Construction contracts

JCT is published by the Joint Contracts Tribunal Limited, a consensus body whose member organisations include the British Property Federation, Build UK, the Local Government Association, RIBA, RICS and the Scottish Building Contract Committee. It has produced construction documentation since 1931. That consensus drafting is part of why JCT carries weight with lenders, funders and insurers: no single side of the industry writes it.

The current suite is the JCT 2024 Edition, rolled out from April 2024 and completed with the new Target Cost Contract in June 2025. The 2016 Edition was withdrawn from sale on 31 March 2026, with a transitional window under which 2016 documents remain obtainable to the end of 2026 for projects already running. Anyone still starting new work on 2016 forms is now working from a withdrawn suite.

The 2024 changes that matter most on site are practical rather than philosophical. References to the Public Contracts Regulations were replaced with the Procurement Act 2023. A new article identifies the principal designer and principal contractor under the Building Regulations dutyholder regime, mirroring the CDM approach, although commentators note the forms are largely silent on the Building Safety Act gateway process itself. New relevant events cover epidemics, changes in law, and the discovery of asbestos, contaminated material and unexploded ordnance, which puts those ground findings expressly on the employer side. The extension of time response window was cut from twelve weeks to eight. Contractor design obligations are expressed as reasonable skill and care rather than fitness for purpose.

The single most important structural feature of JCT, and the one that catches people who have moved across from NEC, is that time and money run on two separate tracks. Delay entitlement runs through relevant events, which move the completion date. Money entitlement runs through relevant matters, which found a loss and expense claim. The two lists are not identical, so an event can buy time without buying money. Variations are valued by reference to the contract pricing document, which is why the quality of the bill or contract sum analysis matters so much commercially.

NEC is published by Thomas Telford Limited, the commercial arm of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and is formally endorsed by ICE. The first edition appeared in 1993, conceived by Dr Martin Barnes; NEC3 followed in 2005 and NEC4 in June 2017. NEC4 remains the current suite. The most recent substantive amendment set was published in early 2023, introducing a climate change secondary option, allowing recovery of costs for people working outside the working areas, and refining the early contractor involvement option.

The structural change most worth knowing about is not an amendment at all. In June 2025 Thomas Telford acquired FAC-1, the Framework Alliance Contract, and TAC-1, the Term Alliance Contract, authored by Professor David Mosey with the Association of Consultant Architects. Those now sit alongside NEC4 as a collaborative contract family, which widens the range of framework and alliance arrangements available under one publisher.

NEC differs from JCT in one respect that changes daily site life more than any other: time and money are handled through a single route. There is no split between relevant events and relevant matters. A listed compensation event, whether a client-side act such as a change of scope or late access, or a neutral event such as specified adverse weather or unforeseen physical conditions, is notified, assessed on a forecast of the effect on defined cost plus fee together with any effect on the completion date, and once implemented the adjustment is final unless disputed. Entitlement is resolved as the job proceeds rather than argued out at final account.

The price of that is administration. NEC is deliberately management-led and process-heavy. The accepted programme is the central control document, and it has to be kept current. The early warning process requires both parties to notify matters that could affect cost, time or quality and to meet to consider how to avoid or reduce them. Under the cost-based options, payment is built from defined cost plus the fee, and the project manager can categorise expenditure as disallowed cost - for example, costs not supported by the contractor’s accounts and records, costs incurred only because an early warning was not given, or defect correction after completion. Disallowed cost is a straight loss to the contractor and sits outside the pain and gain share.

FIDIC is the International Federation of Consulting Engineers, founded in 1913 and headquartered in Geneva. Its member associations represent roughly a million engineering professionals across about a hundred countries. Its contracts are known by colour, and the colours are used as shorthand on site everywhere from Warsaw to Riyadh.

The Red, Yellow and Silver Books are in their second editions, dated 2017 and reprinted in 2022 with amendments. That 2022 reprint did three substantive things: it clarified which matters are ordinary administrative items for the Engineer to agree or determine as distinct from formal claims subject to the strict notice regime; it tightened the definition of a dispute so that the claims process and an Engineer’s determination must generally be exhausted before a matter goes onward; and it modernised how the dispute board operates, including express accommodation of virtual meetings.

