What Happens to the Posts You Paid For and Never Used

Picture a retainer that contracts 20 posts a month. In month three you count 14 that reached your feed, and the invoice still says the full amount. The numbers are illustrative. Who owns the other six depends on whether the agency was slow or you approved nothing for two weeks.

Month three: you are short six posts and the contract says nothing

A retainer is priced as a monthly bucket. Reading the scope of work tells you what is in the bucket. It does not say what happens to included work that never happened. The two are routinely conflated, or the second is simply missing.

Silence is not neutral. With no clause, the default is usually the agency’s invoicing habit: bill the full retainer and treat the month as closed. The mirror image, extra work triggering extra fees, is covered in what counts as a change order. This post concerns quantity and timing, not whether the posts were any good.

Three different gaps, three different owners

The fair outcome depends on whose delay created the gap.

Gap type	What happened	Fair outcome
Agency-caused	Under-delivery, staff absence, missed production	The brand is owed the work inside a stated window, or a credit against the next invoice at the per-deliverable value.
Brand-caused	Approvals sat for two weeks, assets or product information arrived late	The agency reserved capacity it cannot resell, so it keeps that month’s fee, ideally with a short catch up window.
Shared or no-fault	A launch slipped, a freeze, a platform issue, a crisis pause	The messiest case. Set a default, such as one month of rollover and then expiry, so it is not renegotiated each time.

The practical test: which party’s action or inaction, on which date, made the deliverable impossible? Is that date recorded in an approval log or an email? If not, you are arguing from memory.

The use it or lose it version, and when it is defensible

In spirit, the agency-friendly default reads like this hypothetical clause:

Deliverables not completed in a given month expire at month end. No credit or refund is due for unused deliverables.

The honest rationale: the agency staffs and reserves capacity for your month whether or not work gets approved. If you caused the gap, expiry is reasonable, because that capacity cannot be sold twice.

It turns unfair when the same expiry covers the agency’s own shortfall, because then under-delivery becomes extra margin. A single expiry clause with no fault carve-out is the version to push back on. It also removes the cost of shortfall: under a blanket clause, an agency that delivers 14 of 20 is paid the same as one that delivers 20.

What a fair rollover clause actually contains

• The deliverable and its per-unit value. Without a stated value, a credit cannot be calculated.
• The rollover window. For example, carry to the following month only, or a fixed number of months.
• A cap on the balance. Without one, banked posts become a capacity crunch, with several months of work owed in one month and quality dropping.
• What happens at the end of the window. Expiry, credit or refund.
• The remedy per deliverable. Make-good means delivering the missing work. Credit means reducing a later invoice. Launch content delivered three weeks late is not made good, so credit is the honest remedy there.
• The final month. Rollover with no next month needs a stated outcome: a refund, a credit, or work delivered in a short tail period.

Check non-renewal too. The termination clause should say what happens to any banked balance, or the two clauses will contradict each other.

Who counts the posts, and what counts as delivered

“Delivered” can mean drafted, submitted, approved or published. A fair definition ties it to the agency submitting an approvable version by a set date, so a brand that never approves cannot claim the agency under-delivered.

The counter-case: an agency submits an unusable draft, or everything on the last day of the month, and technically “delivers” while you had no realistic window to review. The contract should set a submission deadline that leaves a workable review period, chosen around your own approval capacity.

Ask for a monthly report with four separate figures. A hypothetical month: contracted 20, submitted 17, approved 14, published 14. Now the shortfall is attributable: three posts never reached you, and three submitted posts went unapproved. Keep a dated log of what arrived and when you replied. In a dispute, the record of who waited on whom is the whole argument, and your approval process is where that record starts.

Why this is a contract question and not only a business one

Credits and make-goods are ordinary remedies. According to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, a breach occurs when a party fails to perform promised obligations, and the overarching goal of contract law is to put the harmed party in the economic position it would have held without the breach.

A contract can fix the amount in advance. Liquidated damages are an exact sum or formula owed on breach, meant to compensate the injured party. But an unreasonably high figure that punishes rather than forecasts harm is a penalty clause, which courts do not enforce under the general US framing those pages describe. So set any make-good or credit at a reasonable per-deliverable value.

This is general information, not legal advice. If a contract has meaningful money at stake, a lawyer’s read is worth it.

What to say on the call, and what to add to the paper

If you are already in month three, try this:

The contract says 20 posts a month and we received 14. Is that a gap on your side, on ours, or neither? And what does the contract say happens to the other six?

If the contract is silent, skip the past months and ask for a short written addendum going forward.

If you have not signed, put three requests in the redline: a per-deliverable value, a rollover window with a cap, and a fault-based split between agency-caused and brand-caused gaps.

Next step

Still choosing an agency? Browse vetted agencies. Agencies reading this can list your agency free.

FAQ

Do unused posts on a social media retainer roll over?

Only if the contract says so. Some retainers are silent or expire unused deliverables at month end, so check yours. A fair version has a window and a cap.

Am I owed a refund if my agency delivers fewer posts than contracted?

It depends on the clause and on whose delay caused the gap. Where the agency under-delivered, a make-good or credit is the fair remedy. A cash refund is less common and should be requested explicitly.

Sources

• Cornell LII Wex: breach of contract, fetched 2026-09-25
• Cornell LII Wex: liquidated damages, fetched 2026-09-25
• Cornell LII Wex: penalty clause, fetched 2026-09-25