Calculator · 2 minutes
What is held, and when you get it back
Retention is money you have already earned and cannot spend. This works out how much of it is sitting with the employer, how the two releases split, and what date each one falls due — from your contract, not from a convention.
There is no default retention percentage here, no assumed limit and no assumed defects period. All three are clauses, and two subcontracts on the same tower disagree about them. You supply them; the calculator does the arithmetic and prints every line of it.
Still to collect
AED 250,000
Your money, sitting with the employer. It is not a claim and not a forecast — it is the deduction already taken off certificates you have been paid on.
Held right now
AED 250,000
Certified value multiplied by the retention percentage, capped if your contract caps it.
First release
AED 125,000
Enter your taking-over date
Balance
AED 125,000
Falls due at the end of the defects liability period.
Limit of retention
You are at the ceiling. The limit is AED 250,000 and the deduction reached it at AED 2,500,000 of certified work. Nothing further should be withheld from any certificate after that — worth checking on your last one, because it is a common thing to miss.
Enter your taking-over date. The amount above is right without it. The dates are not: both releases are counted from taking-over, so until that date is in, there is nothing to count from and no answer worth printing.
Every line of the arithmetic
Nothing is hidden behind a button. If a line is wrong for you, the field above it is editable.
- Retention accrued
- AED 3,000,000 × 10% = AED 300,000
- Limit of retention
- AED 5,000,000 × 5% = AED 250,000
- Held (the lower of the two)
- min(AED 300,000, AED 250,000) = AED 250,000
- First release
- AED 250,000 × 50% = AED 125,000
- Balance
- AED 250,000 − AED 125,000 = AED 125,000
This reads your contract back to you. It does not read your contract for you. Retention can be swapped for a bank guarantee, the certificate for the balance often has to be applied for rather than arriving on its own, and a disputed defect can hold the last payment past the date this page prints. What is on screen is the entitlement and the timetable — collecting it is a separate job.
Send us the sheet
If the first release is overdue, the question is which clause the delay is hiding behind and what the certificate has to say to move it. Send us these figures and we will tell you what we would do next.
Want someone to read this with you?
Ten answers cannot see your data, your contracts, or the person who quietly refuses to use the system. Send them over and a consultant will come back with what they mean for a company your size, and what we would look at first. No newsletter, no sequence — one reply from a person.
Retention Release Calculator
Knowing the date is half of collecting it
The other half is the certificate, the notice and the paper trail behind them. Send us the figures and we will tell you what your system should be producing on the day each release falls due.
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