Executive Summary: The Compounding Cost of Submittal Inefficiency

The construction submittal process has evolved from a routine administrative hurdle into a primary driver of project margin erosion. Data reveals that inefficient submittal management is no longer a minor “cost of doing business” but a significant source of project risk, directly responsible for schedule delays, budget overruns, and critical path failures.

The financial impact is compounding. Seemingly small administrative frictions escalate into six-figure liabilities and project-breaking delays. This report analyzes and quantifies the financial impact through five distinct, interconnected stages:

1. Process Failure: The baseline industry average for submittal rejections is an untenable 30-40%. This high failure rate is not primarily due to complex engineering, but to administrative errors and failure to adhere to review protocols.
2. Micro-Cost: Each rejection carries a weighted average cost of $805 in lost productivity, administrative time, and schedule friction.
3. Administrative Burden: This high failure rate is sustained by reliance on manual tracking systems that consume over 30 hours per week of a project manager’s time and are a primary source of “bad data,” directly responsible for 14% of all construction rework.
4. Critical Path Collapse: The procurement timeline for critical long-lead items has ballooned from 3-6 months to 10-14 months. This escalation has eliminated all schedule float, meaning a single submittal rejection on a long-lead item can trigger an immediate and unrecoverable critical path delay.
5. Punitive Recovery Costs: Schedule compression results in a 33% claim rate on projects that use it, compared to a 7% claim rate on projects with conservative schedules.

The central thesis: Submittal management has become a core function of project risk management. The data demonstrates a direct and quantifiable link between high rejection rates, manual tracking, and critical path failures.

The Scale of the Problem: Submittal Volume by Project Size

To understand the impact of submittal delays, we must first establish the scale of the administrative challenge. The volume and complexity of submittals are directly correlated with project size and budget.

Project Tier Definitions

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) provides functional definitions for classifying project tiers:

• Small Projects: Total Installed Cost (TIC) ranging from $100,000 to $2,000,000. These projects are characterized by shorter durations, fewer personnel, and scope focused on repetition, maintenance, renovation, or upgrades.
• Medium and Large Projects: Differentiated by greater complexity, larger stakeholder groups, and longer timelines. Submittals are a standard, formal requirement to maintain quality control and accountability.

Submittal Volume Benchmarks

The volume of submittals on any project is a direct function of its size and complexity. Larger and more complex projects require more submittals than smaller projects due to the increased quantity of components, materials, and specialty scopes of work.

While specific benchmark numbers are often proprietary to construction management platforms, the administrative load can be illustrated using data for Requests for Information (RFIs) as a proxy. A global study of 1,362 projects found an average of 796 RFIs per project. This high volume of documentation provides a clear analog for the administrative load of the submittal process, which on large projects can easily involve managing thousands of individual documents.

The 70/30 Split: Product Data vs. Shop Drawings

Understanding submittal composition is key to diagnosing the root cause of systemic rejections. On a typical project:

• Product Data (70% of submittals): Manufacturer’s cut sheets, technical data, installation instructions, and specifications. These are intended to be straightforward verifications that the product selected meets the specifications.
• Shop Drawings (30% of submittals): Detailed, custom-fabricated drawings prepared by manufacturers or fabricators for complex, custom components such as steel connections, curtain wall systems, or cabinetry.

This 70/30 split reveals a fundamental disconnect: If 70% of all submittals are simple product data verifications, the high industry-wide rejection rates cannot be blamed solely on complex engineering challenges. This suggests that a significant portion of the submittal bottleneck is caused by fundamental administrative failures—contractors submitting non-compliant product data, failing to perform their own contractually-required initial review, or submitting incomplete documentation.

The Review Bottleneck: Timeline Standards vs. Field Reality

The primary driver of submittal-related delays is the discrepancy between contractual expectations for review times and the actual, chaotic performance in the field. This disconnect is exacerbated by critically high rejection rates, which force submittals into a delay-inducing cycle of resubmission.

