Evergreen Contracts: The Agreements That Never Actually End

Ask most businesses when their supplier contracts expire and they will point you to a spreadsheet with a column of dates. What that spreadsheet almost never shows is the contracts that have no expiry date at all.

These are evergreen agreements — sometimes called rolling contracts, indefinite term, or continuous supply. They do not renew, because they never end. They simply continue, month after month, until somebody actively stops them.

They are extremely common, and they are the single easiest kind of contract to lose track of. Not because anyone is careless, but because every system built for tracking contracts is built around end dates, and these have none.

How an evergreen contract works

The wording is usually unremarkable. The agreement continues until terminated by either party on 90 days' written notice. Or: this agreement shall continue on a monthly basis unless and until cancelled. Sometimes there is an initial minimum term, after which the contract simply rolls.

There is nothing improper about this. For genuinely ongoing services — cleaning, waste collection, connectivity, maintenance — an indefinite term with a reasonable notice period is often the sensible commercial structure. Nobody wants to renegotiate a window cleaning contract every twelve months.

The problem is not the structure. It is what happens to a contract that nobody is ever prompted to look at.

Why they outlive their usefulness

An auto-renewing contract at least creates a moment. There is a date, the date arrives, and somebody has an opportunity to notice. That opportunity may be missed, but it exists.

An evergreen contract creates no moment at all. There is no anniversary, no notice deadline in the calendar, no renewal quote landing in an inbox. The invoice simply arrives every month, matches the previous month, and gets paid.

Which means these are the agreements where you find:

Services nobody uses any more. The confidential waste collection at a site you closed. The support contract for a system you decommissioned. The maintenance visit for equipment that was sold.

Prices that were competitive in 2019. Without a renewal event, nobody benchmarks. A rate agreed six years ago is still the rate, and the market has moved.

Scope that no longer matches the business. Cleaning specified for five days a week in an office now used three. Connectivity sized for a headcount you no longer have.

Suppliers nobody has spoken to in years. Not a problem in itself, but it means no relationship, no leverage, and no awareness of what else that supplier now offers.

In my experience these are the contracts that turn up in a spend review and genuinely surprise people. Not fraud, not error — just an arrangement that quietly outlived the circumstances it was created for.

The notice period is the whole story

With an evergreen contract, the notice period is not one detail among many. It is the only exit mechanism you have.

Three things to check.

How long is it? Ninety days is common. Six months is not unusual for facilities and outsourced services. That is the minimum time between deciding to leave and actually leaving, and it needs to be in your planning before you start looking at alternatives.

When can it be served? Some evergreen contracts allow termination at any time on notice. Others only permit it on an anniversary of commencement, which reintroduces a date — one nobody has recorded, because the contract has no expiry.

What form must it take? Written notice to a specified address or named role, sometimes by recorded delivery. An email to your account manager may not satisfy the clause, and a supplier disputing an invalid notice can cost you another full notice period.

That third point sounds pedantic until it happens. The contract is the instruction manual for leaving, and a notice served in the wrong form is not a notice at all.

What it costs to leave one late

Take a facilities contract at £3,000 a month with six months' written notice, terminable on any anniversary of commencement.

You decide in March that the service no longer fits. The commencement anniversary is 1 September. To exit on 1 September you must serve notice by 1 March — which has already passed. The next valid exit is 1 September the following year, meaning eighteen further months of a service you have already decided you do not want.

That is £54,000, and nothing has gone wrong. Nobody breached anything. The only failure was not knowing the shape of the clause early enough to act on it.

Finding them

Evergreen contracts will not appear in a list sorted by expiry date, because that field is empty. Look instead at:

Your recurring payments. Every regular outgoing to a supplier should map to an agreement. The ones that do not map to a dated contract are your candidates.

Direct debits and standing orders, which are disproportionately used for exactly this kind of ongoing service.

Categories rather than documents. Cleaning, waste, pest control, water coolers, confidential shredding, maintenance, telecoms lines, alarm monitoring. If you have one of these, it is quite likely evergreen.

For each one, record three things: the notice period, when notice can be served, and how it must be delivered. That is usually one line, and it converts a contract with no date into a contract with an actionable one.

What to negotiate

If you are signing an evergreen agreement — and often you should — three things are worth asking for.

A notice period proportionate to the service. Six months to stop a window cleaner is not proportionate. Ninety days for a complex outsourced function may well be.

Termination on notice at any time, rather than only on an anniversary. This is the single most valuable change, and it costs the supplier very little at signature.

A scheduled review, even without an expiry. An annual price and scope review written into the contract creates the moment the structure otherwise removes. Suppliers rarely object, because it is not a termination right — but it puts a date in the calendar, and that is most of the battle.

The wider point

Businesses track what their systems have a field for. Renewal dates get tracked because contract lists have a renewal date column. Notice periods get tracked less often. Evergreen contracts get tracked least of all, because they defeat the format entirely.

The difference between an end date and a notice deadline matters for any contract. For an evergreen agreement the notice deadline is the only date that exists — and if it is not written down somewhere, the agreement is effectively permanent until someone does the archaeology.

Timemy tracks notice periods and termination requirements for contracts with no end date at all, so an evergreen agreement still surfaces for review. See how contract tracking works.

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The short version: the contracts most likely to be quietly wasting money are the ones with no expiry date, because nothing ever prompts anyone to look at them. Find them through your recurring payments rather than your contract list, record the notice period and how notice must be served, and give each one a review date the contract itself does not provide.