A measured mile takes a period where your work ran as bid, measures actual labor hours per unit installed, then measures the same metric where trades were stacked, the sequence flipped, or areas congested. Impacted hours per unit minus clean hours per unit, times the impacted quantity, is your lost productivity in hours, and hours convert to dollars. It is widely considered the most credible loss of productivity method because every number comes from your own contemporaneous records, not an industry study or estimate.
That credibility matters in the situation from the schedule compression article. When a recovery schedule turns your staggered floor-by-floor sequence into three trades in one space, everyone feels the loss. Feeling it proves nothing. Measuring it gives you evidence to support a request.
Why the measured mile beats the alternatives
Subs have three broad ways to quantify productivity loss, and they are not equal:
- Total cost. Bid hours versus actual hours, claim the difference. Weakest method, because it assumes the bid was perfect and every overrun was someone else's fault. Reviewers and triers of fact discount it heavily.
- Industry factors. Published studies on stacking, overtime, and disruption applied to your hours. Better than total cost, and useful when no clean period exists, but it is still someone else's data.
- Measured mile. Your own crews, your own work, your own records, impacted versus unimpacted. Nothing borrowed, though comparable scope, conditions and crew mix still have to be shown. AACE RP 25R-03 puts it at the top of the hierarchy for estimating lost labor productivity, and it holds up best when the comparison and causation are documented.
How the analysis is built
- Pick the unit of measure. Something you install repetitively and count naturally: labor hours per fixture, per foot of conduit or duct, per unit roughed in, per floor completed. It has to mean the same thing in both periods.
- Find the mile. A stretch where the same scope ran without the impact. On repetitive work it is often early floors or buildings finished before stacking started. It must be comparable and reasonably clean, not perfect.
- Measure both periods. Hours from certified payroll and daily reports, quantities from installed records, both coded to areas and time, for the mile and the impacted period.
- Compute the loss. Impacted hours per unit minus clean, times the impacted quantity. Lost hours carry your actual labor rates, burdens, and supervision.
- Tie it to cause. Here the schedule does the work. Updates show when the sequence changed, look-aheads and daily reports show who was in your areas, and notice letters show you flagged it in real time. Productivity loss without causation is a number. With causation it is a claim.
What it looks like on repetitive work
On multifamily and high-rise work, the building creates the mile. Picture an electrical sub on a multifamily project in the Carolinas whose rough-in ran floors two through six as bid: one trade per area, steady crew, productivity at bid rates. Then the recovery schedule stacked mechanical and plumbing into the same floors. Hours per unit climbed and output per week fell. Floors two through six are the measured mile, the stacked floors the impacted period. Same crews, scope and building, and the daily reports name the other trades in the area. The job measured itself.
The records that make or break it
Most measured miles fail because the data was never captured. The method needs hours and quantities coded by area and time, recorded contemporaneously. That means:
- Daily reports that say where crews worked and who else was in the space, not just headcounts.
- Timekeeping coded to floors, areas, or activities, so impacted hours can be separated from clean hours.
- Installed quantity tracking on the same breakdown, so productivity is computable per period.
- Schedule updates and look-aheads preserved, because they date the sequence change and tie it to the party that directed it. That is a big reason the monthly update and narrative discipline pays for itself. The record you keep while the job runs is the analysis you can afford later.
If you are mid-stacking and the coding doesn't exist yet, start today. Six months of clean records beat a reconstruction from memory, and the earlier tracking starts, the more of the loss you capture.
Field notes the textbooks skip
- Skip the learning curve when you pick the mile. The first floor or two usually run slow while crews find the rhythm. Baseline off floors after the rate stabilizes, and say so. Include the learning curve and you understate your clean rate, and a defense expert will gladly leave floors one and two in.
- Strip your own noise before computing the delta. Identify the hours and quantities hit by your own rework, callbacks and crew shortages, and adjust both periods consistently. Separating what you caused from what was done to you mirrors separating progress from impact in a delay window, and it makes the delta hard to attack. A slightly smaller loss you volunteered beats a bigger one they dismantle.
- Set the coding up at buyout, not at impact. Cost codes by floor and area cost nothing on day one and cannot be reconstructed later. If your accounting can produce hours by floor by week, you have a measured mile on standby for every job you run.
- Crew density is strong causation evidence. The GC's look-aheads show which trades were planned in your areas, and the daily reports show who was there. Planned one trade, actual three, same week your rate climbed. That overlay supports the causation analysis, alongside the narrative and checks for other causes.
- Photograph the mile, not just the mess. Everyone photographs the stacked floor. Almost nobody shoots the clean one. A dated photo of floor four with one trade next to floor nine with three makes the chart land with people who don't read charts.
Where subs get tripped up
- No clean mile. If the whole job was impacted, a true measured mile is hard. Fall back to the least-impacted period or industry factors, knowing each step away from your own clean data costs credibility.
- Mixed causes. If your own crew shortages or rework overlap the stacking, separate them honestly. Ignoring your contribution hands the other side its cross-examination.
- Cherry-picked periods. A mile selected to maximize the delta gets pulled apart. Pick comparable periods and disclose the selection logic.
- Loss without notice. A beautiful analysis behind a missed notice window may be worth nothing. The notice letter comes first, the math follows.
Building and defending these analyses sits inside our subcontractor protection scope, from setting up tracking while the job runs to quantifying the loss when it is time to recover it.
Send us the current schedule and a couple of recent daily reports. We will tell you whether a measured mile is buildable on your records, and if not, what to start capturing this week so it becomes one.