Practical completion

The certificate is issued by whoever your contract names: an architect, an engineer, a supervising consultant. It moves several things at once. Risk usually passes to the owner. Insurance obligations change hands. The defects period starts running. In many contracts a payment falls due on the date it is signed.

The word doing the work is 'practical'. It does not mean complete. It means the outstanding items are minor enough that they do not stop the building being occupied and used. What counts as minor is a judgement, and it is made by someone the developer engaged, on a date the developer has a strong financial interest in bringing forward.

This is why the same building can be practically complete and, from where you are standing, obviously unfinished. Both statements can be true. The certificate is answering a narrow contractual question, and the answer is not 'is this the property I was sold'.

The date matters more than the condition, because everything downstream is measured from it. If the defects period runs twelve months from practical completion, a certificate issued early quietly shortens the window in which the developer has to fix things at their own cost. The building is no better for the certificate arriving sooner, but your remedy expires sooner.

In markets built around foreign off-plan buyers, practical completion and handover are often weeks or months apart, and the gap is where disputes live. You may be liable for service charges from completion while not yet holding keys, or asked to pay a milestone against a certificate for a building you have not seen.