Why the question comes up
Almost nobody looks up building work hours until something wakes them. The usual sequence is a breaker starting earlier than expected on a weekday, or a cutting disc on a Saturday afternoon when the neighbour had assumed the site would be shut, and then an hour spent searching for a rule that turns out not to exist in the form they were looking for.
The homeowner or the contractor is often no better informed. A small site has a start time written into a planning condition that nobody on site has read, a set of hours in a letter the council sent months ago, and a subcontractor who turns up when it suits them. On one of our jobs the early start was a wait-and-load lorry, booked for half past seven because that was the slot the supplier had, on a road where the neighbours had been told eight. Ten minutes of engine noise did not spoil anyone's day. Not being told did, and the neighbour who raised it did so at the gate, to a driver, and the next time to the council.
By the time anyone checks, there is a disagreement about what happened and when. The neighbour is sure the noise started before eight on three separate days. The site manager is sure it did not. Neither of them wrote anything down, and the council officer who takes the call is being asked to decide between two recollections.
Construction noise hours: the pattern most councils use
There is no national set of hours. The pattern that appears most often in council guidance in England is noisy work from eight in the morning until six in the evening from Monday to Friday, a Saturday morning, and nothing on Sundays or bank holidays. The Saturday hours differ from borough to borough, some boroughs allow no weekend work at all, some restrict the loudest activities to a narrower window inside the weekday hours, and the borough's own page, three of which are linked below, is the one that applies.
Sundays, Saturdays and bank holidays
The question people ask most is whether a builder, or the neighbour's builder, can work on a Sunday. In most boroughs the answer is that no noisy work is allowed on a Sunday or a bank holiday, and a Saturday morning only, but it is the borough's decision and a few allow no weekend work at all. The rule is the same whoever is doing the work: the hours attach to the site, not to the person, so the builder on your neighbour's extension is held to exactly the hours yours would be.
Where the hours come from
The power sits in section 60 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974. A council may serve a notice on whoever is carrying out construction work imposing requirements on how it is done, and section 60(3) lets that notice specify the hours during which the works may be carried out, as well as the plant that may or may not be used and the noise levels that may be emitted. That is the legal instrument behind a set of hours, and our guide to Section 60 notices covers what one contains and how to answer it.
A contractor can also go to the council first and agree the hours in advance under section 61, which is called prior consent. The council has twenty-eight days to decide, and a consent it grants fixes the working methods, the hours and the noise limits for that site. Working in accordance with a consent is a defence if the council later prosecutes over a section 60 notice. Our guide to Section 61 prior consent sets out what an application has to contain.
Two other sources of hours sit alongside these. A planning permission can carry a condition restricting working and delivery hours, which is enforced by the planning authority rather than by environmental health, and the two sets of times do not always match. And when a council decides what is reasonable it has to have regard to the approved code of practice for construction noise, which is British Standard 5228, approved for England by the Control of Noise (Code of Practice for Construction and Open Sites) (England) Order 2015.
Three London boroughs, three answers
These are neighbouring authorities, and their published hours are not the same.
Westminster gives normal construction hours as eight in the morning to six in the evening from Monday to Friday and eight to one on a Saturday, and treats Sundays and bank holidays as outside normal working hours, on its prior consent page.
Southwark publishes permitted hours for noisy demolition and construction of eight to six from Monday to Friday and nine in the morning to two in the afternoon on a Saturday, on its construction noise page. The Saturday window is both later and longer than Westminster's.
Kensington and Chelsea is stricter than either. Its Code of Construction Practice gives standard hours of eight to six from Monday to Friday and, in the wording on that page, "At no time on Saturdays, Sundays and Public Holidays", with high-impact activities such as demolition and concrete breaking confined to nine until noon and two until half past five on weekdays.
The practical consequence is that a builder who works to one borough's hours in another borough may be outside them, and that a neighbour who has read a national summary may be quoting times that do not apply where they live.
What happens when the hours are broken
Nothing happens automatically, which is the part most people find surprising. The hours are enforced on complaint. A resident tells the council, an officer decides whether the noise warrants action, and if it does the council serves a section 60 notice on the people carrying out the works and on anyone else it considers responsible for them.
From that point the hours are legally binding on that site. Contravening a section 60 notice without reasonable excuse is an offence under section 60(8), and section 74 sets the penalty on summary conviction at a fine at level five on the standard scale, with a further daily fine for each day the offence continues after conviction. Whoever is served has twenty-one days to appeal to a magistrates' court.
There is a second route that does not depend on the hours at all. Noise from premises that amounts to a statutory nuisance is dealt with by an abatement notice under section 80 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and an individual can go to a magistrates' court directly under section 82. The government's own summary of how councils handle noise complaints is on GOV.UK.
Every one of these routes asks the same thing of the person complaining: dates, times and what was heard. A diary kept by one side and denied by the other is the weakest possible starting point, and it is the one most complaints start from.
The hours are only half of what a neighbour needs
Knowing the permitted hours tells a neighbour when to be annoyed. It does not tell them that the scaffold goes up on Thursday, that the concrete pour on the fourteenth will run to the end of the permitted window, or that the skip is being swapped at eight on Monday. Those are the things that actually determine whether a street tolerates six months of work, and they are almost never written down anywhere either side can point to afterwards. A shared, dated record of what was planned, what was reported and when it was dealt with settles the argument for the neighbour, the builder and the council officer at the same time, because all three are reading the same record. On Noisy Neighbour it costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works alongside the hours
Each site gets a public web page. A printable QR sheet goes on the hoarding or the front of the property, and scanning it opens the page, which shows who is doing the work, the working hours that apply to that site, and the notices coming up. There is no password and nothing for a neighbour to install, and the page carries the company name and the hours rather than a phone number, so nobody is fielding calls at the gate.
Notices are posted once by the site team, emailed to every neighbour who has joined the page, and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can see. The types are the ones that matter on a street: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions. A neighbour who can see that the noisy day is Wednesday does not spend Tuesday wondering.
A neighbour reports a problem by choosing a category, describing it and adding a photo if it helps. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, and each issue records who raised it, when it was raised, when it was acknowledged, when it was resolved and whether the neighbour confirmed the fix, with the average response and resolution times shown on the page. If the matter does reach the council, both sides have the same dated account of it rather than two diaries. What neighbours are entitled to know, and a message they can send asking for a page to be set up, is on our page for neighbours.