Contractual Standard vs. Actual Turnaround Times

Construction contracts attempt to define a “reasonable” review period:

• The Standard: A typical review is most frequently cited as requiring 7-14 days. Other contracts allow for 14-21 days, with the Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee (EJCDC) recommending contractors “allow not less than 14 days” for review.
• The Reality: The actual turnaround time is defined by extreme variance, which makes the “average” a misleading metric.
  • The “Vanity Metric”: Platform-level data from Procore shows an average submittal turnaround time of 10 calendar days. While this figure appears healthy against a 14-day standard, it masks high-impact outliers. An average of 10 days can be achieved by 99 simple submittals being approved in one day, while one critical, long-lead item takes over 900 days.
  • The High-Variance Reality: Legal disputes highlight the chaos: one court deemed a 10-12 week review period reasonable, while another found anything over 14 days unreasonable. The time commitment for complex reviews is not trivial—a single door hardware submittal can take an architect 40 hours or more to review properly, and a window shop drawing submittal occupied a review team of three for an entire week.

The industry’s reliance on “average” turnaround time as a KPI provides a false sense of security. The only metric that truly impacts the project schedule is the variance from the mean and the specific turnaround time for items on the critical path.

The Resubmittal Rate Crisis

The single most critical metric for diagnosing process failure is the submittal rejection rate. Analysis of industry data reveals a massive performance gap:

• The Unmanaged Baseline: The accepted industry average rejection rate (submittals marked “Rejected” or “Revise and Resubmit”) is 30-40%. Third-party software providers use a conservative baseline of 35% in their cost-saving calculators.
• The Optimized Benchmark: In stark contrast, benchmark data from Procore shows that only 9.2% of submittals are “rejected or marked as revise and resubmit” within its managed platform.

This 20-30 percentage point gap quantifies the value of process maturity and technology adoption. It demonstrates that firms relying on manual or disjointed processes are 3 to 4 times more likely to have a submittal rejected than a firm using a modern management platform.

Root Cause: Why Submittals Are Rejected

This high rejection rate is a product of both contractor error and an adversarial review culture:

1. Contractor Error: The most-cited cause of rejection is the contractor failing to perform their own initial review, a “crucial step” that is “often skipped.” Contractors submit non-compliant products, substitutions without formal requests, or items that are “not even close,” wasting the design team’s time.
2. Adversarial Culture: Contractors express significant frustration with design teams using “Revise and Resubmit” for “petty,” “irrelevant” issues that could easily be addressed with an “Approved as Noted” stamp.
3. The Consequence: A submittal marked “Revise and Resubmit” is not a simple correction. It closes the review, and the contractor must formally revise and resubmit the document, at which point the entire 14-21 day review clock starts over. A 30% rejection rate does not imply a 30% delay; it can imply a 100% or 200% delay on that item as it cycles through the review process multiple times.

The Direct Financial Impact: Quantifying the Cost of Delays

The process failures identified above translate directly into quantifiable financial losses, measured as both a “micro-cost” per rejection and a “macro-cost” in daily project overhead.

The Micro-Cost: The $805 Rejected Submittal

A detailed survey of over 200 construction professionals calculated a weighted average cost of $805 for every single rejected submittal. This figure is a weighted average based on the frequency and severity of impact:

• 25% of rejections have minimal impact ($0). These are caught early and fixed.
• 65% of rejections cause “operational friction,” representing a cost of ~$500 per rejection in lost productivity and the time of Project Managers, Foremen, and Engineers.
• 9% of rejections become “critical issues,” triggering costs of ~$2,000 from rework, schedule compression, or expedited shipping.
• 1% of rejections result in “significant project delays,” costing ~$30,000 per occurrence due to cascade effects, substantial completion delays, and potential liquidated damages.

This $805 micro-cost scales into a significant liability. On a medium-to-large project with 1,000 submittals, the unmanaged industry rejection rate of 35% would result in 350 rejections:

350 rejections × $805 per rejection = $281,750

This represents the direct, quantifiable “cost of chaos” for a single project operating at the industry’s baseline.

The Macro-Cost: Extended General Conditions (EGC)

When a submittal delay extends the project’s substantial completion date, the contractor incurs Extended General Conditions (EGCs)—the daily, time-related costs of maintaining the project site.

