Standing time: recording idle plant and labour

Standing time is time when your workers or machines are on site and being paid for, but can't work because of something outside your control. That might be no access, missing information, waiting for another contractor or a change to the design. For example, if an excavator and its driver wait two hours for a gas main to be made safe, those two hours are standing time.

It is one of the easiest costs to lose. By the time anyone asks about it, nobody can remember which machine stood idle, for how long or why.

Standing time is usually claimed as a delay, not as daywork

Daywork pays for work that was done. Standing time is for work that couldn't be done, so it is usually claimed as part of the cost of a delay. On JCT contracts this kind of claim is called “loss and expense”, and on NEC4 contracts it is called a “compensation event”. Sometimes both sides agree to use daywork rates for standing time to keep things simple, but nobody has to agree to that, and standing time is often paid at less than the working rate. Check what your contract says.^[1]

Owned or hired machines: why it matters

• Hired machines are usually paid for at what you actually paid the hire company, so the evidence is the paperwork: the hire order, the on-hire and off-hire dates, and the invoices. Hire firms charge by the day or the week, whatever the machine is doing. That means you need both the hire dates and the hours the machine actually worked, otherwise neither can be checked against the other.^[2]
• Your own machines don't come with an invoice, so they are paid at a set rate instead. That might be a rate from a published list (CECA's list on civil engineering jobs, or the RICS list of plant charges on building jobs),^[3] a rate written into the contract, or your company's own rate, which has to be close to what the market charges.^[2] Many NEC4 contracts name a published list of rates, often CECA's, and adjust it by an agreed percentage.^[4]
• Machines that come with a driver: check whether the rate includes the driver. If it doesn't, record the driver's hours separately. Otherwise the driver's time will either be lost or counted twice.

We haven't given any rates or percentages for standing time here, on purpose. They come from whichever list your contract names, and those lists have to be bought.

What to record every day

The Society of Construction Law's guide on delay claims, which is widely used across the industry, says records should show whether each machine was working or idle, and if it was idle, why.^[5] In practice, for each machine and each gang, write down:

1. Whether it was working, standing or broken down. A breakdown is your cost, not the client's, so keep breakdowns separate.
2. If it was standing, the times it started and stopped standing, and where it was.
3. Why it was standing, written as a fact, and who or what caused it.
4. Whether it was moved to other work instead, and if so, what work.
5. Who you told and when, so that the client can be told about the delay properly.

On NEC4 jobs paid at actual cost

Some NEC4 contracts pay the contractor what the work actually cost. On these jobs, the client can refuse to pay for workers and machines that weren't actually used on the job, although a reasonable amount of idle time is accepted as normal.^[6] A machine left idle with no reason written down is exactly the kind of cost that gets refused. So is a machine kept on site after the client's project manager asked for it to be taken away.^[6] Writing down each machine's status every day, with a reason whenever it stood idle, is what makes the difference between a cost that gets paid and one that doesn't.

Standing time should also go in the site diary as part of the delay, so see how to record a delay. Keep it out of the task hours on the labour allocation sheet too, as labour allocation vs timesheets explains.