Change Order Template

Verbal change orders are how good jobs go bad

Nobody sets out to have a dispute. It starts with a conversation in a hallway. The owner asks whether the sconces could move over a foot; the contractor says sure, no problem. Neither of them is lying about what happened, and six weeks later they remember it completely differently: one heard "no problem" as "no charge", the other meant "not technically difficult".

Multiply that by the fifteen small conversations a remodel produces and the final invoice arrives with several thousand dollars nobody agreed to in writing. That is where the relationship breaks — not over the work, over the surprise.

The fix is unglamorous. Anything that changes the scope, the price or the schedule gets one page and two signatures before it is built. It takes ten minutes. Not doing it is the most expensive ten minutes saved in the trade.

The schedule impact line is the one people forget

Every change order form has a cost box, and everyone fills it in. The days box is left blank, or filled with a hopeful zero.

Then the job runs three weeks long, and there is a real argument about whether the contractor is late. They are not — the owner added a shower niche, moved two walls and changed the tile to a herringbone layout, and each of those cost days. But none of it is written anywhere, so all the schedule pressure lands on the contractor, and the owner genuinely believes they are being stalled.

Write the days. If a change adds no time, write "0 days" — that is a statement, and a blank is not. If a change adds time only because a material has a six-week lead time, say that on the line. It protects the contractor from a delay claim and it stops the owner from being blindsided by a moving completion date.

A change order signed after the work is done is not a change order

It is a negotiation, and it is a negotiation the contractor is likely to lose.

Once the work is built, the owner's options are to pay or to argue, and arguing is now cheap for them. The leverage that existed before the work — "if you do not want to pay for it, we will not build it" — is gone. Meanwhile the contractor has spent the material and the labour. In several states, retroactive change orders on residential work are also unenforceable or restricted, so the paperwork may not even be worth what it cost to write.

Stop the crew. Write the order. Get the signature. A photo of a signed page on a phone is enough for the moment; formalise it that evening. Emailing the form and getting "approved" typed back is fine in most jurisdictions if the email chain is preserved — the point is a contemporaneous written record, not a notarised document.

The one real exception is an emergency: an open wall, active water, an unsafe condition. Do what needs doing to make it safe, photograph everything, and write the change order the same day.

Unforeseen conditions, and who pays for them

The reason box exists because it usually decides that question.

An owner asking for better tile is plainly the owner's cost. A structural post that turns out to be rotted is nobody's fault, and a well-written contract has already said whose risk it is — usually the owner's, which is exactly why the estimate excluded concealed damage. An error in the contractor's own take-off is generally the contractor's problem.

Recording the reason at the time keeps that conversation factual. Six months later, "we found rot in the sill plate under the bay window, photos attached" carries far more weight than a recollection.

Keep the running total on every page

The last section of this form exists because clients lose track. Change order number seven for $1,400 sounds small on its own; what matters is that the contract has quietly moved from $58,000 to $71,300.

Restating the original sum, the previous changes, this change and the new total on every single change order means neither party is ever surprised by the final invoice. Owners who see that running number tend to make better decisions about the next change, which is good for everyone.