SHORING AND SHIELDING · CIVIL AND EARTHWORK · FIXED BY STEP 03

Rain Adds Qualified Hours Your Pay App Never Bills

OSHA wants a competent person walking the excavation before anybody enters, daily, and again after every rainstorm. That's qualified labor on a schedule set by weather.

WHY IT IS A SHORING AND SHIELDING PROBLEM

Plenty of trades carry safety overhead. Yours is a qualified-labor requirement tied to each crew entry and to the specific protective system you installed, with a weather trigger nobody puts on a schedule. Those hours end up in job labor cost, but they were priced as office overhead or never priced at all, and the difference widens in the weeks when rain is already hurting the job.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Daily supervisory hours and weather-driven re-inspections sit in job labor cost, on a job whose schedule of values has no line that admits they exist.

NO PUBLISHED BENCHMARK FOR THIS TRADE

No published benchmark reference breaks this trade out on its own. CFMA reports at NAICS level, and at that level this trade rolls into a broader bucket with several others. That's why this page carries mechanisms and no margin figures. It reports inside NAICS 238910 Site Preparation, so there's no shoring and shielding margin figure to put in this box. The 48 trades that do publish average 7% net profit at $1M–$5M before taxes, which is the nearest reference point worth anything here.

OSHA requires competent-person inspection of the excavation and the protective system before any worker entry, daily, as conditions change, and again after every rainstorm or water intrusion. Trenches 5 ft and deeper require a protective system at all, so the inspection duty follows your system everywhere it goes. The frequency is set by weather, not by production, which means a wet week costs you more qualified hours on the same footage. A rain event can also force re-evaluation or re-design of a system that's already in the ground.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Give competent-person inspection its own labor code and log the hour to the job every day it happens, rain days included.

STEP 02

Keep rain events next to inspection hours by job, so after two seasons you can say what weather costs you per job type.

STEP 03

Decide before you bid whether that hour lives in the unit price or in a daily supervision line, and put it in the same place on every bid so the estimate and the job cost agree.

THE FIX

Step 03: Overhead calculation

What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying.

CFOS-03 · CHAPTER 3

The overhead rate your bid sheet should carry

What this step changes, what it depends on, and how to tell it's installed.

BENCHMARKS

Shoring and shielding by revenue band

Every one of the 7 bands carries the CFOS target beside the published figure.

ACROSS EVERY TRADE

You're bidding below your own overhead

If the overhead percentage in your estimating template is lower than what you carry, every job you win loses money before a single hour is worked.

SAME TRADE

What else costs shoring and shielding contractors money

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-04

You pay for the stamp and wait on somebody else's data

The box can't go in the ground until a registered PE seals the design, and the engineer is waiting on borings the GC hasn't sent. Your crew and your iron are already on site.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-02

Footage Stops Earning and the Box Rental Never Stops

Trench safety pays by the linear foot of centerline. Shields and slide rail cost by the calendar day, and the calendar doesn't care that the pipe crew is waiting on an inspector.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-04

Cut-off Piles Turn Your Salvage Credit Into Zero

You locked sheet pile pricing at bid and bid the same steel a second time as salvage. Then an obstruction forces cut-off, and the residual you counted on stays in the dirt.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-07

Your work ends in March; your retention ends next spring

Shoring starts on day one of excavation, so your install is done in the first quarter. The retention rides until the whole project is accepted.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-08

You Leave Nothing Behind and Still Get a Claim Later

You leave no permanent installation behind, so there's no warranty item to carry. Settlement, voids after extraction, and a rental damage invoice come after the job is closed.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

DRYWALL

Level 5 gets discovered after the primer goes on

The spec said Level 4, the owner walked it at night with the wall washers on, and now there's a skim coat standing between you and your retention.

DRYWALL

Piece rate and square-foot bids agree on flat walls only

Your hangers make the same on a clean corridor as on a bathroom full of soffits, so guess which walls are done Friday and which ones aren't.

ELECTRICAL

You hit the hours and still lost money on the rate

You bid labor in unit hours and the field hit the unit hours. The loss lives in the dollars per hour you converted them at, and it runs the same direction on every job you take.

QUESTIONS

What shoring and shielding owners ask

How to price daily competent person inspections on trench and excavation jobs?

OSHA wants a competent person walking the excavation before anybody enters, daily, and again after every rainstorm. That's qualified labor on a schedule set by weather.

What does it cost?

Daily supervisory hours and weather-driven re-inspections sit in job labor cost, on a job whose schedule of values has no line that admits they exist.

What do I do first?

Give competent-person inspection its own labor code and log the hour to the job every day it happens, rain days included.

Are there published benchmarks for shoring and shielding?

No, and this site won't print one. No published benchmark reference breaks this trade out on its own. CFMA reports at NAICS level, and at that level this trade rolls into a broader bucket with several others. That's why this page carries mechanisms and no margin figures. In the surveys it rolls into NAICS 238910 Site Preparation, so the closest honest reference is the 48-trade table, where net profit at $1M–$5M averages 7% before taxes. Read that 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 carrying. It comes from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

MASTER ELECTRICIAN · 150+ PROJECTS · $2.1B+ MANAGED

Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.

Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.