Weather days: the allowance in your contract, and the cost nobody bid

Our excavation page says it in one line: weather is not an excuse on your job, it is a cost.

That is the sentence a weather-exposed trade has to get the office to understand. Everyone treats weather as the one delay nobody is to blame for, and then treats the bill for it as nobody’s too. Meanwhile the lost week has already been paid for — by you, out of the labor line, in a month you will not reconstruct in February.

The live article on documenting a delay covers the habit: log the weather every day, whether it mattered or not. This one starts after that. You have the log. Now what are you actually entitled to, and what is it worth?

The allowance you already agreed to

Most commercial subcontracts do not say “weather delays are excused”. They say something narrower, and it is usually a number.

The common shape is an allowance: a count of adverse weather days per month, or per the contract term, that are assumed in the schedule and therefore not a delay at all. Days beyond the allowance may be excusable. Days inside it are yours.

Where the number comes from varies, and it is worth knowing which version you signed:

• A flat count per month. Simple, often low, and usually copied forward from a GC’s template without anybody looking at what month the job starts in.
• A count tied to historical normals for the area — a monthly figure derived from long-run weather records for the nearest station. This is the fairer version, and the one that makes your own records matter most, because it compares actual days against an average rather than against a guess.
• Nothing at all, in which case the general conditions the subcontract incorporates usually carry the term instead, and you are reading the prime contract whether you have seen it or not.

Two things follow, and both are about reading rather than arguing.

Find the number before the job starts, not during the month you blow past it. It belongs on the list you build during the pre-signature subcontract read, next to the notice periods and the retainage percentage. A page of a subcontract you read in a trailer in March reads very differently from the same page read in a quiet office in January.

Know what counts as a day. Most clauses are written as if weather days were whole and binary. Real weather produces half days, days where the rain stopped at ten and the subgrade stayed soft until Thursday, and days where the temperature at 6 a.m. decides whether you mobilize at all. How those get counted — and whether the condition or the inability to work is the test — is a contract question with real money in it. Your contract governs.

Time and money are two different claims

This is the distinction most weather arguments die on, and it has nothing to do with weather.

An extension of time moves your completion date. It protects you from liquidated damages and from being the trade that is late. It does not pay you anything.

A compensable delay pays. Many commercial subcontracts treat adverse weather as excusable but not compensable — you get the day, you do not get the dollar. That is the default to assume unless your agreement says otherwise.

So if you are going to recover money on a weather-affected month, it will usually come from one of three places that are not a weather claim at all:

1. Directed acceleration. The weather pushed the job, the GC directed you to make the time back, and the overtime, the second shift and the extra crew are a cost with a cause and a direction behind it. That is a change event, not a weather claim.
2. Directed protection or temperature control. Covered in the next section, and the most commonly absorbed cost in the weather-exposed trades.
3. Somebody else’s delay that put you in the wrong month. The claim is not the weather. The claim is the four months of predecessor float that moved your paving to November. This one is real, it can be recoverable depending on your contract, and it depends entirely on a dated record of when you were supposed to be out there.

Point three is where most of the recoverable money is, and it is the one that needs documentation you can only gather as it happens. Paving’s version of the complaint is exact: you are the last trade before occupancy, in the wrong month. The wrong month is somebody’s schedule, and schedules have dates.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Weather-day allowances, notice requirements, what counts as excusable and whether any of it is compensable are set by your subcontract and the documents it incorporates, and they vary by state. Have an attorney read yours.

Winter conditions are a change, not an overhead

Here is the money most weather-exposed subs leave on the table, every year, without arguing about it once.

Protection and temperature control are not weather delays. They are work — labor, material and equipment you perform in order to keep producing in conditions outside the ones you bid. Masonry’s version is blunt: you cannot lay in the rain, and nobody budgeted the tenting. Tile’s is colder still: thinset and grout cure to a temperature, and nobody schedules weather.