FIDIC also publishes the Golden Principles, launched in 2019, which set out what FIDIC regards as inviolable when an employer amends a form through particular conditions: the parties’ roles and responsibilities must remain broadly as drafted, amendments must be clear and unambiguous, the balance of risk and reward must not be changed, time periods must be reasonable, and disputes must go to a board for a provisionally binding decision before arbitration unless the governing law prevents it. FIDIC’s stated position is that a document breaching these is not properly a FIDIC contract. That matters in practice because heavy amendment is the regional norm in several markets.

The World Bank renewed its licensing agreement with FIDIC in October 2023 for a further five years, covering nine contracts. Multilateral development bank endorsement is a large part of why FIDIC appears on donor-financed and project-financed work worldwide.

The best available quantitative picture of the UK market is the RIBA Construction Contracts and Law Report 2022, based on more than 950 responses from clients, contractors and consultants. Asked which family they used most, respondents answered: JCT 59%, RIBA building contracts 15%, NEC 13%, bespoke contracts 7%, the Scottish SBCC forms 4%, and all other forms the remaining 2%. FIDIC does not appear as a main form anywhere in that UK sample. Fixed price or lump sum accounted for 77% of projects.

Two cautions about that dataset, both important. First, the respondent base skews toward architects and consultants, which is the likely reason RIBA building contracts rank second on frequency and FIDIC registers so low; it is not a value-weighted picture of the UK market. Second, it is the most recent survey we could find. RICS’s Contracts in Use series appears to have stopped and NBS’s ended in 2018. Any claim about 2025 or 2026 market share is an extrapolation from 2022 data.

What the same data shows clearly is that the families occupy different value bands. RIBA forms concentrate below 250 thousand pounds. JCT concentrates between 250 thousand and 5 million, which captures most individual residential and small mixed-use schemes. NEC concentrates above 5 million, with 61% of its use in that range. FIDIC concentrates above 25 million.

On UK housing and residential, practitioner guidance places JCT Design and Build on design-intensive schemes, Intermediate on residential developments with multiple units, and Minor Works on small extensions and alterations. Social housing consortia have been visibly transitioning to the 2024 suite in step with the 2016 withdrawal.

On UK commercial offices, JCT is the reference point, and JCT Design and Build is described as used on large and complex commercial developments, shopping centres and office blocks in both public and private sectors. On fit-out specifically, commentary treats the JCT suite as the assumed starting point but flags two default assumptions that fit-out employers routinely amend: that the employer insures both the existing structures and the works, and that the contractor gets exclusive possession of the site. Neither of those fits a live or multi-contractor building.

UK infrastructure is a different market with a different answer, and the pattern is consistent enough to be treated as settled. National Highways let a 3.6 billion pound, six-year road renewals framework using NEC4 for both the civils and the design services. Network Rail chose NEC4 for a 1.8 billion pound digital train control framework, its first design-build-maintain model on a major investment programme. HS2 phase one main works civils, 11.8 billion pounds across seven packages, were tendered on NEC3 target contract terms. Water utilities tendering capital work under the utilities regime almost always use NEC structures, typically through long-term frameworks and alliances with a shared target cost.

The observed pattern is that the UK splits cleanly by sector. Buildings run on JCT lump sum. Economic infrastructure runs on NEC, and predominantly on the target-cost options or on term and framework forms, because those clients are repeat programme buyers rather than one-off building procurers.

The headline pattern across MENA is consistent across every source we found. FIDIC is the regional default for buildings and civils. The 1999 suite still dominates over the 2017 second edition. Forms are amended in the employer’s favour as a matter of routine rather than as an exception. Several governments mandate their own FIDIC-derived conditions rather than the published documents. And oil, gas and process work sits largely outside FIDIC altogether, on bespoke EPC terms.

In the United Arab Emirates the Red Book is the predominant standard form and the 1999 edition is the one most used for new projects, with 1987 forms persisting on legacy work. The 2017 suite is described as beginning to gain traction but as not having achieved widespread adoption, attributed both to preference for familiar forms and to a view that its prescriptive approach does not suit typical local contract administration practice. Yellow and Silver are used for design-build and EPC respectively.

