Electrical
General conditions and project indirect costs field guide
What general conditions are, how they differ from company overhead, why they run with the schedule, and how to estimate, track, and recover the indirect costs that quietly eat the margin.
Direct answer
General conditions, also called general requirements, are the project-level indirect costs of running a job that no single work item carries: supervision, the trailer, temporary utilities, dumpsters, safety, hoisting, cleanup, and permits. Most run with the schedule, so a delay grows them. Estimate them as a detailed list by duration, not a flat percent.
Key takeaways
- General conditions are project-level indirect costs no work item carries: supervision, trailer, temporary utilities, dumpsters, safety, hoisting, cleanup, and permits.
- Cancellation test: if a cost disappears when this one job is canceled it is a general condition; if it survives it is company overhead.
- Estimate general conditions as a detailed line list by duration, not a flat percentage; the often-quoted 5 to 15 percent of cost only describes past outcomes.
- Time-related costs price as monthly rate times project months; fixed costs like mobilization, final clean, and permits are a single quantity at a price.
- Recover general conditions as job cost (direct work plus general conditions equals job cost), then add overhead and profit on top, never buried in the markup.
General conditions, and the costs that live in no work item
General conditions are the project-level costs of running a job that are not tied to any single line of installed work. The superintendent, the field trailer, temporary power and water, the dumpsters, the safety program, the crane, the final cleanup, the permits. None of it shows up when you take off devices or measure pipe, but all of it has to be on the job for the installed work to happen, so all of it has to be in the bid.
The reason they get missed is structural. A takeoff counts work items, and general conditions are not work items. They are the cost of having a project at all. So a careful labor and material estimate can be right to the dollar and still lose money, because the indirects underneath it were guessed at or left thin.
Most of these costs run with time. The super is on the job by the month, the trailer rents by the month, the dumpsters get hauled on a cycle. That single fact, that they run with the schedule rather than with the quantity of work, is what makes them dangerous. A schedule slip that nobody priced grows the general conditions every week the job stays open, and the margin pays for it quietly. Estimate them honestly and track them against the estimate, and the indirects stop being the thing that sinks a good bid.
What is the difference between general conditions and overhead?
General conditions are the indirect cost of one project. Company overhead is the indirect cost of the whole business. That is the distinction, and getting it wrong is how contractors either double-count and price themselves out, or miss a cost entirely and lose money.
General conditions live on the job. The superintendent, the trailer, the temporary toilets, the hoisting. If the project were canceled tomorrow, those costs would stop. They belong to that job and get charged to that job. Company overhead lives at the office and keeps running whether or not any single job exists: the estimator at the desk, the rent on the shop, the accounting software, the owner's salary, general liability for the company. That cost is there on a slow month with no projects, so it gets recovered across all the work through markup, not charged to one job as a line item.
Both have to be in the price, and neither can be counted twice. Put the superintendent in general conditions as a project cost and you do not also bury him in the overhead percentage. Recover the office in overhead and you do not also line-item it on the job. The cleanest mental test is the cancellation test: if the cost disappears when this one job disappears, it is a general condition; if it survives, it is overhead. The company overhead and markup side is its own discipline, covered in the overhead recovery guide.
Why general conditions are the silent margin eater
General conditions are real money that hides because it is not attached to anything you counted. A missed light fixture shows up in the takeoff review. A thin general conditions number does not show up anywhere until the job is running and the costs are landing every month.
Three things make them easy to underestimate. They are spread across a dozen small categories, so no single one looks big enough to worry about, and the total sneaks up. They run with duration, so the estimate that was right for a 6 month job is wrong the day the job stretches to 8. And they are boring, so they get a quick percentage instead of a real buildout while everyone spends their attention on the labor.
The damage is quiet because it does not fail an inspection or trip a breaker. It just means the profit you thought the job earned was spent on the trailer rent and the super's time for the two extra months nobody priced. By the time the job-cost report makes it obvious, the money is gone. That is why the discipline is estimate them in detail, tie them to the schedule, and track them while the job runs, not after.
General conditions versus general requirements
The terms get used interchangeably, and on most jobs that is fine, but they come from two different places. General conditions, in the strict contract sense, are the legal terms that govern the relationship between owner, contractor, and architect. The standard document is the AIA A201, General Conditions of the Contract for Construction, which spells out rights, responsibilities, payment, changes, and dispute handling. General requirements are CSI MasterFormat Division 01: the specification sections that tell the contractor what to provide for temporary facilities, submittals, quality control, scheduling, and closeout.
