General conditions are supervision, site facilities, dumpsters and temporary utilities, and they cost money for every week the job is open. Price them that way: a weekly rate multiplied by the scheduled duration. A percentage of hard cost underprices long, slow jobs and overprices fast ones. It also leaves you with no number to point to when the job runs long and the owner caused it.
Most estimators learned general conditions construction pricing as a single line near the bottom of the bid, a flat percentage carried forward from whoever estimated the last job. It is quick. It is also wrong in a predictable direction, and the error lands hardest on the jobs that already hurt.
What counts as general conditions, and what doesn't
General conditions are the job-specific costs of running the site that don't belong to any one trade. They start when the site opens and stop at closeout. On a typical residential or light commercial job they include:
- Supervision: the superintendent, plus the share of project manager time charged to this job
- Site facilities: portable toilets, job trailer or storage container, temporary fencing
- Waste: dumpster rentals and hauls
- Temporary utilities: temp power, water and winter heat
- Protection and cleaning: floor protection, dust walls, ongoing broom-clean
Overhead is not on that list. The office lease, accounting, estimating salaries and the company trucks cost money whether this job happens or not. That is why company overhead is recovered through its own rate across all work. Blend the two and you end up charging office rent twice on one job and not at all on the next.
A percentage ties the cost to the wrong number
Hard cost measures how much material and labor goes into the building. General conditions measure how long the site stays open. Those two move independently. A $600,000 job with expensive finishes and a crew that can stack trades can run 10 weeks. A $600,000 job with a slow inspection cycle, a tight site and one long-lead item can run 20.
Run the same weekly cost through both. Say your general conditions cost $3,500 a week and you have been carrying them at 8% of hard cost. These numbers are illustrative and exist for the arithmetic. Substitute your own.
- Fast job: $600,000 hard cost, 10 weeks. Actual general conditions are 10 × $3,500 = $35,000. At 8% you bid $48,000, which is $13,000 high on a bid you are trying to win.
- Slow job: $600,000 hard cost, 20 weeks. Actual general conditions are 20 × $3,500 = $70,000. At 8% you bid $48,000, which is $22,000 short on a job you now win because you were cheap.
That second line is the real damage. The percentage doesn't just miss. It misses in the direction that sorts work against you. You lose the fast, clean jobs on price and win the long, grinding ones at a loss. Over a year your backlog tilts toward exactly the jobs the formula underpriced.
Small jobs get it worst. A remodel still needs a superintendent on site, a toilet serviced and a dumpster hauled every week. At 8%, a $90,000 job running 8 weeks carries $7,200 of general conditions, or $900 a week. That is set against a weekly cost that doesn't shrink just because the contract did.
Build the weekly rate from line items
A weekly rate is not a guess either. Build it the way you build a trade line: quantity, unit, unit cost. Most items are genuinely weekly. Some are one-time and should stay as lump sums so they don't inflate when the duration changes.
Time-based items: multiply by weeks
- Superintendent: the fraction of the week spent on this job × loaded weekly cost. A super split across three jobs is not 100% of anyone's week.
- Project manager: same method, usually a smaller fraction
- Portable toilet: the weekly service rate
- Dumpster: expected hauls per week × haul price, plus rental. Hauls cluster at demolition and drywall, so average them over the phase, not the whole job.
- Temp power and water: monthly utility charges converted to weekly
- Fencing, storage container and trailer: monthly rental converted to weekly
Fixed items: price once
- Mobilization and demobilization
- Temp power setup and meter fees
- Fence install and removal
- Final cleaning
- Permit fees, if you carry them in general conditions
The split matters when the schedule moves. A two-week extension adds two weeks of super, toilet service and fence rental. It does not add a second fence install.
Price by phase when intensity changes
On longer jobs, one flat weekly rate hides real variation. Demolition burns dumpsters. Finishes burn supervision hours because more trades are on site at once. If a job runs more than a few months, set a weekly rate per phase and multiply each one by that phase's duration. That is three or four lines instead of one, and it matches what the site actually costs.
The duration has to come from the schedule
A weekly rate multiplied by a guessed duration is just a percentage with extra steps. The weeks have to come from a schedule built from the scope, using the same line items that produced the hard cost.
That is the reason to build the schedule from the estimate rather than drawing it separately afterward. In BuilderSolve the schedule is built from the line-item estimate. The duration you multiply by is therefore the one the job will be run against, not a number typed in from memory the night the bid was due.
Then put it in the proposal. One sentence in the clarifications does most of the work: “General conditions are based on a scheduled duration of 14 weeks at $3,500 per week.” Leave it out, and nothing in the bid says how long the price assumed you would be on site.
