe someone money: rent, a subcontractor, a tax payment. Exposure only matters relative to that date. €4,000 of unbilled work matters differently on the 3rd of the month than on the 26th.

Do the arithmetic before you write anything, because it determines how hard the next message is.

The ladder, counted in days since the last substantive reply

The dates are illustrative rather than universal — a three-week build and a nine-month retainer justify different thresholds. What matters is that the thresholds exist before you need them, because deciding what counts as too long while you are anxious about it is how three weeks becomes three months.

You can only stop work if the contract says you can

Walking away from a signed contract because someone stopped replying can itself be a breach, and a client who resurfaces angry will look for exactly that. A suspension clause converts a unilateral decision into a contractual one. It costs one paragraph.

SUSPENSION FOR NON-RESPONSE

1. If the Client fails to provide information, materials, access or
approval within seven (7) business days of a written request, the
Supplier may suspend performance on five (5) business days' written
notice.

2. On the suspension date the Supplier may invoice all work performed
up to that date, whether or not a milestone has been reached, at the
rates in Schedule 1. Such invoices are payable on the standard terms.

3. Each day of suspension extends every subsequent delivery date by one
day.

4. Resumption is subject to the Supplier's availability. Where more than
twenty (20) business days have elapsed, resumption is subject to a
re-mobilization fee of [amount].

Clause 1 fixes the trigger so nobody argues later about whether the client was really unresponsive. Clause 2 is the load-bearing line: without it, "work performed" that has not reached a milestone is unbillable, which is precisely the trap. Clause 3 stops the client from returning in week six and holding you to the original launch date. Clause 4 prices the cost of standing a project back up, which is real and which nobody ever charges for.

If you do not have a contract you can add this to, the contract generator produces a signable PDF in the browser with a custom clause block, no signup and no watermark. Paste the paragraph above into it.

Nothing has transferred yet, and that is your only real leverage

This is the part most freelancers get backwards. They assume that because the client has seen a draft, the client has it. Usually they do not.

In the United States, copyright "vests initially in the author," and a transfer "is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed" (17 U.S.C. §201(a), §204(a)). Commissioned work is not automatically work made for hire; that requires an express written instrument signed by both parties. In the UK, section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes the author the first owner, and the employee exception does not reach a commissioned contractor.

The practical version: unless you signed something assigning rights, you still hold them. Make that explicit rather than implicit. A license line that reads "all rights in the deliverables remain with the Supplier until the final invoice is paid in full" is one sentence and changes what a silent client is actually holding. Send flattened previews during the project and source files on final payment, as a matter of routine rather than as a threat.

Two caveats. This is jurisdictional and it is not legal advice; check it against your own governing law and your existing contracts, some of which may already assign rights on signature rather than on payment. And leverage only works if you use it early. Rights you assert in month four of silence read as retaliation; rights stated in clause 6 of a contract signed in month zero read as terms.

Invoice before you stop, not after

The most common sequencing error is stopping work, waiting to see if the client resurfaces, and invoicing weeks later once it is clear they will not. That gives away the only thing you are trying to gain.

Issue the invoice on the day you give suspension notice. It converts an argument about effort into a document with a number and a date, it can be processed by a finance department that has never heard of you, and if it goes unpaid you are back in familiar territory with statutory interest and a recovery fee available. The overdue payment letter covers the numbers you can legally state once that date passes.

Send it to accounts payable and copy your contact. A silent contact cannot pay you; an AP inbox does not need them to be responsive, only to have a purchase order reference and an approved supplier record.

The message that ends most silences

Day five, after email and one other channel have failed. Short, dated, and not angry.

Subject: [Project name] — pausing 14 September without sign-off >Hi [name], >I have not had a reply since 28 August on the homepage direction, and I need that decision to continue. >I will keep working on the items that are not blocked until 14 September. After that date I will pause under clause 8 of our agreement and invoice for the 34 hours completed since the last milestone. >If the timing has changed at your end that is fine, I would just need to know so I can hold the October slot or release it. >Are you still the right person for sign-off, or should I be speaking to someone else? >[Your name]

Line by line. The subject carries the date, so the message survives being skim-read on a phone. The first line states the missed date rather than a feeling about it. The second line gives a specific pause date and a specific number of hours, which is what turns a complaint into a fact. "If the timing has changed at your end that is fine" removes the need for them to apologize before replying, which is the actual obstacle more often than you would think. The last line is the highest-yield sentence in the whole email: a surprising share of silences are one departed employee, and asking who to speak to instead is a question anyone can answer in nine seconds without feeling accused.

Cut the paragraph explaining how much you enjoyed working on it. It reads as negotiation from a weak position, and it makes the message longer than the phone preview.

What to change this week

1. Add a suspension and WIP-billing clause to your contract template, with the trigger and notice periods filled in. One paragraph, applies to every future project.
2. Set a milestone structure that bills at least every three weeks on anything longer than a month, so the maximum silence you can ever finance is three weeks of work. The full payment system covers where those milestones sit relative to delivery.
3. Get the accounts payable email address at kickoff, before you need it. Add a field for it to your onboarding questions.

Worklyn's Money on the Table reports unbilled hours by project, so the exposure you are carrying into a silence is a number you can read rather than one you have to reconstruct.