A useful way to hold the difference is what versus how. Division 01 general requirements state what the owner wants provided, for example recycling containers and a project schedule. The contractor's general conditions estimate is how those get furnished and what they cost, for example a count of bins on a weekly haul at a real price.
For the estimator the label matters less than the coverage. Call the line a general condition or a general requirement, it makes no difference, but the cost of running the job has to be in the number once and only once. Read the contract and Division 01 together, because the project documents control which document carries which obligation, and a cost assigned to neither is a cost you eat.
What is included in general conditions?
General conditions cover the categories that keep the project operating, distinct from the labor and material of any trade. The exact list belongs to the contract and Division 01, so treat the table below as the usual categories to price, not a fixed menu. Build the list off the project documents and your own job history, because a category you forget is a cost you absorb.
Supervision is usually the largest single line, often by a wide margin, because a salaried superintendent or project manager on the job for the full duration adds up faster than any rental. After that the weight shifts with the job: a tower job is heavy on hoisting, a remote site is heavy on temporary utilities and the trailer, a public job is heavy on safety and bonds. Price the categories your job actually carries, and confirm which ones the owner pays for directly versus which land on you.
| Category | Typical items |
|---|---|
| Supervision and PM | Superintendent, project manager, foreman time charged to the job |
| Field office | Trailer, office setup, IT, phones, furniture, monthly service |
| Temporary utilities | Temp power, water, toilets, lighting, heat and the connection fees |
| Waste and cleanup | Dumpsters, hauling, daily cleanup labor, final clean |
| Hoisting and equipment | Crane, hoist, lift, forklift shared across the job |
| Safety | Safety officer, PPE, training, signage, barricades |
| Small tools and consumables | Blades, bits, fasteners, the shared tools no work item carries |
| Permits and fees | Building and trade permits, inspection fees, temporary easements |
| Bonds and insurance | Performance and payment bonds, builders risk, where contract assigns it |
| Closeout | As-builts, O and M manuals, demobilization, punch labor |
Are general conditions time-related?
Most are, and that is the most important thing to understand about pricing them. General conditions split into two kinds. Time-related costs run by the month for as long as the job is open: the superintendent, the trailer rent, temporary utilities, equipment rentals, the safety officer. Fixed or one-time costs happen once regardless of how long the job takes: mobilization and demobilization, the final clean, signage, the permit pulled at the start.
You price the two halves differently. A time-related cost is a monthly rate multiplied by the project duration in months. A fixed cost is a single quantity at a single price. Mix them up and the estimate breaks the moment the schedule moves, because you applied a flat number to a cost that actually grows with weeks.
The split is also where the schedule risk lives. The fixed costs are locked once the scope is set, but every time-related line is exposed to duration. Separate them on the estimate so anyone can see, at a glance, how much of the general conditions number will move if the job runs long. That single column is the early warning the office needs.
| Type | How to price | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Time-related | Monthly rate times duration in months | Superintendent, trailer, temp utilities, rentals, safety officer |
| Fixed / one-time | Single quantity at a price | Mobilization, demobilization, final clean, signage, permits |
The duration link: every extra month costs
Time-related general conditions equal a monthly rate times the number of months the job runs. Write it that way and the schedule risk becomes visible. A superintendent at a fully burdened monthly rate, a trailer, temporary utilities, and a safety officer can easily total a five-figure monthly burn before any installed work is counted. Multiply that by a schedule that slips two months and you have a real number that came from nowhere in the original bid.
This is the direct line between scheduling and money on the indirect side. The labor and material of a delayed job mostly hold their cost, since the same work still gets installed. The general conditions do not hold. They keep accruing for every week the job stays open, which is why a schedule slip hits the indirects harder than it hits the direct work.
Build the general conditions estimate against the schedule from the start. Take the duration from the project schedule, not from a hopeful round number, and carry the monthly burn rate as its own figure so a change in duration flows straight through to the cost. When the schedule moves, the estimate should move with it instead of pretending the original month count still holds.
Supervision: usually the biggest general condition
The superintendent, project manager, and foreman time charged to the job is most often the largest general condition, and it is a project cost, not company overhead. The super manages this job, walks this site, runs this crew. When the job ends, that charge ends, which is exactly what puts it in general conditions rather than in the office overhead.
