Delay Claim
A formal request by a contractor (or sometimes an owner) for additional time and money because of a schedule delay attributed to the other party or to a defined "excusable" cause, distinct from an ordinary schedule slip because it comes with a documented argument for who's responsible and what it cost.
Why it matters
A project can run late for a dozen reasons, but only some of them entitle the contractor to extra time or money; the rest are just the contractor's own problem to absorb. A delay claim is how that distinction actually gets argued and resolved, usually with the [[concept-baseline-schedule|baseline schedule]] and daily records as the evidence.
On a real project
A contractor's schedule slips six weeks after the owner takes four months to approve a design change that should have taken two weeks. The contractor files a delay claim for the excess time and the added [[concept-acceleration|acceleration]] costs incurred trying to make some of it back up.
Who this matters most to
A Project Manager builds the initial delay claim from the project's own records, arguing why a specific delay wasn't the contractor's fault. A Construction Claims Consultant often gets brought in on larger or disputed claims to independently analyze the schedule and build a more rigorous, defensible case.
Where this goes wrong
A contractor waits until the very end of the project to assemble a delay claim covering issues that happened months earlier, relying on memory to reconstruct what caused each slip. Without contemporaneous daily reports clearly tying each delay to its cause, the owner disputes the claim's accuracy, and a case that should have been straightforward becomes a drawn-out argument over incomplete evidence.
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