For UK contractors, fit-out firms and quantity surveyors
The same event has four different names depending on the contract you signed, and using the wrong one costs you credibility at the exact moment credibility is the asset.
Correspondence is evidence. Every email you send about a change is read later, by a quantity surveyor whose job is to find the weak point in your position.
Writing change order on a JCT job tells that person you are not reading the contract, and everything you claim afterwards is read in that light. It is a small thing that costs you nothing to get right and quite a lot to get wrong.
| Word | Where it belongs | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Variation | JCT Standard Building Contract | A change to the contracted works — an addition, an omission, a substitution, or a change to the conditions under which the work is carried out. |
| Change | JCT Design and Build | The same thing under a different name. DB talks about a Change to the Employer's Requirements. |
| Architect's or Contract Administrator's Instruction | JCT | The document that instructs it. The variation is what changed; the instruction is how you were told. They are not the same thing and the distinction matters when one exists and the other does not. |
| Employer's Instruction | JCT Design and Build | The Design and Build equivalent of the above. |
| Compensation event | NEC3 and NEC4 | Not a variation at all. A defined list of events — twenty-one of them in NEC4 clause 60.1 — that entitle you to a change in the Prices, the Completion Date or the Key Dates. An instruction changing the Scope is one entry on that list. |
| Project Manager's instruction | NEC4 | The instrument itself, which must be in a form that can be read, copied and recorded. |
| Change order | US contracts, and loose UK usage | Not a term of art in either JCT or NEC. Everybody understands it; no UK contract defines it. |
| CVI | JCT practice | Confirmation of Verbal Instruction. Not a type of change — a way of rescuing one that arrived by mouth. |
| Dayworks | JCT | A method of valuing work, not a type of change. Frequently used as though it were both. |
| Final account | Both | The settling-up at the end, where every one of the above is argued about at once. |
This is the table worth keeping. The two families do not merely use different words — they attach very different consequences to missing the same deadline.
| JCT | NEC4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Is a verbal instruction valid? | Not immediately. Clause 3.12 gives it a route to becoming valid. | No. Clause 13.1 requires a form that can be read, copied and recorded. |
| Who has to write it up? | You, by confirming it. | You notify; the Project Manager instructs. |
| Your clock | 7 days to confirm, then 7 days for them to dissent. | 8 weeks to notify a compensation event, from becoming aware of it. |
| Miss it and… | The instruction does not take effect. The work may still be valued, but the route you were given has closed. | The Prices, the Completion Date and the Key Dates are not changed. Clause 61.3. There is no partial credit. |
The bottom-right cell is the one to remember. NEC's penalty for a late notification is absolute — not a reduction, not a discretion, and not something a good relationship with the Project Manager can rescue.
Use your contract's word in every email, name the clause when you confirm anything, and write it up the same day. None of that is difficult. All of it fails in the same place: the change agreed on site at four in the afternoon by two people who both meant it, and which nobody wrote down that evening.
That is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when the programme moves faster than the paperwork, which is every programme.
This page describes how these contracts commonly work. It is not legal advice, and clause numbering moves between editions and between forms — check the contract you actually signed. The provisions referred to are the Standard Building Contract at clause 3.12 and NEC4 at clauses 13.1 and 61.3. Primary sources: jctltd.co.uk and neccontract.com.
If something on this page is wrong, or right but not how it works where you are, I would rather hear it than not. Twenty minutes, no slides, and a reply from the person who wrote it.
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