Price it at a fully burdened monthly rate, the salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, vehicle, phone, and the rest of the load, times the months on the job. The error that bites is staffing it thin. A super stretched across two jobs, or a job that runs three months past the bid with the same super still on it, turns a healthy estimate into a loss. Under-staffing supervision to make a number look competitive is borrowing against the schedule, and the schedule usually comes to collect.
Where a person splits time across jobs, allocate the cost honestly to each. A super giving half their week to your project is half their burdened cost in your general conditions, not a token line and not the whole salary. Account for the real share or one job subsidizes the other.
The field office and trailer
The field office is the trailer or on-site office and everything that makes it work: delivery and setup, steps and skirting, furniture, internet and phones, power and HVAC for the box itself, and the monthly rental. It splits cleanly into a one-time setup and teardown cost and a time-related monthly cost, so price it in both halves.
The piece people forget is the recurring service. The trailer rent is obvious, but the internet, the cleaning, the bottled water, and the office supplies run every month too, and across a long job they add up to more than the trailer itself. On a small or short job, a full trailer setup may not pencil, and a different arrangement, a shared space or a job box, can carry the function for less. Match the field office to the job rather than defaulting to the same setup every time.
Temporary utilities and site services
Temporary power, water, toilets, lighting, and heat are the services the job needs before the building can provide its own. They carry a connection or setup cost at the front and a consumption cost every month after, so they are mostly time-related with a fixed piece up front.
The two traps are the connection fee and the consumption. Utility connection charges and meter fees can be larger than crews expect, and they land early when the budget feels comfortable. Consumption then runs the whole job, and temporary heat in particular can spike hard in winter, turning a modest monthly line into the biggest utility cost on the project. Confirm what the contract assigns to the contractor versus the owner, since temporary utilities are a common split, and price the months and the season you will actually run them rather than a flat average.
Dumpsters and cleanup
Waste handling and cleanup is an ongoing cost that runs the length of the job, not a single line at the end. It covers the dumpsters and their hauls, the daily cleanup labor that keeps the site safe and workable, and the final clean before turnover. The dumpster is the visible part, but the labor to keep the site clean every day is usually the larger number over the life of the job.
Price the haul cycle against the duration, because a dumpster swapped weekly for eight months is eight months of hauls, not one fee. The final clean is a separate fixed cost and a real one, especially where the spec calls for a detailed clean before the owner walks it. On jobs with recycling or waste-diversion requirements in Division 01, the sorting and separate containers add cost that the spec creates, so read the requirement and price what it actually demands.
Hoisting and shared equipment
Hoisting and shared equipment is the crane, hoist, lift, or forklift that serves the whole job rather than one work item. This is the line that gets misfiled. A lift rented to set a specific run of equipment might belong to that work item, but a tower crane or a material hoist that everyone on site uses is a project cost and belongs in general conditions.
Price it as project equipment: the rental or ownership cost, the operator if one is required, fuel and maintenance, and the mobilization and demobilization to get it on and off the site. Most of it is time-related, so it runs with duration the same as the trailer and the super. The detail that drives the number is utilization. A crane on a long lease that sits idle half the schedule is money spent on availability, so the estimate should reflect how long you actually need it on site, and the schedule should keep it earning while it is there.
The project safety program
Safety on the job is a real general condition, not a free assumption. It covers the project's share of the safety program: a safety officer or coordinator where the job warrants one, PPE, site-specific training and orientations, signage, barricades, fall protection, and the inspections the job requires. On larger or public work the safety staffing alone is a significant monthly line.
It is time-related where it is staffed, since a safety officer runs by the month like any other supervisor, and partly fixed for the one-time setup of signage and barricades. The cost that gets skipped is the program itself, the training hours and the management time, because it does not feel like a purchase. It is still a cost, and on jobs governed by OSHA construction requirements and an owner's safety spec, it is not optional. Price the program the job actually requires, then run it, because the cost of an incident dwarfs the cost of the program every time.
Small tools and consumables
Small tools and consumables are the blades, bits, fasteners, layout supplies, and shared hand tools that no single work item carries but every work item burns through. They are real money and they get recovered one of two ways: as a detailed general conditions line, or as a small percentage applied to labor or to direct cost.
The percentage method is common here and defensible, because tracking every blade to a cost code is not worth the effort. The number itself has to come from your own history, though. A shop that has measured its consumable spend against labor over real jobs has a percentage it can trust; a shop that picks a figure out of the air is guessing. Note that durable tools and equipment owned by the company are usually recovered through company overhead or an equipment rate, not the job consumable line, which is the boundary covered in the overhead recovery guide. Pick one method for the project so the same cost is not recovered twice.
