Test your job

Where is your margin leaking?

Heavy civil contractors bid one margin and keep a smaller one. Most of the gap is work you built but couldn't prove, change orders you never collected, and late days you ate. Enter five numbers to see what that costs you a year.

Example numbers for a $22M-a-year pipe contractor. Replace them with yours.

Annual revenue ($M)

Average job ($M) Margin you bid (%)

Most of your work is How you measure installed quantity today Sets how much of what you build you can prove when quantities are disputed.

Peer assumptions (override if you know yours)

Jobs that finish late (%) INDOT, 2010–2020: 40% of DOT contracts Days late when they do INDOT found 115 on average; 20 is conservative

Change orders (% of contract) Industry range 8–14% Never collected (%) Dodge: 32% of potential CO revenue

Liquidated damages ($/day) State DOT schedule for your job size Field overhead ($/day) Supervision, equipment, trailers past the finish

Margin leaking out of your jobs each year

$0per job, averaged

0%margin you actually keep

$0lost on the one job in three that goes bad

Leak	Basis	Per year

Get your full report

See what each leak looks like with daily measured quantities, and get a summary to send your estimator.

What changes with daily measured quantities

Leak	Today	Measured daily

Every foot and yard is measured the day it goes in, so quantity disputes start from your record, not the inspector's.
Extra work gets a dated photo and quantity the day it happens, which is what gets a change order paid.
A crew falling behind shows up within days, not at the next pay app.

Want to see it on one of your jobs? We run a free pilot. Reach out

Can you get on the bid list?

—

0.0your recordable rate vs trade average

0%workers' comp premium vs a 1.00 mod

—when your worst claim stops counting

Check	You	Threshold	Result

What moves these numbers

Your mod is set by claims from three policy years, lagged one. A bad year follows you for about four.
Owners increasingly prequalify on a safety score built from TRIR, DART and EMR against your trade's BLS average, so one strain injury on a 40-person crew moves the score.
Nomon's crew heat-strain alerts target overexertion, one of the injury types that drives heavy civil claims.

How this is calculated

Unprovable quantity. Share of revenue that is unit-price work (by trade) × a variance band set by how you measure: foreman's report 4%, survey per pay app 2.5%, weekly 1.5%, daily 0.5%. Half of that variance is assumed to go against you. Propeller's field data puts conventional survey variance at 3–5% versus 1–3% measured (source); a TDOT audit found quantity overruns were 94% of change-order dollars (source).
Change orders never collected. Revenue × CO share × unrecovered share. Dodge found 32% of potential change-order revenue is lost to unbilled or unpaid COs (source).
Late days. Jobs × share late × days late × (liquidated damages + field overhead). INDOT: 40% of contracts delayed, 2010–2020 (source). Damages default to a state DOT calendar-day schedule by contract size (ALDOT). Overhead defaults to $600 a day per $1M of job size.
The bad job. Dodge: margins fade about 5 points on average and nearly a third of jobs lose 7 or more points. The bad-job figure is 7 points of your average job.
Prequal gate. TRIR = cases × 200,000 ÷ hours, against BLS 2024 rates by NAICS (source). Many owners cap bidders at EMR 1.00; each 0.10 of mod moves premium about 10% (source). The score is Nomon's estimate of how owner prequal platforms weigh these stats, not any platform's actual score.