• Benchmark: General Conditions typically account for 5-12% of a project’s total budget.
• Calculating the Daily Rate: A Florida legal case provides a clear, real-world calculation:
  • Total General Conditions: $2,566,146
  • Original Project Duration: 1,066 days
  • Calculated Daily EGC Rate: $2,407.27 per day

This $2,407 daily rate gives precise financial weight to a schedule delay. When a critical submittal is rejected and its 14-day review clock is restarted, the true financial impact of that single “Revise & Resubmit” action is:

14 days × $2,407.27 per day = $33,701.78

This calculation demonstrates that the 1% “Significant Delay” scenario, costed at $30,000 in the micro-cost analysis, is not an exaggeration but a conservative and highly realistic estimate.

The Cascade Effect: Downstream Trade Disruption

The costs don’t end with EGCs. A delay in one area triggers a cascade effect of disruption for all downstream trades:

• Lost Productivity: 35% of a construction professional’s time is already spent on non-productive activities, including “dealing with mistakes and rework.”
• Rework: “Bad data” is a primary cause of this waste, responsible for 14% of all rework in construction. The submittal process, when it fails, becomes a primary source of this bad data.
• Out-of-Sequence Work: This disruption forces trades into “out-of-sequence work,” where crews must hopscotch around the job site, destroying labor productivity, escalating costs, and creating further coordination problems.

Critical Path Failures: Long-Lead Items and Schedule Collapse

The most severe financial consequences occur when a submittal delay impacts the project’s critical path. Due to unprecedented supply chain volatility, the submittal for long-lead items has become the single most common trigger for these critical path failures.

How Late Submittals Trigger Critical Path Delays

A submittal delay becomes a critical path delay when the item in question has no “float,” or extra time, in the schedule.

• The Legal Impact: A late submittal caused by the contractor’s failure to submit on time or submitting non-compliant documents is classified as a contractor-caused, “inexcusable” delay. In this scenario, the contractor is not entitled to claim EGCs for the delay and may become liable to the owner for liquidated damages, creating a devastating financial double-jeopardy.
• The Prime Culprit: Long-lead electrical equipment is a primary source of these delays. Data shows 41% of construction firms cite delays in items like transformers and switchgear as a major impact on their project schedules.

The Exponential Rise in Long-Lead Times

The fundamental shift that has elevated submittal risk is the evaporation of schedule float. Pre-pandemic supply chains were predictable. Today’s procurement lead times for critical materials have escalated to the point where they often meet or exceed the entire project duration.

This data reveals the true nature of the crisis. A typical 12-month commercial project is now contingent on acquiring a piece of switchgear with a 14-month lead time. This means the submittal for that item must be submitted, reviewed, and approved within the first 30-60 days of the project.

Given the 35% unmanaged rejection rate—which restarts the 14-21 day review clock—a critical path delay becomes a near certainty. The submittal for long-lead items is no longer an early-phase administrative task; it is arguably the single most critical activity in the entire project schedule.

The High Cost of Recovery: A Vicious Cycle

When a critical path delay is identified, the project team is forced to “recover” the schedule through financially punitive actions:

1. Expediting Fees: Paying a premium to the supplier for faster production or, more commonly, for premium shipping. Air freight can be 5 to 10 times more expensive than standard ground or sea shipping. This cost is a direct, unbudgeted hit to project profit.
2. Schedule Compression (“Crashing”): Adding resources, extra shifts, or overtime to perform subsequent activities in a shorter duration. This “solution” is a well-documented cause of further project failure:
   • Increased Claims: 33% of projects that adopt schedule compression end up with claims, compared to only 7% for projects with conservative schedules.
   • Decreased Safety and Quality: Rushing tasks leads to “increased risk of accidents,” “diminished quality” of workmanship, “heightened materials waste,” and strained stakeholder relationships.

The Administrative “Tracking Tax”: Project Management Burden

The process failures and critical path delays are not spontaneous; they are the direct result of a crushing administrative burden placed on project teams.

Manual Tracking Hours vs. Automated Workflows

The industry’s lingering reliance on manual tracking systems—disparate spreadsheets, email chains, and “back of envelope scribble”—is the core of the problem. This manual process creates an “administrative tracking tax” that consumes a project’s most valuable resource: its project manager.

• The “Tracking Tax”: In a manual system, a project manager can spend over 30 hours per week simply “manually collecting data from several different spreadsheets, email notes” to generate a basic status report.
• Compounding the Problem: This administrative drain is not isolated. Construction project managers report working 50 to 60+ hours per week on average.
• The Result: Reactive Management: The 30+ hours of manual data collection produce reports that are 2-3 weeks out of date by the time they are compiled. This creates a vicious cycle where project managers are too busy reporting on past failures to proactively manage future risks.