Abu Dhabi government entities have long been required to use the Abu Dhabi Government Conditions of Contract, based on the 1999 Red and Yellow Books but significantly amended. That was updated on 1 August 2024, when the Abu Dhabi Projects and Infrastructure Centre issued the Abu Dhabi General Conditions Contract, mandatory for government entities, featuring an elevated Engineer role and mandatory integration of dispute avoidance and adjudication boards. That is a notable regional counter-trend, because dispute boards are commonly struck out elsewhere in the Gulf.

Dubai has no single prescribed form, but major authorities including the Roads and Transport Authority and Dubai Municipality use bespoke conditions based on the 1987 Red Book, similarly amended to load obligations onto the contractor. Bespoke contracts are described as increasingly common for mega projects and remain the norm for EPC and project-financed work.

In Saudi Arabia the 1999 Red, Yellow and Silver Books remain predominant, heavily modified in favour of employers, and have been used on Haramain High Speed Rail, Mecca Metro, Riyadh Metro, NEOM, New Murabba and Qiddiya. In March 2024 the Ministry of Justice and the Saudi Contractors Authority launched a Unified Contract for Complete Construction intended to standardise private-sector contracting. Typical Saudi amendments include replacing the dispute board with arbitration seated in Riyadh, adding decennial liability provisions, deleting financing charge provisions because of the prohibition on riba, and adding local content obligations. NEC has not established itself in the Kingdom.

In Qatar, government entities predominantly use the Red Book for design-bid-build and the Yellow Book where the contractor designs; the Green Book has been used on major work including Hamad International Airport. Doha Metro ran on amended 1999 Yellow Book terms. Following the 2019 language protection law, government contracts typically use Arabic versions.

Elsewhere: the 1987 FIDIC conditions were adopted and modified by the public sectors of Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Kuwait’s Ministry of Public Works issues conditions based on FIDIC but heavily amended to impose fixed lump-sum pricing, driven by local tendering law. Oman operates a government standard document set for building and civil engineering works. In Egypt the 1999 Red and Silver Books are the reference forms, materially reshaped by mandatory Civil Code provisions.

MENA power and desalination runs on a different structure again. The market is built on independent power and water producer models with long-term offtake from a single government-owned buyer, and the EPC contract sits inside the project company rather than being let directly by the state. Rail and metro have run predominantly on 1999 FIDIC forms, with Etihad Rail’s Abu Dhabi to Dubai high-speed project let as design-and-build packages.

On how far FIDIC is actually used unamended, the answer from every source is: rarely. What gets amended is consistent. The Engineer’s determination role is curtailed, commonly by requiring employer approval for major decisions. Dispute board clauses are commonly struck out. Contractor cost-claim entitlements and escalation clauses are removed. Notice and time-bar provisions are tightened. And critically, the amendments are usually being made to the 1999 editions rather than the 2017 ones. Regional lawyers repeatedly warn that this creates uncertainty on entitlement and undermines the contractual certainty that standard forms exist to provide.

A JCT Standard Building Contract With Quantities would not be used on an oil and gas project, and a bill of quantities is not how a refinery gets priced. The reasons practitioners and FIDIC itself give are commercial rather than technical, and they are worth understanding because they explain the whole shape of contracting on industrial work.

The first is single point responsibility across engineering, procurement and construction. Turnkey contracting transfers completion risk - cost, schedule and performance - to one contractor responsible for the whole delivery chain, so that when an interface problem arises the owner has one counterparty rather than an argument between designer, supplier and builder. That is described as dominating process plant, energy, petrochemical and mining work, where output reliability is the entire point of the asset.

The second is price and programme certainty for lenders. FIDIC’s own literature states that owners pursue turnkey EPC seeking certainty of final price and often of completion date, and that this appeals particularly to project-financed deals where lenders demand predictable final costs. In the MENA power and water sector this is structural rather than preferential: the asset is financed inside a project company against a long-term offtake, so the debt service model cannot tolerate an open-ended remeasured out-turn.

The third is that the risk profiles are simply opposite. Under the Silver Book model the contractor takes design responsibility and responsibility for verifying the accuracy of employer-supplied information, effectively taking the site as it finds it, with narrower extension of time grounds and a fixed lump sum. A measured building contract does the reverse on every axis - the employer designs, the bill of quantities is the employer’s document, quantity risk sits with the employer, and variations are valued from the employer’s own priced document.

