How to Price a Change Request Without Losing the Customer

A customer calls halfway through a job and asks for something extra. Maybe they want an additional circuit added while the walls are open, a different finish on the joinery, or one more product line added to a branded goods order. Your instinct is to keep them happy and say yes. The question is: at what cost, and when do you sort out the money?

Most contractors and trade businesses handle this in one of two ways. They either guess a number on the spot - usually low, because nobody wants to be the one who pushed the price up - or they say "we'll sort it at the end" and hope the customer remembers. Both approaches lead to the same place: delivering extra work at a price that doesn't cover what it actually cost to do it. Getting this process right is less about confronting customers and more about making the approval easy for them to give.

Calculate the Real Cost Before You Quote

The most common error is pricing change requests from memory rather than from cost. When you're on-site or mid-project, it's easy to think "that's a few hours' work and some materials" without accounting for everything that actually goes into it.

A proper cost build-up for any change should cover labour at the correct rate for that type of work, materials at current supplier prices rather than the rates used in the original quote, any additional sub-contractor or specialist costs, and the overhead associated with replanning and coordinating the change. In construction, the accepted industry practice is to apply an overhead and profit margin on top - typically 10 to 15 per cent combined, though the exact figure depends on your contract terms and the nature of the work.

What often goes missing is the disruption cost: the time to re-sequence work, the additional site management, and any materials that need to be procured outside your existing supplier orders. These rarely make it onto a change request quote, and they represent real money. Research into change order management in construction shows that the hidden costs of processing and coordinating changes - estimating time, schedule coordination, additional supervision - can make change order work unprofitable at low markups, even when the direct costs appear covered.

Structure the Approval Before You Start

Once you have a price, the next step is getting written agreement before the work begins. This doesn't need to be a lengthy formal document - a clear email or a signed change order form is enough. What matters is that it states what the additional work is, what it costs, whether it affects the timeline, and that the customer has confirmed they want to proceed on those terms.

Variation order guidance from the construction industry is clear on this point: verbal agreements are a risk to both parties, because if costs or scope are disputed at the end of the project, there is no documentary record of what was agreed. A written confirmation takes two minutes and eliminates that risk entirely.

In practice, many businesses use a short template they can fill in and send on the same day a change is requested. The customer responds, the response is saved, and the job record shows the approved addition. If you are using job management software, attaching the signed change to the live job gives everyone visibility of what has been approved and at what price.

Handling the Customer Who Pushes Back

Some customers will question the additional cost, particularly if they feel the change is small. The most effective response is to show your working. Breaking down what the additional work involves - the materials, the labour, the scheduling - makes the cost feel concrete rather than arbitrary. Most customers are reasonable when they understand what they are paying for.

Where genuine disagreement exists, negotiate on the scope rather than the margin. If the customer wants to remove part of the additional work to reduce the cost, that is a reasonable conversation. What you want to avoid is agreeing to a lower price for the same scope, which reduces your margin with no corresponding reduction in what you have to deliver.

Customers who see that you price extras clearly and confirm approval before starting are far more likely to trust you with repeat work than those who encounter an unexpected invoice at the end of a job. Zigaflow lets you raise a priced change request directly from an open job, with approval recorded against the job record so the paper trail runs from original quote to final invoice.

• Change Orders in Construction: The Definitive Guide for 2026Rhumbix · accessed 2026-06-23
• What are variation orders in construction?Procore UK · accessed 2026-06-23

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