Permits, fees, and project charges
Permits and fees are the building and trade permits, inspection and plan-review fees, and any temporary easements or use fees the job requires. They are mostly fixed and they land early, which is exactly why a thin permit number hurts: the cost arrives before the job has earned anything to cover it.
Who pays for which permit is a contract question, so read the documents before assuming. On some jobs the owner pulls and pays for the building permit while the contractor carries the trade permits; on others it all rolls to the contractor. Permit fees on larger projects are often a percentage of construction value and can be a serious number, so confirm the basis rather than dropping in a token figure. Where the work needs temporary street use, lane closures, or easements, those carry their own fees and sometimes their own bonds, and they are easy to forget until the city asks for them.
Bonds and project insurance
Bonds and project-specific insurance sometimes sit in general conditions and sometimes get carried as a separate line in the bid, so the first job is to confirm how the contract and your own estimating practice handle them. Performance and payment bonds, where required, are priced as a percentage of the contract value set by the surety, and that rate depends on the company's bonding capacity and history rather than a published number. Builders risk insurance covers the work in place during construction and is often assigned by the contract to one party.
The reason these get their own treatment is that they scale with contract value, not with duration or scope, so folding them into a general conditions percentage can distort both numbers. Place them in general conditions or carry them as a separate bid line, but either way get the rate from the surety and the insurer for this project, confirm who the contract requires to carry builders risk, and price the actual coverage required rather than a habit. The contract controls the obligation.
How do you estimate general conditions?
Estimate general conditions as a detailed line list, category by category, priced against the project duration. That is the accurate method and it beats a flat percentage every time, because it forces you to confront what the job actually needs and how long it needs it. Walk the category list, price each line your job carries, split each into its time-related and fixed parts, and total it.
The buildout makes the estimate honest in a way a percentage cannot. You take the duration from the schedule, set a monthly rate for each time-related line, multiply, and add the one-time costs. Now the number is defensible: you can show where every dollar comes from, and when the schedule or scope changes, you change the inputs and the total moves with them. A percentage is a single opaque figure that hides all of that.
Hedge every rate and quantity to the contract and your own cost data. The categories come from Division 01 and the contract; the prices come from your job history and current quotes for rentals, utilities, and hauling. A general conditions estimate built on last year's actuals for similar work is worth far more than any published percentage, because it reflects how your company actually runs a job. Pair this with the labor and material estimate, covered in the electrical estimating and takeoff guide, so the full cost of the job is on the page.
The percentage trap
A flat percentage for general conditions, a single number like 10 percent of cost dropped on every bid, is the common shortcut and the common way to get burned. The percentage range many contractors quote, often somewhere around 5 to 15 percent of project cost depending on size and type, is a description of past outcomes, not a method for pricing the job in front of you.
The flaw is that a percentage scales with project cost, but general conditions mostly scale with duration. Two jobs at the same dollar value can run very different schedules, and the longer one carries far more time-related cost while the percentage says they are identical. A small, long, complicated job is where the percentage fails hardest, because the indirects are large relative to the installed work and a cost-based percentage understates them badly.
Use a percentage as a sanity check on a detailed estimate, not as the estimate. Build the line list, total it, then divide by project cost and see whether the resulting percentage looks sane against your history. If the buildout and the historical percentage are far apart, find out why before you bid. Do not run it the other way and back into the lines from a percentage you picked first.
Running the estimate against the schedule
Because the time-related lines move with duration, the general conditions estimate is really a function of the schedule, and it should be tested that way. Take the realistic duration, then ask what the number does if the job runs a month or two long, which on real work it often does. The answer is the schedule exposure on your indirects, and it is better to see it during the bid than to discover it in month nine.
This is a straightforward what-if. Hold the monthly burn rate and flex the month count. A job with a high monthly burn and a tight schedule is fragile, since a short slip adds a lot, while a job with a low burn rate can absorb more drift. Knowing which one you are bidding tells you how much schedule contingency the general conditions need and how hard to push the schedule once the job starts.
The same sensitivity argues for keeping the schedule honest on the running job, which is its own discipline. Every week saved is time-related general conditions saved, and every week lost is spent. Tie the indirect estimate to the schedule the team actually plans to hold, and treat schedule recovery as cost recovery, because that is exactly what it is.
