Where the CA Fee Goes: Tracking Architect Hours Against RFIs and Submittals
Understand where construction administration fees go by tracking architect hours across RFIs, submittals, reviews, and project coordination.
The construction administration fee erodes because it is priced as a percentage of a total fee set during pre-design, then consumed by a volume of RFIs, submittal revision cycles and site visits that nobody forecast and no one is counting. Most firms track CA hours against a single phase code. By the time the phase shows red, the project is in punch list and the evidence for an additional services claim is eighteen months cold.
Why the CA fee is structurally underpriced before work begins
A CA fee of 20 to 25 percent of the total design fee is set at the point the owner signs the agreement, often two years before the contractor mobilizes. At that moment the firm knows the building type, the approximate area and the target budget. It does not know who the general contractor will be, how complete the construction documents will be when they are issued, whether the owner will push a GMP before design development closes, or how many substitution requests the trades will file.
Each of those unknowns moves CA labor independently. A contractor with a disciplined submittal coordinator and a contractor who forwards every subcontractor question upstream as an RFI produce different CA phases on the same drawing set. The fee does not move. The hours do.
Then there is the compression problem. When schematic design and DD run long, the fee burn moves with them, and the CA allocation gets quietly raided to cover the overage before construction starts. The phase begins underwater and nobody has written it down. By the time the first submittal log arrives, the firm is spending money it already spent.
What scope creep in the CA phase actually looks like
Scope creep during construction administration is not vague. It is a finite set of recurring, nameable events, and each one has a document number attached to it.
- RFIs answerable from the issued documents. The information is on sheet A-501. The question gets asked anyway, and someone bills 40 minutes to find the detail and point at it.
- Third and fourth submittal cycles. The agreement contemplates a review and one resubmittal. The shop drawings come back a third time with the same deficiency.
- Substitution requests. A proposed equal that is not equal requires comparative review, sometimes recalculation, and a written position the firm will be held to.
- Site visits beyond the contracted count. The agreement says twenty-four. The owner calls the twenty-ninth and the PM gets in the car.
- Meetings above the agreed cadence. Weekly OAC becomes weekly OAC plus a Tuesday coordination call plus a trade-specific mockup review.
- Contractor-initiated value engineering. Redesign presented as cost savings, performed at the designer's expense.
- Punch list expansion. A second and third walk because the first list was not closed.
Every item on that list is countable. That is the point. Unlike design phase overruns, which dissolve into "the client kept changing their mind", CA overruns leave a numbered paper trail. Firms simply do not attach hours to it.
How many RFIs should an architect respond to
There is no credible universal number, and any figure quoted as an industry constant should be treated with suspicion, because RFI volume varies by delivery method, document completeness, project type and contractor behavior more than it varies by building size. What a firm can do is build its own baseline.
Pull the last six closed projects of comparable type and delivery method. Count total RFIs, count the ones that were answerable from the issued documents, and divide by construction duration to get an RFI-per-month rate. That number is defensible because it came from the firm's own history, and it is the only number worth writing into an agreement.
Once the baseline exists, the agreement can carry a threshold: RFI responses above a stated count per month, or above a stated total, are additional services at the hourly rates in Exhibit B. The threshold does nothing on its own. It works because it forces someone to count in real time, and counting in real time is what produces the conversation in month three instead of the write-off in month eighteen.
The same logic applies to submittals. Review of the initial submission and one resubmittal is in scope. The third cycle and beyond is billable, and the submittal log already records the cycle number. Guidance on reducing those cycles at source is covered in how to prevent RFI and submittal delays.
Tracking CA phase hours against the artefact, not the phase
The fix is a change in charge code granularity, not a change in timekeeping discipline. Most firms already capture time daily. They capture it to a code that cannot be converted into an invoice.
| What the timesheet says | What the invoice needs it to say |
|---|---|
| CA phase — 6.5 hrs | RFI 142 response, 1.5 hrs; RFI 143 response, 0.75 hrs; Submittal 08-41-13 cycle 3, 2.25 hrs; Site visit 27 (unscheduled), 2.0 hrs |
| Coordination — 4.0 hrs | Substitution request SR-11 comparative review, 4.0 hrs |
| Meetings — 3.0 hrs | OAC 19 (in scope), 1.5 hrs; mockup review, unscheduled, 1.5 hrs |
The left column is a cost. The right column is either a cost or a receivable, and the firm gets to decide which. Nothing about the right column requires more effort from the person filling the timesheet — it requires that the RFI number, submittal number and visit number already exist as selectable objects in the system where time is booked.
