Planning advice for contractors

Delay damages are the part of the JCT to NEC transition contractors think they already understand. The rate is in the contract data and it starts when you are late. What changes is not the arithmetic but the procedure: JCT surrounds the deduction with three notices a contractor can attack, and NEC removes all of them. Plus the conclusion most find backwards, that taking option X7 out of the contract raises exposure rather than lowering it.

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.

The JCT Standard Building Contract asks for a master programme under clause 2.9, leaves critical paths optional in the Contract Particulars, and only requires an update when you apply for an extension of time. The Design and Build form does not expressly require a programme at all. None of that changes what a retrospective claim has to prove. This is the gap between the contractual floor and the evidential bar, and what to keep so the claim stands up.

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.

JCT vs NEC vs FIDIC, from the planner's side. The three contracts use the same words, programme, notice and extension of time, and give each a different job. This guide sets them side by side, follows one late-access event through each week by week, reads three court cases with the programme at their centre, and sets out how I run the programme when a job moves between them.