The list is longer than most estimates allow for:

• Temporary enclosure. Tenting, poly, scaffold wrap, and the labor to put it up, move it and take it down. On a scaffolded trade it is a second crew.
• Temporary heat. Units, fuel, distribution, and the person who fills them at 5 a.m. Fuel is the line that moves most and gets estimated least.
• Ground thaw and frost protection. Thawing subgrade, frost blankets, stripping frozen material before you can place.
• Cure protection. Blankets, hoarding, insulated forms, accelerating admixtures, and the extra breaks a cold pour needs.
• Dewatering and drying. Pumps, fans, dehumidification, and the day between the rain stopping and the substrate being acceptable.
• Material protection and rework. Wood framing’s problem exactly: you are open to the weather from floor system to dry-in, and your material is the thing that gets wet. Lumber that sat in a week of rain is either dried, sorted or replaced, and all three are hours.
• Insulation’s four-day window. Your window is four days wide and nobody protects it. A wall closed before you were in it is a different cost from a wall you waited on.

Whether any of it is recoverable comes down to two questions, in this order.

Was it in your scope? Read your own proposal. Many subs write “winter conditions and temporary protection by others” or “work performed in temperatures above X” as a clarification, and then never enforce it. A qualification you wrote and did not enforce is a qualification you gave away.

Who directed it? Protection you chose, to keep your own production up, in conditions your contract assumed, is usually yours. Protection the GC directed you to install so the job could continue through a month the schedule did not plan for is a directed cost — and directed costs have a process. It is the same process as everything else: a change event the day it is directed, then a change order. When they want it done now and priced later, that is what a T&M tag is for, signed on site, the day of, by somebody with authority.

The exclusion in your proposal is what makes that conversation short. Write it at bid time. One sentence about the temperature range and the protection assumptions is worth more than any amount of arguing in January.

What a lost day actually costs, in three places

Our concrete page says a lost pour day costs you three ways and gets logged as none. Those three are worth naming, because the number you put in a claim or a change proposal should include all of them and usually includes one.

The crew you already paid for. Show-up time, the hour spent deciding, the half crew you could not send home. This is the only one most subs capture, and they capture it as regular hours against the job with no label.

The equipment on rent. A pump, a lift, a laser, a compressor, scaffold, a crane day. Rental does not stop for weather, and on a scaffolded trade the standing cost of being set up is a daily number. Our masonry page describes scaffold as capital rather than material for exactly this reason — it is a cost that accrues whether anybody is on it or not.

The schedule push and what it costs later. The day you lost in March is the overtime you pay in June, or the second mobilization you drive back for. This is the largest of the three and the hardest to price, which is why the first two need to be exact.

One practical habit makes all three available later: put the hours on the job on the day they happened, with the reason recorded in the day’s log. A rained-out day logged as four hours of nothing is a four-hour hole in your costs in nine months. Four hours with “weather” as the cause and a sentence about the subgrade is a line in a claim.

Notice, which is the part that loses claims

Weather claims often lose on the clock before anyone reaches the merits.

Many subcontracts require written notice of a delay within a short window, sometimes only a few days from when the condition arose. Your contract sets the window. Miss it and a day that was genuinely excusable is simply gone, which is why the notice is a calendar item and not a judgment call.

So make the rule mechanical:

1. Know your window and have it written somewhere the PM can see it.
2. Send notice inside it, even when you do not yet know the impact. “Work was stopped on these dates by these conditions; we are evaluating the schedule effect” preserves the position without committing to a number you cannot support yet.
3. Send it in the form the contract names — email to the named person, usually — rather than as a comment in a meeting.
4. Keep the running count against your allowance, by month, so the month you exceed it is a fact you noticed rather than one you discovered.

A month-by-month tally against the allowance is also the single most useful thing to walk into a schedule meeting holding. It changes the conversation from whether the weather was bad to how many days past the contract number you are.

