Variations
When are dayworks worth it, and when do they cost you?
Dayworks look like the safest way to be paid for messy work: every hour counted, every bag of sand on the sheet. They are, right up until the sheet is unsigned, and then they are the weakest paper on the job.
QScope Team·17 November 2025·5 min read
Two days chasing an intermittent leak through three floors. No bill rate resembles that, and measuring it makes no sense: what would you measure? This is what dayworks exist for.
What dayworks are
The bottom rung of the valuation ladder: where varied work cannot sensibly be measured, it is valued as recorded labour hours, plant and materials, plus the percentage additions your contract sets. Where the contract adopts the RICS definition of prime cost of daywork, that document decides what sits in the base before any percentage is added, and it matters more than the percentages themselves; the percentages have their own page.
When dayworks serve you
- Work with no measurable output: investigation, opening up, chasing faults, attendance on others.
- Stop-start work under someone else’s control, where the hours are the honest measure of the disruption.
- Emergencies, done first and valued after, where a sheet started that morning is the only contemporaneous record that will ever exist.
When they cost you
Measurable work drifted onto dayworks is money left on the table. If the work has a quantity and a rate, the measured valuation usually pays better and argues less, because a rate carries your overheads the way you priced them, while a daywork percentage carries them the way the contract fixed them on day one.
The habit is one sentence: sheets go in daily or weekly, while the memory is shared, and someone on the client’s side signs them as a record of the hours, even where they reserve the valuation. A signature on the hours converts every later argument from “did this happen” to “what is it worth”, which is a much smaller argument.
On a domestic job
Nothing here depends on the Construction Act, but dayworks are a contract mechanism: they exist because the contract provides them. On a thin domestic contract, put the mechanism in your own quote: the hourly rates, the plant basis, and that time-based extras are recorded on sheets confirmed weekly. Without that, you are negotiating every messy hour after the fact.
What to do this week
1. Check your contract has daywork percentages at all, and where the base comes from. No mechanism, no dayworks.
2. Put blank sheets in the van today. Paper or phone, it does not matter; same-day does.
3. Before starting any messy task, decide the rung out loud: measured or daywork, agreed with whoever supervises, before the first hour is spent.