Tracking general conditions against the estimate
General conditions overrun quietly, so they have to be tracked against the estimate while the job runs, not reconciled after it closes. Give them their own cost codes, the same way the installed work has codes, so the trailer, the super's time, the hoisting, and the cleanup each post against a budget you can watch. A category with no code is a category nobody is watching, and that is the one that runs over.
The point of tracking is early warning. If the monthly general conditions burn is running ahead of the estimate in month two, you have ten months to do something about it. If you find out at closeout, you have a loss to explain. The numbers that matter are the actual monthly burn against the estimated monthly burn, and the projected total at the current run rate against the budget. Both should be visible to the PM, not buried in an accounting report that lands after the quarter.
This is where a field tool earns its place. FieldOS lets the crew code time, rentals, and site costs to general conditions as they happen, so the indirect spend shows up against the estimate in something close to real time instead of surfacing at month-end. The sooner the overrun is visible, the more schedule there is left to fix it.
Recovering general conditions in the price
General conditions are a cost of the job, so they go into the price as cost, before overhead and profit are added, not folded into the markup. The build is direct work plus general conditions equals the job cost, then overhead and profit on top. Bury the general conditions inside the overhead and profit markup and you have hidden a real, sizable, project-specific cost inside a percentage meant for something else, which is how jobs get underpriced.
Keeping them separate also keeps the markup honest. Overhead and profit are about recovering the office and earning a return; general conditions are about paying for the trailer and the super on this job. They answer different questions and they belong in different places on the estimate. The full markup discipline, recovering company overhead and a real profit on top of total cost, is covered in the overhead recovery guide.
The failure to guard against is the forgotten or buried general condition. A cost that is neither line-itemed as a project cost nor genuinely covered by the markup is a cost the company eats out of profit. Show the general conditions as their own block on the estimate, recover them in the cost, then apply overhead and profit to the whole. Do not make one number do two jobs.
What to record
The general conditions estimate is a document, not a single number, and it has to survive being read by the PM running the job and the accountant closing it. For each line, record what the item is, the basis for the cost, and the note that explains the assumption, so the estimate can be reproduced and checked against actuals.
Capture the category, whether it is time-related or fixed, the monthly rate or unit price, the quantity or duration, the source of the price, and the resulting cost. Carry the project duration the estimate assumed as its own visible figure, because that one input drives every time-related line and it is the first thing that changes on a real job. When the schedule moves, the person updating the estimate needs to see exactly which lines move with it. Track the same codes against actuals through a field tool like FieldOS so the estimate and the job cost speak the same language.
| GC item | Basis | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Superintendent | Burdened monthly rate times duration | Time-related; allocate share if split across jobs |
| Field trailer | Setup plus monthly rental | Split fixed setup from time-related rent |
| Temp utilities | Connection fee plus monthly consumption | Confirm owner vs contractor; price the season |
| Dumpsters and cleanup | Haul cycle times duration plus final clean | Daily cleanup labor often exceeds the haul cost |
| Hoisting | Rental plus operator plus mob/demob | Match duration to actual need; watch utilization |
| Safety | Officer monthly plus one-time setup | Per OSHA and the owner's safety spec |
| Permits and fees | Per fee schedule or percent of value | Confirm who pulls and pays per contract |
| Bonds and insurance | Surety/insurer rate on contract value | Confirm GC line vs separate; contract controls |
Common mistakes
- Using a flat percentage that ignores the schedule duration the time-related costs actually run with.
- Double-counting or omitting a cost against company overhead instead of placing it cleanly in one or the other.
- Under-estimating or under-staffing supervision to make the bid look competitive.
- Ignoring how a schedule slip grows the time-related general conditions every month the job stays open.
- Not tracking general conditions against the estimate until the job has already closed.
- Forgetting permits, connection fees, or temporary utilities that land early before the job has earned anything.
- Burying general conditions inside the overhead and profit markup instead of recovering them as a job cost.
- Loading shared costs onto one job instead of allocating them by the driver that causes the cost.
Field checklist
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Standards and references
CSI MasterFormat Division 01, General Requirements, is where the project's temporary facilities, submittals, quality control, scheduling, and closeout obligations are specified, and it is the structure most general conditions estimates are built around. The contract general conditions, commonly the AIA A201, General Conditions of the Contract for Construction, set the legal terms and assign responsibilities that determine which costs the contractor carries. Read the two together with the project's supplementary conditions, because amendments to the standard form change who pays for what.