Digital construction management platforms are designed to solve this specific problem by automating workflows, centralizing documentation, and providing real-time tracking. This automation reduces the administrative “overhead,” with some platforms cutting submittal-related workload and turnaround time by up to 40%.

The True Cost of Submittal Coordination

The “tracking tax” is not just a soft cost; it is a direct, salaried line item in the project budget:

• Contractual Submittal Coordinator: Billed at an hourly rate between $22 and $64 per hour.
• Assistant Project Manager: This role is typically fulfilled by an Assistant PM, whose job description explicitly includes “manage submittal log and coordinate submittals.” The benchmark salary for this role is $95,000 to $110,000 per year.

This $100,000+ salaried position represents a profound, multi-layered financial inefficiency. A firm is paying a six-figure salary for an individual to execute a manual process that, at the industry average, produces a 30-40% failure rate. This failure rate, in turn, costs the project an additional $281,750 in micro-costs and exposes it to daily EGCs of $2,400+ and a 33% risk of compression-related claims.

The Frequency of Missed Deadlines

The failure to manage this process is not an exception, but a systemic and predictable outcome:

• 87% of contractors report experiencing construction delays on their projects.
• Approximately 30% of all commercial construction projects fail to meet their scheduled deadlines.

Missed submittal deadlines are a frequent, recurring flashpoint, forcing General Contractors to resort to formal “notice” letters to compel subcontractors to perform, further contributing to an adversarial project culture.

Strategic Recommendations: Breaking the Cycle

The data presented in this report indicates that inefficient submittal management is a critical financial and operational risk. However, the data also points to clear, actionable solutions.

1. Technology & Automation (The Financial Justification)

The 20-30 percentage point gap between the unmanaged industry rejection rate (30-40%) and the platform-managed rate (9.2%) provides a clear and compelling financial justification for technology adoption.

Action: Adopt a centralized, cloud-based construction management platform. Eliminate the use of manual spreadsheets and email for tracking submittals.

Return on Investment (ROI):

• Direct Cost Savings: Reducing the rejection rate from 35% to 9.2% on a 1,000-submittal project saves $207,690 in $805-per-rejection micro-costs.
• Human Capital Recapture: Reclaims the 30+ hours per week of project manager time previously spent on manual data entry.
• Process Efficiency: Reduces overall submittal turnaround time and administrative workload by up to 40%.

2. Process & Contractual (The Legal & Cultural Fix)

Technology alone cannot solve a problem rooted in poor process and an adversarial culture. Contractual terms must be updated to enforce accountability and collaboration.

Action:

1. Mandate an AIA-style “Schedule of Submittals” as a Day 1, contractually-required deliverable from the General Contractor.
2. Stipulate clear review periods (e.g., 14 days) but add a “Priority Review” clause for identified critical path items.
3. Train both contractor and design teams to default to “Approved as Noted” or “Furnish as Noted” for minor, non-conforming issues. “Revise and Resubmit” should be reserved only for true non-conformance that impacts performance, safety, or design intent.

3. Procurement (The Critical Path Solution)

The “negative float” crisis, where long-lead item procurement times (10-14 months) exceed project float, is the single greatest threat to project schedules. This threat can be neutralized by re-classifying long-lead submittals.

Action: De-risk the entire project schedule by shifting the long-lead approval process off the critical path. Contractually require that the submittal, review, and final approval for all critical long-lead items (e.g., electrical switchgear, structural steel, custom MEP units) be a pre-construction deliverable.

Result: This makes the approval a condition before the schedule’s “Notice to Proceed” (NTP) clock begins. This moves the 14-day to 12-week review process into the pre-construction phase, allowing the 14-month procurement clock to start before, or concurrent with, the 12-month construction clock.

Conclusion

Submittal management is no longer a clerical function—it is a strategic risk management imperative. The data is conclusive: firms that continue to rely on manual processes are systematically eroding their own margins through avoidable rejections, preventable delays, and cascading productivity losses.

The cost of managing submittals manually exceeds the cost of automation by an order of magnitude. The question is not whether to adopt better systems, but how quickly firms can implement them before their competitors do.