Let us start with something that most platforms do not say plainly: things go wrong. A plumber misunderstands the scope of the job. A painter leaves a visible roller line on a ceiling that the homeowner only notices after they have left. A professional arrives late to the point where the homeowner cannot wait. We are not saying these happen often — our dispute rate is below 4% of completed jobs. But they happen, and how a marketplace handles the 4% tells you more about its values than anything it says about the 96%.
This post describes our dispute resolution process in full — what you can dispute, how to raise it, what happens next, and what outcomes are and are not possible. We are also going to be honest about where our process has gaps and what we are still figuring out.
What Can Be Disputed
There are three types of issues homeowners raise with us, and they require different responses.
Work quality disputes are cases where the job was completed — the professional marked it done, the homeowner paid — but the homeowner believes the work was not done correctly or not done to the standard the quote implied. Examples: a drain remains partially blocked after a clearing job; a new tap has a slow drip that was not there before; paint coverage is visibly uneven on one wall.
Price disputes arise when the final charge differs from the confirmed quote. Under our fixed-price model, this should not happen — the price the homeowner confirms at booking is the price charged. When price disputes occur, they are almost always the result of a scope escalation: the professional identified additional work required and added charges. We require professionals to get explicit in-app approval from the homeowner before adding anything to the invoice. If additional charges were applied without homeowner approval, we treat that as a process failure and the homeowner gets a full refund of the add-on amount.
Professional conduct disputes cover cases where the professional was late beyond acceptable limits, behaved in a way that made the homeowner uncomfortable, or made representations during the job that we consider misleading. These are handled differently from technical disputes because the evidence is often subjective and the appropriate response may be more about the professional's continued access to the platform than about financial remediation.
How to Raise a Dispute
All disputes are raised through the job record in the OSCAR app, within 72 hours of the job being marked complete. This window exists because disputes raised weeks after completion are much harder to investigate — photos degrade in usefulness, memories shift, and in the case of work quality disputes, other parties may have worked in the same area since.
We do accept disputes raised outside the 72-hour window in limited circumstances — specifically, latent defects that could not reasonably have been identified immediately. A tile that looks fine on completion but cracks within two weeks because the adhesive was poorly applied is an example. Portuguese consumer protection law, including the Decreto-Lei n.º 67/2003 governing guarantees on services, provides two-year coverage for service defects. We honour this framing: a clear defect in the work itself can be disputed within two years; a dispute about whether the work was completed at all must be raised within 72 hours of completion.
What Happens After You Raise a Dispute
Every dispute goes to our operations team — currently two people who handle nothing except dispute cases. A human reads every dispute. We do not auto-resolve disputes algorithmically.
The first step is reviewing the job record: the before-and-after photos the professional submitted, the scope description, any in-app messages between the homeowner and professional, and the professional's notes at job completion. In roughly half of disputes, this evidence is sufficient to make a clear determination. A photo showing the drain before and after the clearing job, where the "after" photo shows no visible change, is fairly conclusive. A photo showing a repainted wall with clearly visible roller lines against a wall that was not painted tells its own story.
In the other half, the evidence is ambiguous or incomplete, and we contact both parties directly. We ask the homeowner to provide additional photos if they have them, and we ask the professional to explain their assessment of the completed work. We typically give both parties 48 hours to respond.
We will be direct about a limitation here: we are not present at the job. We are making judgments based on documentation and testimony. In cases where the documentation is thin and the accounts conflict, we sometimes make decisions on incomplete information. We try to be consistent about how we handle ambiguous cases, and we try to describe our reasoning when we communicate the outcome. But we cannot promise that every disputed outcome is objectively correct — only that we applied a consistent process.
Possible Outcomes
There are four possible outcomes from a dispute:
- Full refund: We determine the work was not completed or was so deficient as to be worthless. Payment is reversed in full.
- Partial refund: We determine the work was partially completed or partially acceptable. A percentage of the job cost is refunded.
- Remediation job: We determine the work needs to be corrected, and we dispatch a professional — either the original one or a different one — to redo the specific deficient element at no additional charge to the homeowner. The cost is absorbed by OSCAR and may be recovered from the original professional if we determine the deficiency was their error.
- No action: We review the evidence and determine the work was completed as booked and the dispute does not reflect a deficiency in the work or process. We communicate our reasoning and offer the homeowner the right to escalate.
Escalation beyond our internal process is possible. Homeowners who believe our determination was wrong can escalate to the Centro de Arbitragem de Conflitos de Consumo do Porto e Viana do Castelo (TRIAVE), which provides mediated consumer dispute resolution under Portuguese law. We participate in that process and comply with mediated outcomes. We are not saying this is necessary often — we resolve most disputes directly — but the option exists and we point people to it when they feel our internal process did not give them a fair hearing.
The Professional's Side
Professionals have rights in this process too, and we are explicit about that. A homeowner who disputes a job in bad faith — claiming work was not done when the documentation shows it was, or demanding a refund on a job that was completed correctly because they changed their mind about wanting the work — is engaging in a form of fraud. We take that seriously.
When a professional disputes a homeowner's claim, their response is given equal weight to the homeowner's submission during our review. Professionals who accumulate patterns of bad-faith disputes from the same homeowner — or homeowners who raise disputes against multiple professionals with identical outcomes — are flagged for review. We have suspended homeowners from the platform for this pattern, in the same way we suspend professionals for poor work quality.
What We Are Still Building
Our current dispute process is manual and fairly slow — it typically takes three to five working days from dispute raised to outcome communicated. That is not fast enough when the issue is a flooded kitchen or a broken lock. We are building triage logic that identifies high-urgency disputes — those involving water, electrical safety, or physical security — and routes them for same-day review. That is not live yet.
We also want to improve how we communicate dispute outcomes. Currently, outcomes are communicated in plain text through the app. We are adding structured outcome records that both parties can download, which matter if either party needs documentation for an insurance claim or legal process. That is in development.
The 4% dispute rate is something we track carefully. We do not expect it to reach zero — that would require every job to go perfectly, every time, with no miscommunication, no building surprises, and no human error. What we do expect is that when it does not reach zero, the process for handling what goes wrong is clear, fair, and fast enough to matter. We are still working towards that last criterion.
