§ 7. Duty to advise against (plikt til å frarå): when the tradesperson must warn you

The Craftsman Services Act (Håndverkertjenesteloven)·LOV-1989-06-16-63

Machine-translated from Norwegian. The Norwegian text is the one that applies. Read the original in Norwegian.Norsk English العربية Polski Українська

In brief

The tradesperson (håndverker) must warn you before the job if it will not be worth it for you.
If the invoice (regning) is going to be much higher than expected while the work is under way, he must contact you.
If he gets no answer, he must stop when that is in your interest.
Failing to warn you can affect what he can charge you.

The text of the law (unofficial translation)

§ 7. Duty to advise against

(1) If the service provider (tjenesteyter), before the agreement (avtale) is entered into or before the work has begun, must assume that the price of a repair will be out of proportion to what the item (ting) is worth in repaired condition, or otherwise that the service will not be of reasonable benefit to the consumer (forbruker), the service provider shall inform the consumer of this.

(2) If the service provider, during performance, gets reason to assume that the price will be considerably higher than the consumer could expect, or reason to doubt whether the consumer still has an interest in having the service performed as intended, the service provider shall contact the consumer. If the consumer cannot be reached or the service provider for other reasons does not receive an answer, the service provider shall stop the work if this must be assumed to be in the consumer's interest.

Source: Lovdata — Håndverkertjenesteloven (the Craftsman Services Act) § 7

What does this mean?

The tradesperson has a duty to warn you in two situations. The first comes before the job has been agreed or started. If he then sees that a repair will cost much more than the item will be worth after the repair, or that the job otherwise will not be of reasonable benefit to you, he must tell you.

The second situation arises while the work is under way. If the tradesperson gets reason to believe that the invoice will be considerably higher than you could expect, or that you may no longer be interested in the job as it was intended, he must get in touch with you. If he cannot reach you, or no answer comes, he must stop the work if that is in your best interest. So stopping is not a choice for the tradesperson, but a duty when your interests call for it.

The consequence of failing to warn is set out in § 8. If the customer would probably have decided not to order or would have cancelled after a warning, the tradesperson cannot charge more than he would have received in that case. § 19 refers to this provision.

The rule is linked to the general duty to look after the customer's interests (§ 5). It sits alongside the rules on additional work (tilleggsarbeid) (§ 9), where the tradesperson must also get in touch when something comes up outside the job (oppdrag), and the rules on the time for performance (§ 10). Safety requirements (sikkerhetskrav) from the public authorities are in § 6.

Example: a customer hands in an object for repair. The tradesperson sees that fixing it will cost far more than the object is worth once it is finished. He must then tell the customer before he starts. This is a constructed example that only uses the roles in the law.

Related sections

All sections of the Craftsman Services Act →

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