An extension of time moves the contractual completion date because of delay caused by events the contract places at the employer’s risk or treats as neutral. Its immediate effect is relief from liquidated damages for the period extended. It matters to the employer too: a working EOT mechanism keeps a fixed completion date alive, because if employer-caused delay cannot be dealt with under the contract, the fixed date can fall away and take the right to liquidated damages with it.
Under JCT contracts the trigger is a Relevant Event: variations, exceptionally adverse weather, delayed information or access, statutory undertakers and the other listed causes. The contractor gives notice of the delay with particulars, and the contract administrator assesses a fair and reasonable extension, with a review after practical completion to sweep up anything under-assessed at the time.
NEC contracts do not use the term at all. Delay is dealt with through compensation events, which move the Completion Date, and the discipline is front-loaded: where notification is the contractor’s responsibility, it must notify within eight weeks of becoming aware of the event or lose the entitlement. Assessment is prospective, through quotations built on the Accepted Programme, which makes an honest, current programme and daily progress records the price of admission.
Entitlement everywhere turns on cause and effect: showing that a qualifying event occurred and that it delayed completion, normally by reference to the critical path. Delay to an activity with float may consume the float and move nothing. Concurrent delay, where employer and contractor causes overlap, remains one of the most argued corners of construction contracts, and drafting increasingly deals with it expressly. The Society of Construction Law Delay and Disruption Protocol is the standard reference for analysis methods and record expectations.
Every method of delay analysis is only as good as the records beneath it. Programme revisions show intent; daily records, photographs and correspondence show what actually happened, when, and what it affected. An assessment built on a day-by-day picture of labour, plant, work fronts and stoppages survives scrutiny. A narrative assembled months later from recollection rarely does.
The common failures are procedural as much as evidential: notices given late or not at all where the contract makes them a condition of entitlement, global claims that bundle every event into one undifferentiated delay, and records too thin to link any particular event to any particular effect.
Time bars reward the party whose record was building daily from day one; Construction Metric does that from the site WhatsApp group, and its NEC page explains how the record maps to NEC’s machinery.