What it looks like by trade

Concrete. Pour days are the events: temperature at placement, precipitation during and after, cure protection, the breaks. The pour you could not place is a cost; the pour you placed and protected is a different one.

Masonry. Cold and hot weather masonry both carry real requirements, and both arrive as protection work. Tenting plus heat around a scaffolded wall is the biggest single line most masons absorb.

Excavation and sitework. The claim is rarely the rain, it is the days after it — soft subgrade, haul roads, dewatering. Trench conditions on a Thursday are the argument on the following Tuesday, and only a photograph settles it.

Paving and asphalt. Perishable material plus a temperature floor plus a last-trade position in the wrong month. Mix delivered and not placed is a hard cost with a ticket attached to it.

EIFS, stucco and plaster. Your schedule is written by cure time, and the GC schedules you like a painter. Every coat has a temperature and a cure window, so a cold snap does not cost you a day, it costs you a sequence.

Tile and stone. Setting materials cure to a temperature, interior or not, and an unheated building in December is an exterior job as far as your mortar is concerned.

Wood framing and insulation. The exposure window from floor system to dry-in is the risk, and the material is the thing that takes the damage. Both trades live and die on when the building closes in, which is somebody else’s date.

How SubMark handles it

Start with what is not there. SubMark does not calculate a weather claim. There is no allowance tracker, no automatic comparison against historical normals, no claim document, no notice generator. We do not have weather-based delay alerts, and we do not fill in historical weather on a backdated log — which is a limit on purpose, because a guess in a legal record of site conditions is worse than a blank.

What it holds is the record a claim is built from.

Site Weather, on by default. Every US project with a geocoded address gets current conditions and a 7-day forecast for that location, read from the National Weather Service. Projects outside the US get no weather card. It is a module, so it can be switched off, but it ships on.

Daily logs that auto-fill the weather, when you log on the day. Open today’s log in the web app with the weather left blank and the condition and temperature fill in from the latest observation at the nearest National Weather Service station. Open one for last Tuesday and the fields stay empty, deliberately. That asymmetry is an argument for same-day logging that has nothing to do with discipline: the log written on the day carries an observed figure, and the one written on Friday carries whatever the foreman remembers.

Weather as one of seven fixed delay causes. A delay is recorded with its cause — weather, material, labor, access, GC direction, inspection, other — alongside the narrative, work areas and phases, labor hours, materials, and photos. Condition is picked from a fixed list rather than typed, so a month of weather is something you can search instead of read. Field users are free and unlimited, which is what makes a log per job per day realistic across eight crews.

Change events, dated when you create them, with photos. This is where the directed protection, the tenting, the heat and the acceleration go on the day they are directed. It records the event rather than the dispute, and it carries forward into a change order when it turns into recoverable work. T&M tags, on by default in most trade setup packs, cover the version where the GC wants the heat on tonight and the price next week: priced in the office off your rate lists, signed by the GC on site, with several tags bundling into one change order. T&M hours do not feed job-costing actuals; your crew’s clocked hours still do.

Hours on the job, on the day. The time clock puts a worker’s hours on a job, which is what turns “we lost most of a week” into a labor number you can hand somebody. Job costing is at wage rate.

See the product for how the field side fits together, daily logs for what the field actually fills in, and pricing for what the office side costs.

What to do before the next cold month

1. Find your weather-day allowance and write it on the job’s start-up list.
2. Find your notice window and put it where the PM will see it.
3. Read your own proposal for what you excluded on temperature and protection — and enforce it.
4. Log the day with its cause even on the half days, because the tally is monthly and half days are what push you past the allowance.
5. Treat every directed protection cost as a change on the day it is directed. Tenting, heat, fuel, blankets, thaw, dewatering.
6. Price all three buckets — crew, standing equipment, and the push — not just the crew.
7. Keep a running month-by-month count against the allowance, so the meeting starts from a number.

Weather will still take the days. The question this answers is whether it also takes the margin — and the related habit, the one that makes any of this possible, is in how to document a construction delay.