The Notice to Proceed Starts More Than the Work

What the Document Does

The notice to proceed is the owner telling the contractor, in writing, to start. It usually confirms that the contract is executed and that the preconditions attached to award — payment and performance bonds, insurance certificates, sometimes licensing — have been met.

None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is the date, because most construction contracts express the completion obligation as a duration rather than a deadline: three hundred and sixty five calendar days from the notice to proceed, not a fixed date on a calendar.

That means the NTP date is the origin point for every schedule calculation on the project. Get it wrong by a week and every milestone, every float calculation and every delay assessment is wrong by a week, in a direction that will not be discovered until it matters.

What to Confirm Before Accepting

The risk in a notice to proceed is accepting one while something outside your control is still outstanding. Contract time starts. Your obligation to finish within it starts. The missing permit is still missing.

Delay caused by an owner or a third party is usually recoverable in principle, but recovering it requires a claim, and a claim requires having raised the issue at the time. Raising it before accepting the NTP is considerably easier than raising it four months later.

• →Are all permits required to start the authorised work actually issued?
• →Is site access available and unobstructed, including for deliveries and laydown?
• →Are utility relocations, demolition or preceding contractor work genuinely complete?
• →Have the design documents been issued for construction, not just for tender?
• →Does the notice state whether it is full or limited, and what contract time it starts?
• →Does the stated start date leave adequate time for long-lead procurement already identified?

Full, Limited and What Each One Starts

Owners frequently issue a limited notice to proceed when they want to protect a schedule before everything is settled — releasing procurement of long-lead equipment, for instance, while the guaranteed maximum price is still being negotiated.

This is generally sensible and occasionally dangerous. The danger is ambiguity about what clock is running.

Recording It Where It Will Be Found

The NTP date belongs in the project record as a field, not as a PDF in an email thread. Every delay analysis, every extension of time request and every liquidated damages assessment for the life of the job counts from it.

The common failure is mundane. The notice arrives by email, the start date in the body differs from the date the email was sent, somebody enters one of them into the schedule, and eight months later a dispute about four days of liquidated damages turns on which one was authoritative.

Capture the date the notice specifies, the date it was received, and the scope it authorised, in the system where the job is managed. It costs a minute at the start of the project and it is the foundation of every schedule position you take afterwards.