A 30-year super in Philly told me he budgets 15% for rework, and I about fell off my chair
I was grabbing coffee with a project super named Walt who has been running jobs in Philly for close to 30 years, and he dropped a number on me that I keep thinking about. He pulls 15% of his budget aside for rework before the first shovel even hits dirt, and he said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. I asked why so high and he said it's not that his crews are bad, it's that something always changes, a detail gets missed on a drawing, or a sub reads a plan different than the guy before him. I used to price my jobs closer to 5% and then get stressed every time a wall had to come back down. What got me is he doesn't treat rework as a failure, he treats it as a normal cost of building stuff with 40 people who all see things a little different. I ran his math on a $600k job and that's $90k sitting in a line item I never even made. It made me rethink how I bid the next one. Curious if other folks here build a rework cushion into their numbers or just eat it when it shows up.