The NEC4 eight week time bar, and how to calculate it
Under NEC4 clause 61.3 a contractor must notify a compensation event within eight weeks of becoming aware of it. Miss that window and the entitlement is gone, however strong the underlying claim was.
The maths is trivial. Knowing the date you became aware is not, and that's the part that costs money.
Take the date you became aware of the event, add eight weeks, and that's your notification deadline. What isn't simple is establishing when awareness actually began. That date is usually buried in a site diary entry, an email, or a conversation nobody wrote down.
Clause 61.3 sets the eight week limit from the date the contractor became aware of the event
The clock starts at awareness, not at the event, and not when someone decides it's worth claiming
If the Project Manager should have notified and didn't, the time bar doesn't apply, but you have to be able to show that
This calculator now lives on QS Tools
QS Tools is our free sister platform, built by the founders of Gather. It's free, needs no Gather account, and it's where we keep the standalone calculators so they can be maintained properly in one place.
Gather is the AI site diary and commercial record platform this calculation sits inside. It reads your site diaries against your NEC4 contract and flags the compensation events a manual review misses. If that's the problem you're actually solving, book a demo.
.webp)