When the job runs long, the weekly rate is your claim
Some delays are yours, like a sub who doesn't show or a framing error. Some aren't, like late owner selections, a design change or a hold waiting on the owner's engineer. When the delay is the owner's, the extra weeks of general conditions are a legitimate cost to recover.
With a weekly rate in the bid, the arithmetic is already on paper: four weeks of owner-caused delay at $3,500 is $14,000 of extended general conditions. A percentage gives you nothing to multiply. 8% of the original hard cost covered some unstated number of weeks. The owner can fairly ask how many, and the honest answer is that nobody wrote it down. That is where most general conditions construction disputes stall.
The rate alone doesn't win the claim. Extended general conditions turn on contemporaneous records. You need daily logs showing the site was open and staffed, what was holding the work, and when the hold started and ended. A change order that cites the delay, the weeks and the rate, with an audit trail showing when it was issued, is much harder to wave off than an invoice sent at closeout.
BuilderSolve's AI assistant can draft that change order and the daily log entries behind it from what has been recorded on the job. A person on your side approves or rejects each draft before it goes anywhere. It drafts. It does not decide what to claim.
A weekly rate tells you what a delay costs. It does not give you the right to recover it. Some contracts have no-damage-for-delay clauses that limit you to a time extension. Many set written notice deadlines for delay claims. Miss the notice window and the claim can be gone no matter how good your logs are. Know the notice requirement on every contract before work starts, not after the schedule moves.
Where a percentage still belongs
Some owners and lenders want general conditions shown as a percentage, and cost-plus contracts often express them that way. That is fine as a reporting format. Calculate from weeks, then state the result as a percentage if the form asks for one. The percentage is an output, not the input.
Fee is a separate line. Markup sits on top of general conditions, not inside them. Before you add it, get the difference between markup and margin straight, because confusing the two is its own way to lose money. Contingency is separate too. Don't pad general conditions to cover schedule risk you haven't named.
To check the rate against reality, track general conditions under their own cost codes (supervision, facilities, waste and temp utilities) rather than one lumped code or scattered across trade codes. At closeout, divide actual general conditions cost by actual weeks. That number is the starting rate for the next job.
What to do before the next bid
- Pull your last three closed jobs. From QuickBooks job costing, total what you actually spent on supervision, site facilities, dumpsters and temporary utilities.
- Divide each total by the number of weeks the site was open. Compare the weekly figures across jobs and against what your percentage would have produced.
- Separate one-time items (mobilization, setup, fence install, final clean) from weekly ones.
- Set a weekly rate, or a rate per phase for jobs longer than a few months.
- On the next bid, multiply by the scheduled duration and write both the weeks and the rate into the clarifications.
- Keep daily logs from day one, so that if the duration changes you can prove when and why.
If back-office time is what stops this from happening, BuilderSolve's estimating team can work through steps one to four from your closed-job records and build the rate into your estimating template. QuickBooks stays your book of record. The platform reads from it and does not write back.
Common questions
what is included in general conditions in construction
General conditions are the job-specific costs of running the site that don't belong to a single trade. They include superintendent and project manager time, portable toilets, trailers or storage containers, fencing, dumpsters, temporary power and water, floor protection and ongoing cleaning. Most of them cost money every week the site is open. That is why they should be priced as a weekly rate multiplied by duration.
is general conditions the same as overhead
No. General conditions belong to one job and stop when that job closes out. Overhead belongs to the company: the office, accounting, estimating salaries and company vehicles, which cost money whether any particular job happens or not. Overhead is recovered through a company-wide rate. General conditions are priced on each job from its own schedule. Mixing the two double-charges some jobs and undercharges others.
what percentage should general conditions be on a construction job
No fixed percentage is right, because general conditions track time on site, not hard cost. Two jobs with the same contract value can run 10 weeks and 20 weeks, and their site costs differ accordingly. Build a weekly rate from your actual costs, multiply it by the scheduled duration, and convert the result to a percentage only if an owner or lender form requires one.
how do you calculate extended general conditions for a delay
Multiply the weeks of owner-caused delay by the weekly general conditions rate stated in your bid. Four weeks at $3,500 a week is $14,000. To recover it, you need daily logs showing the site stayed open and what was holding work, plus a change order issued promptly. You also need to have met the contract's written notice requirements, which can bar the claim if missed.
should one-time costs like mobilization go in the weekly general conditions rate
No. Keep one-time items such as mobilization, temp power setup, fence installation and final cleaning as lump sums. If you fold them into the weekly rate, they grow every time the schedule extends, and that overstates a delay claim. A two-week extension adds two more weeks of rentals and supervision. It does not add a second fence install or a second final clean.