UCP was built for things that ship. A large part of commerce sells time instead: a haircut at 3pm, a spot in Tuesday's yoga class, a table for four, a boiler service at the customer's home. The inventory is a slot that exists once and then expires, so two agents can race for the same one, and the lifecycle runs booked, rescheduled, attended or no-show rather than purchased, shipped, delivered.

Requests for it have run through most of 2026. Discussions #93 and #163 set out use cases beyond retail and the case for holding a slot before checkout; issue #303 (25 March) asks the Technical Council to scope a Services vertical; issue #317 (28 March) proposes a three-step search-availability, hold-slot, book-appointment flow, prototyped under its own io.github.ligament-oss.scheduling namespace; and issue #479 (26 May) asks for a booking-availability query for timed tickets and busy restaurants. All three are still open.

On governance, the UCP Governing Council discussed a Services Domain Working Group on 10 July 2026. There was interest, but no agent-platform participant, and the council wants any charter to come from both sides of the market — service providers and platforms — so it agreed to exploratory conversations rather than a charter. Its most recent published minutes, from 7 August, approved a working group for feeds; services has not returned to the agenda since, and the roadmap names Food and Lodging as the industries in development.

That changed on 9 October 2026, when Stripe filed a charter for a Local Services Domain Tech Council (issue #922), naming Meta as a platform and Wix, Squarespace, Housecall Pro, Jobber, HoneyBook and Stripe as businesses, with both sides of the market on board. It proposes USP as the starting point and commits to folding in #303, #317 and #479; it awaits Governing Council review. A fuller draft now exists outside the protocol body.

The Universal Scheduling Protocol (USP), maintained in Wix's GitHub organisation and published under Apache-2.0, defines a service catalog, availability with slot holds, and a full booking lifecycle. Its UCP-Native Mode lets a business register those capabilities in its existing /.well-known/ucp and take paid bookings through UCP checkout. It sits under its own dev.usp-protocol.* namespace rather than dev.ucp.*, which is what UCP's namespace rules ask of anyone building ahead of a council.

And it already appears in the wild: our census sees one service business declaring the USP catalog, availability, bookings and paid-bookings capabilities in its UCP profile, alongside Appointedd's UCP demo endpoint declaring booking, intent and schedule capabilities under com.appointedd.*.

What it would look likeA homeowner tells an assistant: "get someone out to service the boiler next Tuesday morning, under $150." The agent finds a provider, checks real availability, holds a slot so no other agent can take it, confirms the booking at the customer's address and takes a deposit — with the business still the merchant of record.