Preliminaries

Preliminaries — prelims — are the contract-wide costs of setting up and running a project that do not attach to any single work item: site management, welfare, plant, access, insurances and time-based overheads.

Prelims are the bill\'s clock. Because most prelim items are priced per week or month, the total exposure is the rate times duration — which makes every week of extension of time a prelims claim, and every prelims recovery a programme argument. Contracts that fix prelims as a lump sum shift that risk deliberately.

Evaluation follows the same honesty as everything else: actual cost for time-related items where the form allows, or the priced level for the extended period. The disputes come from claiming prelims twice — once inside the loss and expense total and once as measured extension — which is why the two are reconciled before either is settled.

Related: extension of time · cost plan · tender