Fabrication doesn't release until the EOR approves
You pay a licensed engineer and a detailer to seal a tendon layout, then wait on somebody else's desk before a strand gets cut. The review clock belongs to the design team.
The gate is the whole point. A framer with a slow submittal can still buy studs and stage them on the deck, while a PT contractor can't, because the fabrication order is keyed to the approved layout and the plant won't cut against a drawing that hasn't cleared review. A submittal-heavy owner buys more of your engineering hours than the last one did, and nothing in a standard chart of accounts tells you which owner that was.
The size of it
Weeks of engineering and detailing cost hit a job that has produced no pay application. Most contractors bury it in overhead, so estimating never sees what a submittal-heavy owner really costs and prices the next one the same way.
Structural drawings on most PT slab work show design intent. Somebody still has to produce a buildable layout: tendon profiles, chair heights, anchor locations, and calculated elongations, sealed by a licensed engineer and submitted to the Engineer of Record. Fabrication doesn't release until that review comes back approved. So the job already absorbs engineering, detailing, and coordination hours before there's a strand to ship or a pay app to send, and the length of the wait is set by a reviewer you don't employ.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using.
What else costs post-tension contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What post-tension owners ask
Why can't tendons be fabricated before shop drawing approval?
You pay a licensed engineer and a detailer to seal a tendon layout, then wait on somebody else's desk before a strand gets cut. The review clock belongs to the design team.
What does it cost?
Weeks of engineering and detailing cost hit a job that has produced no pay application. Most contractors bury it in overhead, so estimating never sees what a submittal-heavy owner really costs and prices the next one the same way.
What do I do first?
Open a PT engineering and detailing cost code on every job and charge the supplier's engineering fee, your detailer's hours, and every resubmittal round to it.
What are post-tension contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates post-tension, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Concrete, 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 post-tension'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 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using. It comes from chapter 3 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 post-tension 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.