Deposits and the law: when a clinic must refund

A clinic can lawfully keep a deposit when the term allowing it is fair, was made clear before the client paid, and the amount kept reflects a genuine pre-estimate of what the cancellation actually cost the business. A clinic must refund, in whole or in part, when any of those three conditions fails: when the term is an unfair penalty, when it was buried or sprung on the client, or when a statutory cancellation right applies to the booking. “Non-refundable” written on a booking page is the start of the analysis, not the end of it.

Checked against official sources at the date shown above. Regulation moves; if you spot something out of date, email [email protected] and we will correct it.

Fairness under the Consumer Rights Act 2015

Your clients are consumers, so your booking terms sit under Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. A term is unfair if, contrary to good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties’ rights to the consumer’s detriment, and an unfair term is not binding on the consumer. The Act’s indicative list of potentially unfair terms includes terms allowing the trader to keep sums paid where the consumer cancels, without the consumer having an equivalent right, and terms requiring a consumer who cancels to pay a disproportionately high sum.

Terms must also be transparent: plain, intelligible language, presented so the client has a real chance of reading them. The Competition and Markets Authority publishes guidance on the unfair terms provisions, and it has been increasingly active on cancellation charges; its consistent position is that fairness is judged by substance, not by what the trader chose to call the payment.

Genuine pre-estimate of loss, not a penalty

The dividing line in practice. A retained deposit is defensible where it approximates the loss the cancellation genuinely caused: an appointment slot that could not be refilled, product ordered for the client, prescriber time already incurred. It tips into unfair penalty territory where it is designed to do more than compensate, for instance:

• Keeping a large deposit for a cancellation made weeks out, when the slot was almost certainly refillable.
• Charges that recover the full treatment price, covering all your costs plus the profit, regardless of circumstances.
• Flat forfeiture with no sliding scale, treating a 14-day notice cancellation the same as a no-show.

A sliding scale tied to notice periods (full refund beyond a sensible window, partial within it, forfeiture only close to the appointment or on no-show) maps retention to real loss and is far easier to defend. The clinic’s actual ability to refill slots is relevant: a busy clinic with a waitlist suffers less loss than the policy may assume, and a fair policy acknowledges that, for example by refunding when the slot is rebooked.

Online bookings and cooling-off rights

Most clinic bookings are now made at a distance: through a booking page, over the phone, or by social media message, with payment taken online. That brings the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 into play. For distance contracts for services, the client normally has a 14-day cancellation right from the day the contract is made, and you must tell them about it; where a trader fails to give the required cancellation information, the cancellation period can be extended substantially.

There are exceptions, and they need careful handling rather than confident assumptions:

• Regulation 28 excludes certain contracts from the cancellation right, including services related to leisure activities where the contract provides for a specific date of performance. Whether an aesthetic treatment booked for a specific slot falls within that exception is not clearly settled, and we have not found authority that puts clinic appointments safely inside it. Cautious clinics assume the cancellation right applies.
• If the client expressly requests that the service begins within the 14 days and acknowledges the consequences, the right to cancel is lost once the service has been fully performed, and a client who cancels after asking for early performance can be charged for what was supplied up to that point.

The practical upshot: for an appointment booked online more than 14 days ahead, a blanket no-refund deposit term is on weak ground during the cooling-off window. Build the 14-day right into your terms and your booking flow rather than litigating it one refund request at a time.

Clarity at booking is half the law

A fair term presented badly can still fail. The deposit amount, what it covers, the cancellation windows and the refund position should be stated before payment, in the confirmation message, and in your published policy, in the same plain words each time. Surprise is the common thread in deposit disputes: the client who genuinely understood the deal at the moment of booking rarely raises one. Our cancellation policy template gives you a structure, and if you take deposits through your booking system, the policy text should appear at the point of payment. AesthetiClinic’s deposit settings attach your policy to every booking confirmation automatically, which is the cheap way to make “it was made clear” provable.

The dispute reality: chargebacks

Whatever your terms say, a client who paid by card can raise a chargeback through their bank, and many do before they ever email you. The card schemes’ processes are not small claims court; the evidence that wins is documentary and boring. A clinic that can produce the booking record, the timestamped policy shown before payment, the client’s acceptance, and the communication trail around the cancellation will defend most chargebacks. A clinic relying on “our policy is on Instagram” will lose them. Treat every deposit as a future evidence question: capture acceptance at booking, keep the messages, and respond to chargeback notices within the deadline, because silence is an automatic loss.

What a defensible policy looks like

Pulling it together: a deposit modest relative to the treatment price, a published sliding scale tied to notice, a stated 14-day cooling-off position for distance bookings, a rebooking-instead-of-refund option offered but not forced, and the whole thing shown before payment and kept on file. That policy retains deposits from the no-shows who actually cost you money, refunds the edge cases that would have been losing fights, and leaves a paper trail for the rest.

This guide is general information, not legal advice.