What a fair P&G costs in 2026

Preliminaries and general — P&G — is the money that keeps a construction site running but doesn't belong to any single trade. It's the site office and its establishment, the site agent and foreman, cranes and scaffolding, insurances and guarantees, security and welfare, temporary water and power, and the cost of simply being there for the duration of the contract. Get it wrong and a tender either prices itself out of the running or wins the job and bleeds money for the length of the programme.

What P&G actually covers

P&G splits, broadly, into fixed and time-related costs. Fixed costs happen once regardless of how long the job runs — site establishment and de-establishment, mobilising plant, setting up the site office. Time-related costs accrue every week the site is open — supervision salaries, plant hire, site running costs, insurances. That distinction matters more than any single number, because it's the basis on which P&G is recovered when the programme changes.

• Site establishment: offices, stores, ablutions, hoarding, signage, temporary services
• Management and supervision: site agent, foreman, safety officer, admin
• Plant and equipment not priced in the rates: cranes, hoists, scaffolding, small plant
• Insurances, guarantees, and bonds required by the contract
• Health, safety, and environmental compliance
• Site running costs: security, cleaning, temporary water and power, waste

The typical range

As a rule of thumb, P&G on South African building work commonly runs between about 8% and 15% of the contract value. Where a job lands in that band depends on scale, duration, complexity, and access. A short, simple, urban job with easy access sits at the lower end. A long-duration, phased, or remote project — where you carry supervision and site costs for many months — pushes toward the top, and sometimes beyond it. Bigger projects often show a lower P&G percentage than small ones, because the fixed establishment cost is spread across a larger contract sum.

What inflates P&G

• A long or uncertain programme — every extra month is time-related cost
• Remote sites — accommodation, travel, and logistics for staff and plant
• Restricted or shared access, working around an occupied building, or night work
• Onerous contract requirements: heavy guarantees, extensive insurances, strict HSE regimes
• Phased handover, which keeps you on site longer for the same built area

Why it matters on variations and extensions of time

This is where P&G stops being an abstract percentage. When a contract's completion date is extended — through a compensation event on NEC, or a revision of the date for practical completion on JBCC — the contractor keeps carrying time-related P&G for the extra period. If your P&G build-up doesn't separate the time-related element and express it as a weekly or monthly rate, you have no clean basis to recover those costs when the programme slips through no fault of your own. A defensible, itemised, time-related P&G rate is one of the most valuable things in a well-built tender.

Practical takeaways

• Build P&G up from real, itemised costs — don't just apply a flat percentage and hope.
• Split fixed from time-related, and carry a clear weekly/monthly time-related rate.
• Sanity-check the total against the 8–15% band for a job of that type and length.
• On long programmes, model what happens to your P&G recovery if the job runs late.

You can sense-check the mark-up P&G adds to a direct cost with the Tender Pricing Calculator, and price the P&G section of an actual bill with the BoQ Pricer.