Your jacking pipe is bought before the shaft is dug
You wired a deposit for casing cut to one crossing, and the first pay app on that drive is still two months out.
Conduit, rebar, and fittings are stock items. An electrician who loses a job puts the material on the next one, and the supply house takes back what's left. Casing cut to one crossing's diameter, wall, and length can't be used anywhere else, which is why a tunnel sub carries more non-recoverable cash per contract dollar than almost anyone else standing on that site.
The size of it
On a $400K crossing the pipe often runs 30 to 40 percent of the contract value, paid at order, sitting on your books with nothing billable behind it. If the crossing gets deleted or redesigned, you own steel nobody will take back.
Jacking pipe gets fabricated to one drive: a specified diameter, wall thickness, and joint detail, cut to the length of that crossing. RCP with steel collars, Permalok, rolled steel casing, and liner plate all carry mill and precast lead times measured in months, so the order goes in against a design that's still in review. You excavate the shaft to hit the GC's window, and then the shaft sits open waiting on steel. The deposit or the full buy leaves at order, with no pay application to hang it on until the drive starts.
Three moves, in order
Step 01: Job cost structure
Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.
What else costs tunnel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What tunnel owners ask
Paying for jacking pipe months before i can bill the bore?
You wired a deposit for casing cut to one crossing, and the first pay app on that drive is still two months out.
What does it cost?
On a $400K crossing the pipe often runs 30 to 40 percent of the contract value, paid at order, sitting on your books with nothing billable behind it. If the crossing gets deleted or redesigned, you own steel nobody will take back.
What do I do first?
List every open crossing with its pipe PO date, deposit amount, and the earliest date the drive can start; the weeks in between are your real cash exposure.
What are tunnel contractors supposed to be making?
Tunnel runs 23% gross margin, 16% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits right on it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 01, job cost structure. Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words. It comes from chapter 1 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.