Abortive work is costing you more than you think
In short
Abortive work is effort spent on jobs that never go ahead, and unless your terms say otherwise you usually pay for it. Record that time against the lost job, then price it into future quotes.
Surveys, designs and site visits for jobs that never happen are real costs that rarely appear in any record. Here is what counts as abortive work, who pays, and how to record and price it.
Abortive work is any work you start or complete that will not form part of the final job, such as site surveys, designs, drawings, samples and ordered materials for a project that gets cancelled or never goes ahead. When the job dies, someone pays for that work. Unless a contract or a written term says the customer pays, it is almost always you, and because the loss sits in no single record, it rarely shows up as a loss at all.
What counts as abortive work
The Designing Buildings wiki defines abortive work (also called abortive costs or abortive fees) as work that has been started or carried out but is no longer needed and will not be part of the final development. It can occur at any stage: the tender process, the consultants' work or the construction itself. A related term, nugatory work, describes work of no value or consequence. The nuance is that abortive work was cut short or failed to reach its intended outcome.
The causes are mundane. The wiki lists cancellation of a project, failed tendering, refusal of planning permission, changes in budget or size, mistakes and misunderstandings, and procurement of redundant goods or materials. For a construction or trade business, that translates into everyday things:
- A half-day site survey for a refurbishment that the customer shelves.
- Two rounds of drawings for a tender you then lose to a rival, or that the client cancels.
- A supplier quotation chase, a sample and a mock-up for a job that never gets a purchase order.
- Materials ordered on the strength of a verbal go-ahead that was withdrawn.
None of these feels like a big decision when it happens. Together they are a steady drain on the hours of your most expensive people.
Who pays when a job is cancelled
Designing Buildings is direct about this: the cost of abortive work is allocated according to the wording of the contract. Very broadly, the client bears it if the conditions set out in the contract have been met (sometimes called abortive terms), if the client accepted the risk for unknown items such as ground conditions, or if the client breached the contract. Where a consultant or contractor carried out unauthorized work, or accepted the risk for unknowns, they may bear the cost themselves.
Read that the other way round. If your quote has no abortive terms and nobody authorized the work in writing, the default position is weak. The customer never agreed to pay for a survey on a job that did not proceed, so a late invoice for it starts an argument you probably lose and a relationship you want to keep. Most small businesses simply absorb the cost and move on.
Unauthorized work is your risk
Work started on a verbal go-ahead, or beyond what the quote covers, is the category most likely to land on you. Get written authorization before spending time or money on anything that cannot be reused if the job stops.
Legal disputes over architects' fees on abortive projects have reached the courts in England and Wales, which shows how contested the point becomes once there is no clear agreement. It is much cheaper to settle the question in the quote than in a dispute.
Why abortive work stays invisible
The cost goes missing because of how most businesses record work. A job that is won gets a job record, with time and costs booked against it. A job that is lost or cancelled gets nothing. The survey hours were booked to general overhead, the supplier call was never logged, and the sales email thread sits in someone's inbox. Your management accounts show lower margin or higher overheads, with no clue why.
A cancelled job costs you twice: once in the revenue you never earned, and again in the work you did to get that far and never recorded.
There is also a survivorship problem in your pricing. Your win-rate and margin figures only describe jobs that went ahead. The quote that bears the cost of everything done for the jobs that did not go ahead is the one you never see. If you win one in three quotes and each quote involves a survey, your winning jobs are quietly subsidising the other two.
Record it against the lost job
The fix is small and procedural. Treat a cancelled or lost job as a record that still carries cost. When someone surveys, designs or visits a site, the time and any expenses go against that specific enquiry, and the record stays open after the job dies, marked cancelled rather than deleted. Keeping that record on the job itself, rather than in a spreadsheet or an inbox, means a cancelled job keeps its history, and the quote that preceded it is still there to look back on.
Once that data exists, you can answer questions that were previously guesses. How many hours did we spend on jobs that never happened last quarter? Which customers or job types cancel most often? Which stage of the process leaks the most, the survey or the design?
Review lost jobs monthly
Add up recorded hours and costs on cancelled and lost jobs once a month. Divide by the number of jobs won. That figure is the abortive cost each winning job needs to carry.
Price it into future quotes
Recording the cost tells you what abortive work costs. Pricing it in recovers that cost. There are two honest ways to do so, and many businesses use both.
First, make costly pre-contract work chargeable. For surveys, detailed designs and mock-ups, state in the quote that a fee applies if the job does not proceed, or that the fee is credited against the contract if it does. Customers who are serious accept this readily. Customers who are not tend to reveal themselves before you have spent the money.
Second, build an allowance for the unrecoverable remainder into your rates. If recorded abortive work equals a few percent of the value of won work, your margin target has to absorb that. It is the same logic as any overhead: a cost that is real, predictable and carried by the jobs that succeed.
Designing Buildings also suggests reducing abortive work in the first place, including tendering only where the chance of success is high, limiting the extent of tender processes and introducing change-control gateways where each stage is agreed before the next begins. Recorded data helps here too, because you can see which enquiries are worth a free survey and which are not.
The principle
Work you were never paid for is still work. If you do not record it against the job that failed, you cannot price it into the jobs that succeed, and the gap shows up later as a margin you cannot explain. Start by recording one number: the hours spent on jobs that never happened.
Sources
- Abortive work in building design and constructionDesigning Buildings · accessed 2026-10-19
- Defects and Abortive WorkC-Link · accessed 2026-10-19