Construction Claims Consultant Fees and Day Rates
What we charge, how we charge it, and what you get for it. Published because being asked to guess is the thing clients tell us they dislike most about hiring consultants.
The short answer
Construction claims consultants in the UK typically charge between £400 and £1,200 per day, depending on seniority, the complexity of the dispute and how quickly the work is needed. Expert witness work and large forensic delay analyses sit at the upper end. Routine outsourced quantity surveying is a different job and a cheaper one, typically £350 to £800 a day, and is more often taken as a monthly retainer than by the day.
RKA Associates work on three bases: a day rate for advisory and claims work, a fixed fee for defined adjudication stages, and a monthly retainer for ongoing commercial management. Every engagement starts with a written fee proposal, and the first conversation is free.
Our rates
| Service | Basis | Indicative fee |
|---|---|---|
| Claims preparation | Day rate | £450 per day |
| Adjudication (referring or responding) | Fixed fee per stage | from £560 per stage |
| Forensic delay analysis | Day rate | £730 per day |
| Expert witness (quantum) | Day rate | £960 per day |
| Outsourced QS for subcontractors | Monthly retainer | from £1,690 per month |
| Retained commercial management | Monthly retainer | from £2,700 per month |
| Contract or claim review | Fixed fee | £510 |
| Initial consultation | None | Free, no obligation |
Where a rate sits in those ranges reflects the work rather than the client: routine claims preparation towards the lower end, forensic delay analysis and expert witness work towards the top, which is how the market prices them and how an adjudicator or a court would expect to see them priced. Rates are exclusive of VAT and disbursements. Travel within the West Midlands is not charged. Travel beyond it is charged at cost and agreed in advance.
Fixed fees for adjudication
Adjudication is the one area where a day rate genuinely does not help you decide, because you cannot know at the outset how many days it will take. So we price it by stage, and you can stop after any stage.
| Stage | What happens | Fixed fee |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Merits review | We read the contract, the payment history and the correspondence, and tell you honestly whether you have a case worth referring. | £560 |
| 2. Notice and referral | Notice of adjudication, nominating body application, and the referral notice with supporting documents. | £1,690 |
| 3. Reply and conduct | Reply to the response, any further submissions the adjudicator directs, and managing the timetable to the decision. | £1,970 |
| 4. Enforcement support | Assistance if the losing party does not pay and enforcement proceedings become necessary. | £840 |
A straightforward payment adjudication taken all the way to a decision is therefore £4,220 in our fees, and most stop there because most get paid. The adjudicator's own fee is separate and is not ours to set. Adjudicators typically charge £200 to £350 per hour, and a straightforward payment dispute commonly lands somewhere between £3,000 and £8,000 in adjudicator fees. The decision will normally say who pays it.
What a day actually includes
A day is a working day of substantive work on your matter, recorded and reported. It includes reading in, drafting, calls with your team, and correspondence. It does not include:
- The first conversation, which is free and often long enough to tell you whether you need us at all
- Short follow-up calls and emails on a live engagement, which we do not clock-watch
- Travel time within the West Midlands
- Any work you have not agreed to in writing first
How to keep the fee proportionate
Being straightforward about this costs us work occasionally, and we would still rather say it.
- Come early. The cheapest claim is one notified on time. A compensation event notified inside the eight weeks under NEC4 clause 61.3 costs a fraction of a claim we have to argue is not time-barred.
- Bring your records, not your narrative. If your allocation sheets, site diaries and marked-up drawings are in order, we spend our time building the claim rather than reconstructing the history. Records are usually 70% of the cost of a claim.
- Do not adjudicate small sums on principle. Below roughly £15,000, the combined cost of the adjudicator and both sides' representation often exceeds what is in dispute. We will tell you when negotiation is the better commercial answer.
- Ask us to review, not to run. If you have a competent commercial team, a day of review on a claim they have drafted is frequently better value than handing the whole thing over.
Why we publish this
Most consultancies in this field will not put a number on a page. We think the reluctance mostly protects the consultant. If you are a subcontractor deciding whether £40,000 of unpaid variations is worth pursuing, you need to be able to do that arithmetic before you pick up the phone, not after a chargeable meeting.