Six setups bill against one mobilization line
Six crossings means six setups and six teardowns, and the contract has a single capped mobilization item to cover all of it.
A drywall crew stays in one building until it's done and mobilizes once. You set up, produce for a few days, tear down, and then do it five more times on the same contract against one mobilization line. Every idle stretch between crossings is somebody else's sequencing decision spending your rental money.
The size of it
Remob runs $15K to $40K each time and shaft standby bills at daily rental rates, on a job that already invoiced its mobilization item. It reads as a job that was profitable at buyout and lost money at closeout, with no line explaining where it went.
Tunnel work is a run of discrete mobilizations: crane, jacking frame, shaft shoring, dewatering, power, and roughly 11,000 square feet of laydown, built and torn down again at the next hole. Mobilization is usually one lump sum item, so remobs driven by the GC's sequence aren't automatically compensable. A finished bore then leaves an open shaft that can't be backfilled until the pipe crew ties in the carrier pipe. Shoring rental, pumps, plating, and traffic control keep accruing on a shaft producing zero feet.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them.
What else costs tunnel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What tunnel owners ask
Getting paid for remobilization on multiple bore crossings?
Six crossings means six setups and six teardowns, and the contract has a single capped mobilization item to cover all of it.
What does it cost?
Remob runs $15K to $40K each time and shaft standby bills at daily rental rates, on a job that already invoiced its mobilization item. It reads as a job that was profitable at buyout and lost money at closeout, with no line explaining where it went.
What do I do first?
Cost code at the crossing level, with mob, drive, and demob under each crossing, so the loss has an address you can point at.
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 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them. It comes from chapter 6 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.