The fourth is that process plants are performance assets, not area assets. Payment and acceptance turn on tests on completion and on performance criteria such as throughput, availability and efficiency, rather than on measured quantities of work in place. A remeasured building contract has no natural mechanism for that.

The counter-arguments are equally well documented and are part of an honest description of the market. FIDIC itself advises against the Silver Book where tenderers lack time to scrutinise the Employer’s Requirements and price the risk, where there is substantial underground or inaccessible work without special provision for unforeseen conditions, or where the employer intends to supervise closely - and points to the Yellow Book in those cases. A FIDIC-hosted paper argues that owners frequently do not get the wrap they expect, because large projects usually involve multiple EPC contractors so interface risk fragments, because proprietary licensed technology creates accountability gaps, and because the Silver Book’s own carve-outs allow risk to migrate back to the owner. And the price of certainty is a risk premium: contractors embed contingencies into lump sums to cover transferred risk, and the absence of an impartial first-tier decision-maker means disagreements escalate faster. In MENA the market has in any case moved further than the Silver Book, to bespoke owner EPC forms that pass more risk down than FIDIC does.

What follows is stated as properties of the documents and of how they behave in use. It is a description of what each form does, not advice on which to choose or what to do about any of it.

The same three families, seen from the other side of the table. Again: properties of the documents, not advice.

This is the part most often mis-stated in general writing about international contracting, and it is the part that catches teams arriving in the Gulf from a common law market. In civil code jurisdictions certain provisions are mandatory. They apply regardless of what the parties agreed, regardless of a foreign choice of law where the works are in-country, and regardless of which FIDIC book sits on the shelf.

Decennial liability is the best known. Across the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Egypt, contractors and designers carry statutory liability for a period after handover for collapse and for defects threatening the structure - ten years in most of these jurisdictions, five in Bahrain - and any clause excluding or limiting it is void. It coexists with, rather than replaces, the contractual defects liability period, which is why a twelve-month defects period in the contract tells you almost nothing about a contractor’s actual exposure.

The United Arab Emirates position changed materially and recently. The Civil Transactions Law that governed construction since 1985, Federal Law No. 5, has been replaced by Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025. Reported construction-relevant effects include: decennial liability retained for collapse and for defects compromising durability and safety; greater primacy for express contractual terms over default rules, with new pre-contractual disclosure obligations; mandatory and non-waivable statutory hardship relief where unforeseeable exceptional public circumstances undermine the contract’s financial basis; an employer right to terminate for convenience with compensation covering costs, work completed and lost profit, subject to reduction for savings; and stronger employer self-help on defective work. Article numbering has changed throughout, which means a large body of published UAE construction commentary is now citing superseded article numbers. Treat any source citing the old 1985 articles as pre-reform unless it says otherwise, and check the official text.

Separately, Dubai Law No. 7 of 2025 introduces unified contractor registration with Dubai Municipality, classification-based project limits, professional competency certificates, pre-approval for subcontracting and document retention obligations.

Saudi Arabia’s Civil Transactions Law took effect in December 2023 and codifies principles that bite on FIDIC terms: good faith in performance and in pre-contractual negotiation; agreed damages adjustable by the court where excessive or where the obligation was partly performed; limits on excluding liability for fraud or gross negligence; and mandatory hardship relief. The Government Tenders and Procurement Law separately constrains price adjustment and caps variation limits on public work. Interest-based late payment damages are unavailable.

Qatar’s Civil Code imposes decennial liability and voids any clause exempting or limiting the engineer’s or contractor’s guarantee. On employer termination for convenience the contractor is indemnified for expenses, works completed and the profit it would have made, which is wider than FIDIC’s own position. Pre-agreed delay damages cannot exceed ten percent of contract value where the employer is a Qatari public entity.

Egypt’s Civil Code imposes decennial liability for destruction or latent defect, mandates good faith, allows a judge to adjust the contractor’s fees or rescind where unforeseeable exceptional events destroy the contractual balance, and - critically for anyone relying on a notice regime - prevents parties agreeing limitation periods different from those prescribed by law.

The cross-cutting point is simple and worth carrying onto any international project: the contract is not the whole of the bargain. Read it alongside the governing law, and take advice on the interaction from someone qualified in that jurisdiction.

BuildPedia would rather tell you where the evidence runs out than round it off. The following are open at the time of writing.