Three men show up at 7:00 for the second-floor east wing. The ceiling grid isn't released, so nobody can pull or terminate anything. They stand at the panel room until 9:32, then work a full day.
You put "Standby — 2.5 hrs" on the invoice. The GC strikes it.
Electrician standby time billing fails for one reason, and it isn't the rate. A line that reads "Standby — 2.5 hrs" asks the customer to pay for nothing. The charge was fair. The explanation was missing.
Below is the whole thing: what counts as standby, who pays for each kind of wait, what you owe the crew either way, the notice that has to go out before the clock starts, the field note that makes the charge stick, an invoice line you can copy, and a standby clause for your own proposals.
None of it requires buying anything.
What Counts as Standby Time on an Electrical Job?
Standby time is time your crew is on site, mobilized, ready to work, and prevented from working by something outside your control. They are not on break and they have not been sent home. They are held.
That is what separates standby from every other kind of downtime. The crew is available and useless at the same moment, and that is the exact condition a customer won't pay for unless you name the cause.
The waits an electrical sub actually eats:
- The GC hasn't released the area — ceiling grid not up, walls not closed, floor still being poured
- Another trade is still working in the space you were scheduled into
- A framing or rough-in inspection hasn't cleared, so your next task can't start
- The utility no-shows for the shutdown or energize window
- Temp power isn't energized yet
- The lift, hoist, or elevator you were promised isn't available
- The energized-work permit or LOTO release hasn't been issued
- Owner-furnished gear or fixtures didn't land
- Badging or gate access isn't ready and the crew is sitting at the gate
- An owner-directed stop-work or suspension
Who Pays for the Wait?
Whoever caused the wait pays for it. A hold created by the GC, the owner, another trade, or the utility is normally billable with notice; a hold you created — your material, your truck, your scheduling miss — is yours to absorb. Sort the cause first, then decide how to charge it — arguing rate before you've established cause is how these lines get struck.
| What you're waiting on | Who caused it | Usually billable? | Where it belongs |
|---|
| Work area not released (ceiling grid, walls, floor) | GC or another trade | Yes, with notice | Standby line on the T&M ticket, signed by the super |
| Inspection not cleared, blocking your next task | GC's sequencing / AHJ | Usually yes | Standby line naming the inspection and who called it in |
| Utility no-show for a shutdown or energize window | Utility / owner coordination | Usually yes | Standby line with the scheduled window and the actual arrival |
| Owner-directed stop work or suspension | Owner | Yes — this is what suspension clauses exist for | Written suspension order plus daily reports |
| Owner-furnished material or gear didn't arrive | Owner | Yes | Standby now; change order if it moves your schedule |
| Lift, hoist, or elevator unavailable | GC logistics | Usually yes | Standby line for labor, separate line for idle equipment |
| Permit, LOTO release, or badging not issued | Owner's facility or safety group | Usually yes | Standby line naming who holds the release |
| Your material, your truck, your scheduling miss | You | No | Absorb it. Bill nothing. |
| Weather on an outdoor scope | Nobody | Read the contract | Often excusable (extra time) but not compensable (money) |
One clause can knock out the billable rows above: a "no damages for delay" provision. Where it applies and is enforceable, it converts a compensable delay into extra time and nothing else. It is not absolute — courts commonly read exceptions for active interference, bad faith, and delays the parties never contemplated, several states limit or void these clauses on public work, and an owner-directed suspension is usually handled by the contract's own suspension clause instead. Have your attorney tell you which side of yours you are on before the job starts, not after the crew has stood around all morning.
You Owe the Crew for That Time Whether You Bill It or Not
Under federal wage-and-hour rules the question is whether your electricians were engaged to wait or waiting to be engaged. Department of Labor regulations at 29 CFR 785.14–785.16 treat waiting as hours worked when the wait is short, unpredictable, for the employer's benefit, and the worker can't use the time effectively for their own purposes.
A crew held at a panel room for two and a half hours, told to stay put because the area could open any minute, is engaged to wait. Those are paid hours.
Union work adds a second floor. Many IBEW inside agreements carry reporting or show-up pay — check your local's agreement for the minimum that applies when a man reports and can't work.
So the payroll side is settled before the billing side even starts. Those hours leave your account regardless. The only open question is whether any of it comes back.
That's also why your standby rate should be a real number instead of an afterthought. You're pricing a cost you have already incurred.
What Standby Is Worth: Example Arithmetic
Numbers with the inputs visible, so you can swap in your own.
Example. One morning: 2 journeymen and 1 apprentice held 2.5 hours waiting for the GC to release a ceiling.| Input | Value | Math |
|---|
| Crew held | 3 people | — |
| Hours held | 2.5 each | 3 × 2.5 = 7.5 labor hours |
| Bill rate | $95/hr | 7.5 × $95 = $712.50 billed |
| Your cost: 2 JW @ $42/hr, 1 apprentice @ $24/hr | $108/hr crew | 2.5 × $108 = $270 |
| Labor burden @ 35% | — | $270 × 1.35 = $364.50 out of pocket |
At those inputs the morning costs $364.50 whether or not the line survives review. If a hold like that lands twice a month for a year, the same arithmetic runs 24 × $712.50 = $17,100 of billing that either gets defended or written off.
