Incidental Means Your Scope Was Never Priced
The measurement and payment section makes dewatering incidental to the excavation or pipe item, so your scope hides inside somebody else's unit price with no way to change it.
This is the only trade on the job whose entire scope routinely gets buried inside another trade's unit price. An excavation contractor at least has a quantity to bill against, while you absorb a cost with no measurable and no adjustment path. That makes the spec's payment language a bigger driver of your outcome than the design, because it determines whether your scope exists as a priced item at all.
The size of it
On an incidental-payment spec the whole dewatering scope was never priced as its own cost object, so every hour of fuel and rental erodes a unit price that was set by someone estimating dirt.
Read the measurement and payment section before you read anything else in the spec. Plenty of owner specifications make dewatering incidental to the excavation or pipe item with no separate payment, which means your wellpoints, header, pumps, fuel, tanks, and permits have no home of their own. When the cost has no pay item, it also has no change mechanism, so there's nothing to submit against and no quantity to bill. The scope still gets performed, and the site still decides how much water you pump. That work simply gets charged against a line somebody else priced, usually per cubic yard or per linear foot.
Three moves, in order
Step 04: Estimating system
The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.
What else costs dewatering contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What dewatering owners ask
Spec says dewatering is incidental to excavation how do I price it?
The measurement and payment section makes dewatering incidental to the excavation or pipe item, so your scope hides inside somebody else's unit price with no way to change it.
What does it cost?
On an incidental-payment spec the whole dewatering scope was never priced as its own cost object, so every hour of fuel and rental erodes a unit price that was set by someone estimating dirt.
What do I do first?
Pull the measurement and payment section on every bid and mark whether dewatering has a pay item. If it doesn't, state your dewatering number as a separate line in your proposal and say plainly that it's included inside the excavation or pipe item.
What are dewatering contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates dewatering, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Excavation, which runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10.5% net. Those are derived figures, not dewatering's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for dewatering contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.