Planning advice for contractors

Every contractor arriving on NEC has heard that NEC is strict about notices and JCT is relaxed. It is half wrong, in the half that costs money. JCT keeps two notices because it keeps two lists: the extension of time notice carries no sanction, while the loss and expense notice has been held by a court to be a condition of being paid at all. NEC runs one notification and one deadline, and it bars time and money together.

Cash is the part of the JCT to NEC transition nobody rehearses. Both forms pay on a fixed cycle under the same Act, so the shape looks familiar. Then the detail bites: the contractor's application stops being optional, the pay less window shortens by two days, and clause 50.5 withholds a quarter of the price for work done to date until a compliant programme is submitted. The payment cycle, set side by side.

Vocabulary transfers faster than machinery. A JCT team learns to say compensation event within a fortnight, then prices its first one like an extension of time application with the money to follow. There is no money to follow. The mechanism comparison in full: what triggers each, who assesses it, against what standard, and why the notice reflex has now flipped on both contracts.

Most JCT and NEC comparisons stop at philosophy: one allocates risk, the other encourages collaboration. Both true, and useless when the project manager has just rejected your programme. This is what actually changes when a team fluent in JCT runs an NEC job: the programme becomes a contractual instrument, extensions of time become compensation events on an eight-week clock, change is valued from Defined Cost rather than your rates, and early warnings acquire a price.

A compensation event quotation has two limbs, time and money, and the money is the one contractors price worst. This is the guide to the change to the Prices: how it is built from Defined Cost and the Fee under clause 63.1, why your tendered rates usually do not apply, where your overhead and profit actually sit, why the forecast you agree is final, and the handful of points where valid entitlement quietly leaks away in the pricing.

The notice says not accepted, and what happens next decides more than the fate of one submission. This playbook covers the moment in full: the four reasons Clause 31.3 permits and why they are the only four, the detail a notice must give you under Clause 13.4, the triage that sorts right from wrong from unclear, when withholding acceptance becomes a compensation event under 60.1(9), and the cost of drifting while the Accepted Programme goes stale.

In June 2026 the High Court refused to enforce a £1.65m NEC adjudication award in Premier Modular v Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. The legal headline is natural justice. The lesson for contractors is a project controls one. The whole dispute turned on which programme was the Accepted Programme, and the date the claim relied on was never in it. Under NEC, a compensation event is only as good as the Accepted Programme it stands on, and acceptance is a status you earn,

Most NEC4 time impact assessments fail at the project manager's desk, not in the planning team. The analysis is usually sound. The structure is what fails. This article explains the five elements every accepted assessment contains: the dividing date with justification, the accepted programme with version, the compensation event fragnet built in isolation, the impacted programme with the calculation, and the narrative that walks the project manager through the cause and effect

NEC requires mitigation but cannot impose acceleration. Most contractors confuse the two. Contractors who mitigate when they should be quoting for acceleration give away recovery work the contract entitles them to be paid for. Contractors who refuse to mitigate lose entitlement because the assessment assumes they would have mitigated anyway. This is the practical guide to understanding where the line sits and how to protect the commercial position on both sides of it.

A programme that has lost integrity does not announce itself. It looks exactly like one that works. The problems only surface when a compensation event tests it and the programme cannot answer the one question the NEC contract keeps asking. This article describes five signs any project director can check in ten minutes, without specialist planning knowledge, to know whether the programme is protecting their commercial position or quietly giving it away.

Most contractors submit programme revisions that update progress, move the data date forward, and miss everything else clause 32 requires. The project manager receives a schedule that shows where the job is but not what the contractor is doing about it. That is not a revision. It is a progress snapshot. This article explains what a clause 32 programme revision actually needs to contain, why most revisions are rejected, and what to do when the project manager is deliberately a

Primavera P6 is the industry-standard scheduling tool on major UK construction projects. It is also an opinionated one. Its defaults were shaped by contracts that work very differently from NEC, and a P6 schedule built to generic best practice will usually look fine on the surface and fail at the moments that matter most. This is the complete contractor guide to Primavera P6 for NEC programmes.

Most contractors come to NEC with JCT instincts: claim extensions retrospectively, reconstruct delay at the end, argue from the completion date. NEC works the opposite way. Time entitlement is built prospectively, one compensation event at a time, against planned completion at the dividing date. Get that wrong, and you are fighting uphill for every week. Get it right, and the contract does the heavy lifting. This is the complete contractor guide to NEC delay analysis and exte

Most contractors treat clause 31 as a procedural hurdle to clear at the start of the job. Submit the programme, wait for acceptance, move on. That approach quietly hands commercial control to the project manager. This article explains what the accepted programme actually protects, how the deemed acceptance mechanism works, and why a programme that was accepted at mobilisation provides almost no commercial protection by month six.

Many specialist subcontractors run NEC packages without a full planning team. The issue is not team size. It is whether the programme stays live, current and commercially usable while the job is moving.

Where multiple compensation events arise under NEC4, separate assessment is usually the safer route. This guide explains the accepted programme, the dividing date, and why one blended impact programme can weaken traceability.

Clause 15 only works when early warnings trigger decisions and programme movement. Here’s a quantified register method and weekly rhythm you can run on real jobs.

A practical NEC3 vs NEC4 comparison focused on programme acceptance, treated acceptance, early warning discipline and CE integration, based on NEC’s “Next Generation” white paper.

Clause 64 is not a procedural fallback. It is the contract's switching mechanism for commercial control of valuation. When the contractor submits compliant quotations on time with current programme information, the contractor controls valuation. When the contractor fails to meet any of the four conditions, the contract switches that control to the project manager, with consequences that typically reduce entitlement by thirty to sixty percent.

The NEC4 compensation event time bar is the most asymmetric provision in the entire contract. Almost every other NEC provision creates a spectrum of outcomes through judgement, extension mechanisms, or proportionate consequences. The eight-week time bar creates a cliff: notifications inside the period preserve entitlement, notifications outside it forfeit it entirely. The contractor who understands this asymmetry organises their administration around it.