One week of delay = £1 million in lost profit | Construction delays explained

4 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:08

A short YouTube explainer by William Doyle MRICS about the financial impact of construction delays. The speaker gives a worked example: on a £40–50m project typical prelims can be about £25,000 per week; with profit margins around 2–2.5% a one-week critical delay equates roughly to £1m of lost profit. The video stresses the importance of contemporaneous records to evidence delay assessments.

Questions this video answers

£25,000 per week

Around below 2%; example uses 2–2.5%

Roughly £1,000,000 in lost profit (equivalent to having to win and deliver £1m of extra work)

Chapters

One of the big challenges the industry faces is assessing delay and there's a lot of energy behind this. When you think about the typical prelims on a 40, 50 million pound job might be 25,000 a week. You know, this is for keeping the fences, the site huts, the security and all, and the staff in the, in the office keeping, keeping all that going. If we have a critical delay that affects planned completion, and that's potentially £25,000 a week plus prelim cost and you know, where profit margins are sort of, well, that they're hovering somewhere below 2%. But I mean, even if they're two and a half percent, that's a 40th. So we're talking about, you know, losing a week's worth of, of delay, which was due is equivalent to having to win a million pounds worth of work and deliver it. So you can see why delay and disruption is such an emotive topic. And again, records, records, records, we can evidence and substantiate our assessments far better if we've got contemporaneous records.