Last updated: September 12, 2026
📊 The Evidence

The numbers behind
construction’s costliest problem.

Document coordination failures aren’t an edge case — they’re the industry’s most persistent source of waste. Here’s what the research shows.

$177.5B
US labor cost of non-optimal activities in 2018 — looking for project data, resolving conflicts and fixing mistakes (PlanGrid & FMI)
4.6%
Of contract value lost to field rework on building projects — measured across 32 buildings
796
RFIs on the average project — measured across 1,362 projects and 1,083,807 RFIs
The Rework Problem

Where the Money Goes

Poor coordination doesn’t just cause inconvenience — it drives billions in preventable losses every year.

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$88.69B
Global rework cost from decisions made on bad data, 2020
Accounting for 14% of all rework performed in 2020. The earlier PlanGrid & FMI survey put the US figure at $31.3B of rework caused by poor data and miscommunication in 2018. Neither study states a per-event rework cost.
Autodesk & FMI, Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction, 14 September 2021
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5.04%
Median direct cost of rework, as a share of project cost
Range 4.03–6.05%. Adjusted for indirect costs at the ~80% uplift the literature supports, the median becomes 9.07% (range 7.25–10.89%). The adjustment is not a second measurement.
Navigant Construction Forum, The Impact of Rework on Construction, August 2012
⏱️
1.5%
Of contract value lost to design errors and omissions alone
Within the 4.6% total field rework factor measured on building projects. Across all building types the figures are 1.8% and 5.2%. This is the slice document review addresses.
Hwang, Thomas, Haas & Caldas (2009), 359 projects, via Navigant 2012
The Human Bottleneck

Why Manual Review Falls Short

The problem isn’t effort — it’s that humans are being asked to do something that exceeds human capacity.

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35%+
Time on non-productive tasks
Construction professionals spend over 14 hours per week looking for information, resolving conflicts, and dealing with mistakes.
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1,000s
Details to cross-reference
Project coordinators must manually compare thousands of details across dozens of document sets from multiple disciplines.
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52%
Of rework caused by poor data and miscommunication
Globally, across ~600 construction leaders surveyed in April 2018. Widely requoted as 48% — the report says 52%.
The Cascade Effect

How a Missed Conflict Becomes a Six-Figure Problem

A single coordination error caught on paper costs minutes. Caught in the field, it costs months.

1

Conflict Created

Disciplines design in parallel — MEP routes through structural elements, specs contradict drawings.

→
2

Review Missed It

Manual coordination can’t catch everything across hundreds of pages. The conflict goes to permit and bid.

→
3

Found in the Field

Work stops. RFIs are issued, change orders drafted. Work stops while the answer is chased, and the fix now carries demolition, rework, a change order and schedule impact.

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Hypothetical Cost and Savings

Flikt.AI Review
$30K
→
% of $50M Project
0.06%
→
Typical Savings
$1M–$2.5M
A fraction-of-a-percent investment to prevent the 1.5–3.2% of contract value that measured design errors and omissions drive.

Sources & References

Every figure on this page is traced to a primary document. Grades and full provenance are in the construction rework source register, which also lists seven widely-quoted figures that did not survive the trace.

Hwang, Thomas, Haas & Caldas (2009) — “Measuring the Impact of Rework on Construction Cost Performance,” 359 projects — field rework factors by population
Navigant Construction Forum (August 2012) — “The Impact of Rework on Construction” — direct and indirect rework cost
Navigant Construction Forum (April 2013) — “Impact & Control of RFIs on Construction Projects” — 1,362 projects, 1,083,807 RFIs
Lopez & Love (2012) — “Design Error Costs in Construction Projects,” ASCE JCEM — 139 projects
Autodesk & FMI (14 September 2021) — “Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction”
PlanGrid & FMI (2018) — “Construction Disconnected” — ~600 construction leaders surveyed April 2018; non-optimal time, US rework cost

Don’t let these numbers become your numbers.

See how Flikt.AI catches document conflicts before they become field problems — and budget disasters.

Those are industry figures. If you would rather test the claim against your own project than against a statistic, send a set you have already built and check the findings against that project’s own RFI log.

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Where the numbers come from

If you want the underlying work rather than the summary, we catalogued 364 coordination conflicts across 14 real plan sets, traced the root cause of 827 RFIs, and collected what is actually measured in construction rework statistics.

For single projects with the findings confirmed by the general contractor, the case studies cover a commercial retail set in South Florida and a structural and HVAC clash.

To put those figures against a specific job rather than the published averages, the RFI cost calculator and the ROI calculator run the same math on your own numbers.

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