Who owns the float
It is the single most argued question in delay, and under most standard forms the answer is nobody, which satisfies neither side.
QScope Team · 9 March 2026 · 5 min read
Float is the difference between the earliest an activity could finish and the latest it can finish without delaying completion. A contractor who programmes twelve months of work into a fourteen month contract period has two months of float.
The question is what happens when an employer risk event consumes some of it.
Three possible answers
The contractor owns it. It priced the job, it built the programme, the float is its risk contingency. On this view any employer delay entitles it to an extension even if completion is unaffected.
The employer owns it. The contract period is what the employer bought. If the contractor can finish early, that is a bonus and not an entitlement.
The project owns it. Float is available to whoever needs it first. Neither party has a claim on it until it runs out.
Why that feels unfair to contractors
Because it does eat something real. A contractor that planned to finish two months early has lost the ability to demobilise, redeploy its team and start the next job. That is a genuine commercial loss and it is not compensated.
The answer, which is unsatisfying but correct, is that the contract obliged it to finish by the completion date and it will still do so. It was not obliged to finish early and the employer did not buy that.
Where it stops being theoretical
The argument matters when float has already been consumed by contractor delay and then an employer event arrives. The contractor says the event is now critical and claims an extension. The employer says the only reason it is critical is the contractor’s own earlier delay.
Both are describing the same facts. The resolution turns on whether the employer’s event independently caused delay to completion, which is a question about causation and not about ownership of float.
Terminal float
Float at the end of the programme, between the contractor’s planned completion and the contractual completion date, is treated differently in some contracts. NEC deals with it expressly through the concept of time risk allowances and terminal float, and it is one of the areas where NEC is markedly clearer than JCT.
What to do about it
Submit a programme showing the float honestly and get it accepted. A programme that hides float by padding durations is worse for the contractor than one that shows it, because when the float is challenged the padding is what gets examined.
And record the reasoning on every extension decision. Two years later, whether float was available in March is a question nobody will be able to answer from memory.
QScope records the relevant event, the weeks claimed and the weeks awarded with the reasoning, so a float argument made today can still be explained in two years.