Planning advice for contractors

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.

FIDIC is the contract of EU-funded infrastructure, and the 2017 Edition decides extensions of time on the programme and the records behind it, not on the merits. On CEF-funded work those records also have to survive a funding audit. A guide for UK contractors moving into EU work and Baltic teams on funded jobs: what Sub-Clause 8.3 demands, how the 28-day and 84-day claim time bars work, and what an audit-ready FIDIC programme and claim actually contain.

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

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.

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.

Every subcontractor delay on an NEC4 project is two delays at once. The subcontract event runs on its own clock with its own notification requirements, evidence, and commercial outcomes. The head contract event runs on a parallel clock with its own clause 61.3 window, its own assessment, and its own clause 64 vulnerability. Most contractors run one of these processes diligently and the other partially or not at all.

Give the same compensation event to two competent planners. Same accepted programme, same dividing date, same facts. One comes back with three weeks of delay to planned Completion. The other comes back with nine days. Both can defend their model. Neither has made an arithmetic error. The difference is five judgement calls that sit inside every NEC4 delay assessment, that the contract deliberately leaves open, and that most contractors make silently.