What Is A Change Order?

A change order has one job: make the new agreement survive without anyone having to remember the conversation. If it does that, the format barely matters. A page, an email both parties reply to, or a line in your quoting software all work. What matters is that four things are on it and a signature is under them.

Write the scope in the same language you used on the original quote. If the quote said "supply and install 6ft cedar fence, 200 linear feet", the change order says "add 24 linear feet of the same fence along the north property line" — not "extra fencing". Vague scope is the reason change orders get argued about six weeks later.

Almost nobody lies about a verbal change order. They remember it differently, which is worse, because both people are certain and neither is dishonest. You remember quoting eleven hundred at the wall. They remember you saying "shouldn't be much". Both memories are real.

The dispute never happens at the moment of the change. It happens at the final invoice, when the work is done, the materials are installed and your leverage is gone. That is the whole problem. A verbal change order moves the negotiation to the one point in the job where you have nothing left to trade.

So it resolves one of two ways. You eat it, and the job's margin quietly disappears into work you actually performed. Or you hold the line and bill it, and a customer who genuinely didn't expect that number feels ambushed on the last day — which is exactly the day they decide whether to recommend you. Written change orders are not paperwork discipline. They are how you get paid for the extra work and keep the customer at the same time.

These get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The test is simple: did the original quote anticipate this?

An allowance is a placeholder dollar amount already sitting in your quote for a decision the customer hasn't made yet — tile, fixtures, hardware. When they pick the $9 per square foot tile against a $5 allowance, that's a reconciliation your quote already planned for, not new scope. Confirm the number in writing anyway, because "we'll settle up at the end" is the same failure mode as a verbal change order.

A contingency is money held against the unknowns inside the agreed scope — the sort of thing you expect to hit on an old house without knowing where. Spending it isn't a change order either, as long as the work stays within what you priced.

A change order is for when the scope or the conditions actually moved. New work the customer asked for, work nobody knew about until a wall came open, or the same work made harder by something outside your control. If your original quote could not reasonably have covered it, it's a change order — write one.

Before the work happens. Every time. A change order written after the fact is not a change order, it's an invoice with extra steps, and it gets treated as one.

The moments that should trigger one are predictable. The customer asks for something extra while you're on site. You open something up and find rot, old wiring, no footing, the wrong substrate. A spec or material changes. Another trade's delay puts you into overtime or a second mobilization. Access changes — the driveway is now blocked, the material has to be carried.

Write them for the small ones too. Nobody loses a job to a single $2,400 change. Margin dies in the $180 ones you waved off eight times, and there's a second cost: every freebie teaches the customer that changes are free, which makes the one you do need to charge for feel like a betrayal of the pattern you set.

If the work genuinely cannot wait — water running, something unsafe, a crew standing idle at $200 an hour — do what has to be done, then write it the same day, note on it why the work started before signature, and get it signed. Same day. Not at the end of the week when the detail has gone soft.

This is the part that decides whether change orders make you money or cost you the customer, and it's the part most advice skips. Raise it at the moment you find it, in person, with the customer looking at the same thing you are. An open wall explains itself. An email that evening reads as a bill.

Separate the news from the ask. Show them what you found, say plainly why the original price could not have covered it, and only then give the number. Contractors who lead with the price sound like they're selling. Contractors who show the problem first sound like they're solving one.

Give real options where real options exist. Do it now, defer it to a later phase, or do the reduced version — and say which one you'd pick if it were your house, and why. A customer choosing between three things is making a decision. A customer handed one number is being told what it costs, and people push back on being told.

Price the change on exactly the same logic as the original quote — same labour rate, same markup, same units. If they can see it's your ordinary pricing applied to extra work rather than an opportunistic number, signing is easy. If a change order is heavy on material, ask for the material money up front the same way you did on the original job; the sizing logic doesn't change, and it's covered at /answers/how-much-deposit-should-a-contractor-ask-for.

One thing not to do: never bundle a change order with a grievance about the original quote or the customer's earlier decisions. Keep it about the work in front of you. A customer who signs at the wall tells the neighbours you were straight with them. A customer who discovers it on the final invoice tells them something else, and that version travels further.