The $1,080 question: what RFIs really cost

A Navigant study of 1,362 projects counted about a million RFIs: 796 per project on average, each one costing roughly $1,080 to review and answer, with a median reply time of 9.7 days.

The request for information is the smallest formal document on the project: a question about the drawings. The Navigant Construction Forum measured what that smallness adds up to. Analyzing 1,362 projects, it found about one million RFIs in total — 796 per project on average, or 9.9 RFIs per $1 million of construction cost. The average cost of reviewing and answering a single RFI came out at $1,080, which puts the average project's RFI bill near $860,000. And the clock matters as much as the money: the median reply time was 9.7 days.

What an RFI really is

Not bureaucracy: a controlled question with an owner, a date and a written answer. The alternative is a decision made on site by whoever was standing there, undocumented, waiting to become rework. The RFI exists so that the person who designed the thing answers the question before the person who builds the thing has to guess.

Where the process leaks

• Questions asked informally: answered on a call, forgotten by Friday, disputed in December.
• No need-by date: the RFI goes out when the question appears, but nobody ties the answer to the activity it blocks.
• Answers that don't travel: the design team replies to one person; the crew on the other front never hears it.
• Closed without closing: the answer arrives, but the drawing, the submittal and the crew instruction never get updated.

The discipline that pays

Number every question, give it an owner and a need-by date tied to the schedule, distribute the written answer to everyone who builds from it, and record the cost when the answer changes the work. Ten days of median waiting is ten days of crew standing by: the RFI log is schedule management, not paperwork.

And like every other project document, the RFI is only as strong as the system that keeps it visible. When questions, answers, costs and schedule live in one place — implemented around each company's process — the $1,080 question stops being a surprise. That is the daily work of an ERP for construction companies.