The notice letter that protects your delay claim, and exactly when to send it

Your subcontract almost certainly has a notice provision that says two things. You must give written notice of any event you believe entitles you to more time or money, and you must give it within a set number of calendar days of when the event occurred or you knew about it. Miss the window and many contracts say the claim is waived. Not weakened. Waived. The most protective document in a delay situation is a short, factual letter sent on time.

Subs lose more recoverable time and cost to silence than to bad delay analysis. The analysis can be built later from the record. The notice can't, and it can go out without torching the relationship with your GC.

When does the notice clock start?

Pull three facts from your subcontract's notice clause:

• The trigger. Usually the event itself, or the date you knew or reasonably should have known it would impact your work: access not turned over, a hold on your area, a directive changing your sequence, drawings changing your scope.
• The window. Usually calendar days, and short: often 7 to 21 CDs depending on the form, and plenty of subcontracts sit at 7 or 10. Count from the trigger, not from month end or the next OAC meeting.
• The form and the recipient. Written notice, to the named party, by the method the contract calls out. An email to the superintendent may not satisfy a clause that requires notice to the GC's office. Follow the clause exactly.

The most common miss is waiting until the impact is fully known. Most clauses ask you to identify the delay inside the window, not quantify it. Check yours for any estimate or follow-up deadline. The TIA and the updates quantify it later. Notice first, math second.

What the letter has to say

Keep it short, factual and specific. Five elements:

• The event. What happened, stated as fact. "Access to Level 3 was not made available on the date shown in the current schedule."
• The date it occurred or was discovered. This is what shows your notice was timely.
• The work affected. Which activities, areas and crews. Tie it to schedule activity IDs if you can, so the letter connects to the network from day one.
• The reservation. State that the event may impact your time and cost, that you are tracking the impact, and that you reserve your rights under the subcontract. You are not demanding anything yet, just preserving the ability to.
• The ask. Request direction, or the access or information you need. A notice that asks for a fix reads as problem-solving, not positioning.

The letter should not argue, assign blame, or estimate damages you cannot support yet. A number thrown out under pressure in week one follows you into every negotiation after. Facts, dates, activities, reservation of rights. That is the whole letter.

Why subs stay silent, and why that instinct is wrong

The fear is real. Nobody wants to be the sub who papers the job, and plenty of GCs bristle at the first letter. But the subs who send short, factual, on-time letters get taken seriously, because the GC knows the record is being kept. The subs who stay quiet to protect the relationship end up in the worst conversation months later, asking for time and money with no notice on file and a clause that says they waived it.

Tone does most of the work. A letter that states facts and asks for direction isn't an attack. On multifamily work in the Carolinas we have watched electrical subs send exactly these letters, keep working, and keep a good relationship with the GC, because the letters read like project management, not litigation. The record got built without a fight, and the time extension talk became a schedule conversation instead of a memory contest.

Notice is the front door of the claim, not the claim

Timely notice keeps the claim alive. The schedule, contract and cost records have to support it. The letter is step one of a chain:

• Notice inside the contractual window, tied to schedule activities.
• The impact tracked contemporaneously in the monthly updates, so the record grows while the job runs.
• A fragnet and time impact analysis when the impact can be quantified, showing the effect on the critical path and your total float.
• The time extension or change order request, grounded in the network, with a narrative that explains it.

This chain is what our advocacy and notice support service runs for subs, and it plugs into the broader protection scope on our subcontractor page. If your delay came from a compressed or resequenced schedule, our schedule compression article covers how to document that impact.

Change orders need the same reservation instinct. Most CO forms carry release language, and signing one for the direct cost can quietly waive the time impact and cumulative effect of the change. Reserve your schedule and impact rights in the change order itself, with counsel on the wording, the same way the notice letter does for a delay. That trap gets its own article: Before you sign that change order: the release language that waives your delay claim.

One caution. Notice clauses are contract terms, and how strictly a waiver gets enforced varies by contract and jurisdiction. We are schedulers, not lawyers. When real money is on the line, have a construction attorney read your clause. From the scheduling side, one thing is universal: the letter that exists beats the letter that was almost sent.

Frequently asked questions