There’s a number sitting on every construction project that never appears on any budget line. It’s not contingency. It’s not overhead. It’s the cost of managing questions that should have been answered before anyone asked them.

$860,000.

That’s the average cost per project of managing RFIs, Requests for Information, according to a study of over 1,300 projects and more than a million RFIs. That figure dates to 2013. Inflation, labor cost increases, and project complexity have pushed it higher since. Current estimates put the direct cost of a single RFI at $2,000 to $3,000. On a project that generates 800 RFIs, the average in that same study, you’re looking at a number that should be on your desk every morning.

And you’re paying it.

What an RFI actually costs

The billing you see in change orders and fee adjustments is the visible portion. The hidden cost is larger.

Each RFI takes roughly eight hours of combined time across all the parties involved: preparing the question, submitting it through the proper channel, receiving and routing it to the right person, researching the answer, drafting a response, getting it reviewed, distributing it, and closing the loop in the tracking log.

The median response time is 9.7 days. Nearly two weeks from question to answer, during which the work either stops or proceeds on an assumption.

When you have 800 open RFIs in various stages of resolution, you’re not running a construction project. You’re running a construction project plus an information management operation that went unplanned and for which no party is explicitly paying. Except you are paying for it: in time, in schedule impacts, and in the decisions being made based on stale or assumed information while the formal question is in transit.

The real problem is upstream

The part that should concern you most: 13 percent of RFIs in that study were classified as unnecessary. The information to answer them already existed in the documents. It simply wasn’t found.

Another 22 percent received no response at all. Questions submitted through a formal contractual process, simply never answered.

The RFI process has been professionalized (there’s software for it, contract language about response times, tracking logs with status fields) but the underlying problem it exists to solve has not been fixed. The problem is that the design documents, specifications, and contracts don’t make the right information available to the right person at the right time.

The RFI is a workaround for an information architecture failure. The industry has gotten very good at managing the workaround, and has largely stopped questioning why the failure happens in the first place.

Where this connects to your role as an owner

You don’t submit RFIs. Your contractor and their subs do. But you absorb the cost through extended schedules, buried overhead, and decisions made under time pressure because the answer took 10 days to arrive.

More subtly: the cognitive load this creates on your project team is significant. A project manager tracking 800 active RFIs alongside their actual project management work is operating at diminished capacity for the higher-judgment work you actually need from them. Schedule risk assessment. Subcontractor performance monitoring. Change order negotiation. The tasks that require clear thinking get less of it because the information management overhead is consuming so much attention.

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a document quality problem and a process design problem. The fix starts before construction begins.

What to demand earlier

The volume of RFIs on a project is a measurable signal of document quality. High RFI volume in the first two months of construction almost always traces back to incomplete or ambiguous design documents.

Before your project goes to bid, require your design team to do a completeness review. This doesn’t mean reviewing for code compliance. It means reviewing for information gaps. What questions are likely to come up in the field, and are they answered somewhere in the document set?

During construction, track your RFI metrics. Not just volume: response time, aging, categories of questions, and resolution rate. Pattern recognition in RFI data tells you what’s actually going wrong before it shows up as a change order.

At closeout, review which RFIs generated scope changes. Those changes are where the design documents failed. That data should inform how you structure future projects.

$860,000 is real money. It’s also almost entirely preventable with better decisions made earlier in the process.

Start there.