Run it with your crew size, your rate, and how often your jobs actually stall. The total isn't the point. The point is that a standby hour is worth roughly what a productive hour is worth, so it's worth the two minutes of documentation it takes to defend it.
The Notice Rule: Standby Starts When You Say It Starts
Notice is the one requirement your subcontract can make fatal on its own terms. Where the contract sets a window and you miss it, the proof never gets read. Many subcontracts require written notice of a delay within a stated window — some as short as 24 or 48 hours — and AIA A201-2017 § 15.1.3.1 sets 21 days for claims generally. As a sub you're bound by whatever notice window flows down to you through your own subcontract, not by A201 directly, so find the number in your flow-down clause before you need it.
Notice also changes the conversation. A GC who hears about standby at 7:10 in the morning can fix it, move you, or accept it. A GC who hears about it six weeks later on an invoice can only argue.
A text or email from the foreman's phone is enough on most jobs. Send it the moment the hold starts. Rates below are the example figures from the table above; swap in your own.
Subject: Standby — Bldg C, 2nd flr east — 8/10, 7:10a>
J. Torres — as of 7:02 this morning my crew of 3 (2 JW, 1 apprentice) is on standby at Bldg C, second floor east. Ceiling grid isn't released, so we can't pull or terminate the LP-2B feeders. We're staged and ready to go the minute the area opens.>
Per our T&M authorization, standby bills at $95/hr per man starting now. Happy to move the crew to another area or demob instead — just tell me which.
Two things that message does. It timestamps the start, and it hands the customer a way to shut the meter off — which is the difference between documenting a charge and running one up.
Send a second one when work resumes. "Released 9:32a, crew back on LP-2B feeders" closes the window and gives you both ends of the line.
The Field Note That Makes a Standby Hour Billable
A standby line has to answer three questions before anyone pays it. Who held the crew. What they were staged and ready to do but couldn't. That they were physically on site and idle.
Hours alone answer none of the three. This is the difference:
Loses the line:Standby — 2.5 hrs
Ends the argument: Mon 8/10 7:02a–9:32a — 2 JW + 1 apprentice staged at Bldg C, 2nd flr east. Ceiling grid not released by GC (per J. Torres). Could not pull or terminate LP-2B feeders. Notified Torres 7:10a. Crew laid out panel schedules and staged wire while holding. Released 9:32a.
Same hours. Same money. One of them the customer can check, and being checkable is what makes it read as a fact instead of a claim.
Note the last detail — what the crew did while waiting. A crew that staged wire and laid out panel schedules during the hold reads as a company managing the customer's money, not milking it.
Here's the real obstacle, and it isn't the format. Nobody writes this at 7:10 in the morning with a phone in one hand and a bag on their shoulder, and nobody can reconstruct it on Friday.
So make it a one-sentence habit at the moment it happens, and give it somewhere to land. A standby block on a paper daily report in the truck works. A text to the office with those three facts plus the time window works, and plenty of shops just forward the same message they sent the super. A time app that prompts for it at clock-out works — FieldTimesheet does, and so do others.
What matters more than the tool is the framing. The note isn't a report on the crew. It's what stops a customer taking money off the invoice for work those men stood there ready to perform. That's the only version a journeyman has a reason to cooperate with, and it happens to be true.
How to Write the Standby Line on a T&M Invoice
Put the explanation on the invoice itself, not in a folder the customer never opens. The person approving your bill shouldn't have to ask a single question to understand the charge.
Example line, using the same inputs as above (3-person crew, 2.5 hrs each, $95/hr bill rate).| Date | Description | Hrs | Rate | Amount |
|---|
Attach the backup behind it: the daily field report for that date, the notice text or email with its timestamp, and the signed T&M ticket if the super signed one.
If your records carry a site-arrival or GPS stamp, standby is the one line item where it earns its keep. "On site and unable to work" is the entire evidentiary test here, and a stamp showing the crew was on the property settles half of it without anybody arguing.
You can see how the pieces stack on a finished document in this sample billing packet, and the forms behind it — daily field report, T&M work authorization, change-order log — are in the free T&M Billing Backup Kit.
A Standby Clause for Your Own Proposal
The cheapest way to win a standby argument is to settle it before the job. Get the rate and the notice method agreed in writing and the invoice line becomes a lookup instead of a fight.
Language you can adapt. Have your attorney read it before you use it — this isn't legal advice:
Standby time. If Contractor's personnel are mobilized and ready to perform and are prevented from working by a condition outside Contractor's control — including work area not released, another trade's work incomplete, inspection not cleared, utility or owner-furnished equipment or material unavailable, or permit, access, or energization not issued — the affected personnel shall be billed at the standby rate of $______ per hour per person. Standby is billed in 15-minute increments. Occurrences shorter than 30 minutes are not billed; occurrences of 30 minutes or longer are billed in full from the time standby begins.>
Contractor will notify Owner's representative in writing (text or email is sufficient) when standby begins and again when work resumes. At Owner's direction, Contractor will reassign personnel to other available work or demobilize; demobilization and remobilization are billed at cost.
