Quantifying the Costs of Field Rework in Construction

Limited knowledge exists about the actual costs of field rework in construction. The reported costs of rework presented in the literature vary significantly because of differing definitions and methods used to quantify them. Exacerbating this problem is the difficulty in obtaining actual field rework data because contractors are typically averse to providing access to their costs due to commercial confidentiality. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study undertaken by a contractor’s quality managers, who sought to determine the actual costs of field rework in their projects. Actual rework costs, excluding those materializing postcompletion because data were unavailable, were underreported by 300% and were found to be, on average, 0.38% (minimum 0.01% and maximum 3.67%) of a project’s contract value. The quality managers suggested that precompletion and postcompletion rework costs were roughly equal. Thus, with the inclusion of postcompletion corrections, average rework costs increase to an average of 0.76% (minimum 0.02% and maximum 7.34%) of a project’s contract value. Several practical recommendations to help the contractor better track rework costs and their causes have also been identified. The contributions of this paper are twofold: it provides: (1) new insights into the makeup of actual field rework costs, and (2) a series of actions to improve an organization’s ability to document, track, and communicate its rework.