For estimating method, the AACE International recommended practices on cost estimate classification describe how an estimate moves from a rough parametric figure to a detailed bottom-up buildout as the design firms up, which is the same logic that argues for a detailed general conditions list over a flat percentage. ASPE, the American Society of Professional Estimators, publishes practice guidance on the same ground. Use these for the framework, then hedge every category, percentage, and rate to the specific contract and to your company's own general conditions cost history.
The strongest reference is your own data. The categories are industry-standard, but the rates, the monthly burn, and the share that general conditions take of a job are particular to how your company staffs and runs work. The three things to hold onto: general conditions are a project-level indirect distinct from company overhead, they are estimated in detail and by duration rather than as a flat percent, and they are tracked and recovered rather than buried.
Units and terms
General conditions go by several names across a contract, a spec, and an estimate, so the same cost can read differently depending on which document you are in.
General conditions and general requirements are often used interchangeably for the project indirect costs, even though the contract sense of general conditions and the Division 01 sense of general requirements come from different documents. Project indirect cost, project overhead, and job overhead all refer to the same thing: the cost of running this one job that no work item carries. Company overhead, general overhead, or corporate overhead is the separate whole-business indirect. Keep the two straight and price each once.
- General conditions
- The project-level indirect costs of running one job, distinct from company overhead; sometimes also the contract's legal terms
- General requirements
- CSI MasterFormat Division 01: the spec sections for temporary facilities, submittals, quality, scheduling, and closeout
- Project indirect cost
- Cost tied to the project but not to a single work item; the same idea as project overhead or job overhead
- Time-related cost
- A general condition that runs by the month for the job's duration, priced as monthly rate times months
- Overhead vs general conditions
- Overhead is the whole-business indirect recovered through markup; general conditions are one job's indirect, recovered as job cost
- Mobilization
- The one-time fixed cost of bringing crews, the trailer, and equipment onto the site; demobilization is the cost of removing them
FAQ
What are general conditions in construction?
General conditions are the project-level indirect costs of running a job that no single work item carries: supervision, the field trailer, temporary power and water, dumpsters, safety, hoisting, cleanup, and permits. They are real costs that have to be in the bid even though a takeoff of installed work never counts them.
What is the difference between general conditions and overhead?
General conditions are the indirect cost of one project; company overhead is the indirect cost of the whole business. If a cost disappears when the job is canceled, it is a general condition charged to the job. If it survives, like the office and estimators, it is overhead recovered through markup. Price each once.
Are general conditions time-related?
Most are. Time-related general conditions, like the superintendent, trailer, and rentals, run by the month and are priced as a monthly rate times the project duration. Fixed costs, like mobilization and the final clean, happen once regardless of schedule. Because most run with time, a schedule slip grows them every month the job stays open.
How do you estimate general conditions?
Estimate general conditions as a detailed line list, category by category, priced against the project duration, not as a flat percentage. Split each line into time-related cost (monthly rate times months) and one-time fixed cost, price the rates from your own job history and current quotes, and hedge every line to the contract and Division 01.
What percentage are general conditions of a project?
Many contractors see general conditions land somewhere around 5 to 15 percent of project cost depending on size, type, and duration, but that range describes past outcomes, not a pricing method. A flat percentage scales with cost while general conditions scale with schedule, so build a detailed estimate and use the percentage only as a sanity check.
Are general conditions the same as general requirements?
They are often used interchangeably for project indirect costs, but they come from different documents. General requirements are CSI MasterFormat Division 01, the spec for temporary facilities and closeout. General conditions, in the contract sense, are the legal terms like the AIA A201. For estimating, the label matters less than covering every cost once.
Why do general conditions kill bids?
They are spread across small categories so the total sneaks up, they run with duration so a schedule slip grows them, and they get a quick percentage instead of a real buildout. The damage is quiet because it fails no inspection. The profit just gets spent on the trailer and super for the months nobody priced.
Should general conditions be in the markup or a separate line?
Recover general conditions as a job cost on their own line, before overhead and profit, never inside the markup. The build is direct work plus general conditions equals job cost, then overhead and profit on top. Burying them in the markup hides a real, project-specific cost inside a percentage meant for the company office.
How do you track general conditions on a running job?
Give each general conditions category its own cost code, like the installed work has, and post the trailer, supervision, hoisting, and cleanup against a budget you watch monthly. Compare actual monthly burn to the estimated burn so an overrun shows in month two, not at closeout. A field tool like FieldOS keeps the indirect spend visible in near real time.