That 30-minute floor is a trigger, not a deduction — a 2.5-hour hold bills the full 2.5 hours per man, which is what the invoice line above shows.
Three things that clause does: it names a rate, it names the triggers in the customer's own vocabulary, and it gives the customer a switch to shut the charge off. The last one is why it gets signed.
If your T&M work authorization already has a line declaring standby billable or not billable, fill it in at every job walk. A blank there is where the argument comes from.
When Standby Becomes a Change Order Instead
Three different things get called standby, and they carry different rates and different proof. Sorting them correctly is most of the battle.
| Situation | What's happening | How to bill it |
|---|
| Standby | Crew on site, mobilized, unable to work. Scope unchanged. | T&M standby line with the field note and the notice |
| Disruption / inefficiency | Crew is working, just slower — stacked trades, constant relocation, out-of-sequence work | Hardest to prove. Needs a productivity baseline and daily records; usually a change order |
| Suspension | Crew sent home or demobilized by direction | Change order covering demob, remob, and schedule impact |
The dividing line is simple. If the crew is idle and the job is otherwise unchanged, it's a standby line. If the scope, sequence, or duration of the work itself changed, it's a change order and it needs a signature.
The overlap case: standby that keeps repeating on the same job stops being an incident and becomes a schedule problem. That's when you write it up once as a change order with the standby log attached, instead of adding another line every two weeks.
When the GC Strikes the Line Anyway
It still happens. Send the record, not the argument.
Reply with three things: the field note from that date, the timestamped notice you sent when the hold started, and the daily report showing the crew on site. Then ask which of the three they dispute.
That question does real work. It moves the conversation off "we don't pay standby" and onto a specific fact somebody has to contradict in writing.
Don't discount before you know the objection. A reviewer who can't name a wrong fact is usually working from policy, not evidence, and policy bends when the file is clean.
If it turns out the notice never went out, take the hit and fix the process — a missing notice is the one defect the record cannot repair after the fact, and it's fixable by Monday. More on assembling backup before it's contested is in this guide to T&M billing best practices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can an electrical contractor bill a customer for standby time?Yes, when the wait was caused by the customer, the GC, or another trade, your contract permits delay or standby costs, and you gave notice at the time. With no standby rate in the agreement you're negotiating after the fact, which is why the rate belongs in the T&M authorization before the first man rolls out.
Do I have to pay my electricians for standby time even if I can't bill it?Almost always. Under DOL regulations at 29 CFR 785.14–785.16, a short unpredictable wait for the employer's benefit — where the worker can't use the time for their own purposes — counts as hours worked, and many IBEW agreements add reporting or show-up minimums on top of that.
Should standby be billed at the full hourly rate or a reduced rate?Both are common. Full rate is defensible because your cost doesn't drop when the crew is held; a reduced standby rate — a percentage of the working rate that you and the customer agree on in writing — is easier to get signed. Pick one, write the number into the contract, and stop renegotiating it job by job.
Do I have to notify the GC before standby time starts accruing?Usually yes, and it is the requirement that is hardest to cure after the fact — a perfect field note cannot retroactively satisfy a 48-hour notice provision. Many subcontracts require written notice within 24 to 48 hours of the delay event, and AIA A201-2017 sets a 21-day window for claims — a text from the foreman the moment the hold starts satisfies most of them.
How do I prove standby time when the general contractor disputes it?Three pieces: a contemporaneous field note naming who caused the wait and what the crew couldn't do, a timestamped notice sent when the hold began, and evidence the crew was on site. Hours reconstructed weeks later carry almost no weight, and everyone reviewing the invoice knows it.
Is standby time billed at straight time or overtime?Standby hours are hours. If they push the day or week past the overtime threshold, overtime applies to them the same as productive hours — and your invoice should show which standby hours landed in an OT bracket instead of blending everything into one rate.
What's the difference between standby time and a change order?Standby is idle crew with the scope unchanged, billed as a T&M line. A change order covers work whose scope, sequence, or duration actually changed, including a suspension that sends the crew home and forces demob and remob.
Can I bill for a lift or truck sitting idle alongside the labor?If you're paying for it during the hold — a rented lift, a rented trencher, a boom truck committed to that job — bill it as a separate idle-equipment line at the rental or standby rate, with the same date, window, and cause as the labor line. Owned equipment is a contract question; owned-equipment standby rates are normally negotiated in advance.
The Short Version
Standby is the hardest line on a T&M invoice to defend, because on its face it asks somebody to pay for people standing still.
It gets easy the moment three facts are on the page: who held the crew, what they were ready to do, and that you said so at the time.
Get the rate and the notice method into your proposal. Get one sentence out of the field when the hold starts. Put that sentence on the invoice where the customer reads it.
Do that and you stop eating mornings you didn't cause.