The recoat argument comes back to you at closeout
The frame stood open through a wet winter, there's rust bloom on the columns, and now the question is whether shop primer was supposed to hold up that long.
Your product sits outdoors, unfinished, for as long as somebody else's schedule takes to close the building, and it gets judged against a spec written for a shorter window. No other package is held to a durability standard set by the delay of the trade that follows it. The cost comes back months after your job closed, which is why it usually disappears into overhead with no cost code open to catch it.
The size of it
A touch up or recoat mobilization inside an enclosed building runs with lifts and a supervisor, and it gets priced at closeout against retention that hasn't been released. Absorbed into overhead, it raises the rate every other job in the shop has to carry, and no report tells you so.
Shop primer protects steel between fabrication and enclosure, and that's the whole job it was specified to do. When the envelope slips and the frame stands exposed through a season, surface rust appears and the conversation turns into a claim that your coating failed. The same seam opens with spray applied fireproofing, where SFRM adhesion depends on the primer, so an adhesion and cohesion test failure at closeout gets argued between you and the fireproofer with nobody clearly responsible. By then the building is enclosed, so the fix takes lifts, supervision, and a crew working inside finished space.
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 carrying.
What else costs structural steel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What structural steel owners ask
Who pays to recoat shop primer that rusted before enclosure?
The frame stood open through a wet winter, there's rust bloom on the columns, and now the question is whether shop primer was supposed to hold up that long.
What does it cost?
A touch up or recoat mobilization inside an enclosed building runs with lifts and a supervisor, and it gets priced at closeout against retention that hasn't been released. Absorbed into overhead, it raises the rate every other job in the shop has to carry, and no report tells you so.
What do I do first?
Photograph and date the frame at erection completion, close ups of primed surfaces included, and send the set to the GC with a note on the exposure duration that primer covers.
What are structural steel contractors supposed to be making?
Structural steel runs 23% gross margin, 15% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 1 points above it. The CFOS target is 10%.
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.
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.