What is the difference between a claim and a dispute?

A claim is a position: you assert, under the contract's own machinery, that you are entitled to money or time, a variation priced, loss and expense, a compensation event. It lives inside the ordinary administration of the job, and most claims are simply assessed, negotiated and absorbed into the account without any formal process. A dispute is what a claim becomes when it is rejected, cut down or met with silence long enough that rejection is the only honest reading; the law calls that crystallisation, and it matters because the formal processes, adjudication first among them, can only decide a dispute that exists. Refer a claim the other side has never actually answered and you invite a jurisdiction argument that the dispute had not crystallised. The distinction also disciplines tone and timing. While something is a claim, the job is evidence and machinery: notices in time, substantiation attached, deadlines pressed. Once it is a dispute, the job becomes positioning: choosing the forum, the scope and the moment. Money is lost by treating a live claim as a war, and more is lost by not noticing the moment a claim quietly became a dispute and the clock started mattering.

Picture a subcontractor submitting a £60,000 loss and expense application with full substantiation. For six weeks it is a claim: the contractor's surveyor asks questions, records get added, an offer of £45,000 arrives. If the subcontractor takes it, no dispute ever existed. Instead the offer is rejected, the response deadline passes in silence, and a follow up letter states that unless the balance is addressed the position will be referred. The silence and the rejection have crystallised a dispute over the £60,000, and adjudication is now available without a jurisdiction argument to fight first. The lesson is to run the claim machinery cleanly and to log the moment refusal happens, because that timestamp is what unlocks the formal routes.