That is the integration point most design firms are missing. The RFI log lives with the contractor or in a project platform. The submittal log lives somewhere adjacent. Time lives in the accounting system. Nobody reconciles them, so the association between an hour and the document that caused it is never recorded and cannot be reconstructed later without an uncomfortable afternoon in the email archive. The structural reasons that association breaks are worth reading on their own in how to fix construction administration software gaps.
A CA phase budget the project architect can actually manage
Treat the CA fee as four sub-budgets rather than one number, and give each one a unit count.
- Submittal review. Expected item count multiplied by average hours per item, plus an allowance for one resubmittal per item. Track cycles consumed against cycles budgeted.
- RFI response. Baseline rate per month multiplied by construction duration. Track against the actual log weekly.
- Site presence. Contracted visit count, plus travel and field report preparation. Count visits, not hours, because the contract counts visits.
- Meetings and administration. OAC attendance at the contracted cadence, pay application certification, change order review, closeout.
Reviewed weekly, this surfaces the overrun while the project is still mid-construction. A project architect who can say in week fourteen that submittal review is at 68 percent consumption with 40 percent of the submittal log outstanding has a management decision to make and a conversation to open. The same architect looking at one CA phase line at 71 percent has nothing.
The claim fails on evidence, not on merit
Additional services requests are rarely denied because the work was not performed. They are denied because the firm cannot produce a contemporaneous record showing what was performed, when, at whose instruction, and why it fell outside the agreement.
An owner presented with a closeout invoice for 240 hours of unscheduled CA labor and a summary spreadsheet will negotiate it down or refuse it. The same owner presented with a monthly log — RFI 142 flagged as answerable from issued documents on 14 March, noted in that month's invoice narrative, never disputed — is in a materially different position. The record was offered when it could still be checked, and silence at the time is hard to walk back.
This is the same defensible record that protects the firm on a standard of care question two years after substantial completion. One record serves both purposes: the fee conversation during construction and the liability position afterwards. The practices that make an audit trail hold up are set out in construction admin tools for audit trails.
Keeping that record intact means RFIs, submittals, site visit logs and the hours booked against them sitting in one connected system rather than in a contractor's platform, a shared drive and a timesheet that never speak to each other. INGENIOUS.BUILD connects those records so the association between an hour and the document that caused it exists at the moment the hour is booked, not reconstructed from email at closeout.
Where to start on the next project
Add three things to the agreement before it is signed: a stated site visit count, a stated submittal review cycle allowance, and an RFI threshold derived from the firm's own closed-project history. Then open charge codes at the artefact level on day one of CA.
The combination changes the timing of the conversation, which is the only variable that matters. An overrun identified in month three is a scope discussion with an owner who still needs the firm. The same overrun identified at closeout is a write-off with a cover note.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the construction administration phase usually lose money for design firms?
Because the CA fee is a percentage of a total fee set during pre-design, while the work is driven by RFI and submittal volume generated years later by a contractor the firm did not select. Firms track CA hours by phase rather than against the specific documents consuming them, so overruns only surface at closeout.
How many RFIs should an architect expect to respond to on a project?
There is no defensible industry constant, and any single number applied across project types will mislead. The reliable approach is to set a baseline from the firm's own closed projects of similar scope, delivery method and drawing completeness, then write that baseline into the agreement as the threshold above which additional services apply.
What is a reasonable submittal review turnaround time for an architect?
Most agreements specify ten to fourteen calendar days from receipt of a complete submittal, with the clock starting only when the package is complete and bears the contractor's review stamp. Incomplete packages should be returned the same day rather than reviewed, because reviewing them restarts the cycle at the architect's cost.
How should a design firm track CA phase hours against fee?
Open a charge code for each numbered RFI, each submittal item including revision cycles, and each site visit beyond the contracted count. Review consumption weekly against the fee allocated to each category. Hours booked to a single undifferentiated CA phase code cannot be converted into an additional services request.
When should an architect raise an additional services request during construction administration?
At the point of the trigger, not at closeout. If the agreement caps site visits at twenty-four and the twenty-fifth is requested, the request accompanies the next invoice with the visit log attached. Claims raised months later require the owner to accept reconstructed evidence and are routinely discounted or denied.
What counts as scope creep in the construction administration phase?
Common triggers include RFIs answerable from the issued documents, submittal items reviewed a third or fourth time, substitution requests requiring new design work, site visits beyond the contracted count, meetings exceeding the agreed cadence, and redesign driven by contractor-initiated value engineering. Each should be defined and counted in the agreement.
