Section 1
The artifact: the per-project contract-type scoring grid
Score the project on each of the six axes from 0 to 3. Higher scores mean more reason to move risk off your own balance sheet and toward a cost-reimbursable structure. Add the six numbers. The total, from 0 to 18, maps to a recommended contract type. Add the six axis scores.
Section 2
The artifact: the per-project contract-type scoring grid (continued)
The bands are deliberately not sharp lines. A score of 10 or 11 sits on a seam, and the right call there depends on which axes drove the number. That is a feature. The grid is meant to force the six questions and locate you roughly, not to hand you a verdict you switch off your judgment for.
Section 3
How to read a worked example
A commercial fit-out, mostly finish work, quoted three weeks before a six-week build. Drawings are complete. The client is a repeat customer you have worked with twice. One cost line, structural steel for a mezzanine, sits under active tariff pressure. An 8 lands in the second band: fixed-bid with an escalation clause on the named volatile SKU. That is the correct shape. The job is well-scoped and short, so a full cost-plus structure would be overkill and would cost you the price-certainty advantage the client values. But the steel line can move 20 points on a proclamation, and swallowing that on a fixed number is the uncompensated-insurance trap. So you hold the fixed price on everything you can price, and you put the steel, and only the steel, on an escalation mechanism. The grid pushed you to the narrowest instrument that covers the real risk, which is exactly the point. You did not blanket-switch the whole job to cost-plus because one line was hot.
Section 4
The two models underneath the grid
The grid is not arbitrary. It is two ways of thinking about the same decision, pointed at your quote. The first is game theory, specifically risk transfer. Every contract silently assigns the input-cost risk to someone. A fixed-price bid assigns all of it to you: if steel moves, you eat it, and the client's price is guaranteed regardless. Cost-plus assigns it to the client: they reimburse what things actually cost, and you carry almost none of the price risk. A GMP splits it, with the client protected above the cap and you exposed only underneath. Read this way, contract type is a risk-allocation decision, and the six axes are just the inputs that tell you how much risk is actually in the job and how badly it would hurt to hold it. High volatility and a long window mean there is a lot of risk to allocate. A price-shopping one-off client means you probably lack the standing to push it onto them, which is why axis 4 matters as much as the volatility axes. The second is real options, the value of flexibility. A cost-reimbursable structure is worth more precisely when the future is uncertain, because it lets the price adjust as information arrives instead of committing you to a number you set while blind. When scope is locked and inputs are stable, that flexibility is worthless, so you should not pay for it, and a clean fixed bid wins because it is simplest and gives the client the certainty they want. When scope is open and inputs are moving, flexibility is the whole game, and locking a fixed number throws away the option to respond. Axes 2, 3, and 5 are all measuring how much the option to adjust is worth on this specific job. High scores there mean the future is uncertain enough that flexibility has real value, which is the signal to move toward cost-plus or a GMP. Two models, two different failure modes, which is the point of using more than one. Risk transfer can tell you to push risk onto a client who will simply walk. Real options can tell you flexibility is valuable when the client will never accept an open book. Where the two agree, the recommendation is strong. Where they pull apart, the override rules below are usually why.
Section 5
The override rules: when the score is not the answer
The grid gives you the contract type the job deserves. Three real-world constraints can override what the job deserves, and pretending otherwise is how operators get burned. Check these before you act on the band. The pattern across all three overrides is the same: your bargaining position, not the job's risk profile, sets the ceiling on which contract type you can actually use. The grid tells you what is optimal. Your leverage tells you what is available. When they disagree, you take the best available structure and manage the residual risk in your pricing, because a contract type you cannot get the client to sign protects nobody.
Section 6
A word on the clause language
The moment you move off a plain fixed bid, you are adding contract language: an escalation clause, a GMP provision, cost-reimbursement terms. None of that drafting belongs to a scoring grid. Contract law varies by jurisdiction and by contract form, and a provision that reads fine in isolation can be void or unenforceable in the context of your whole agreement. Treat every structure above the plain fixed bid as a prompt to have a specific, informed conversation with a construction attorney licensed where you work. The grid tells you which instrument to ask for. A lawyer writes the one you sign. This is educational, and it is not legal advice. For the escalation-clause band specifically, the industry reference point is the ConsensusDocs 200.1, which describes itself as the only standard material price escalation clause in the industry (ConsensusDocs). It ties adjustments to a published index and excludes overhead and profit, which is what makes it acceptable to owners. If your grid lands you in the escalation band, that document is the shape of the conversation to have with counsel, not something to paste in yourself.
Section 7
What the grid cannot see
The grid scores the job. It cannot score your nerve or your balance sheet. Two contractors can run the identical project through the identical axes, land on the identical score of 7, and still make different correct calls, because one has the cash cushion to absorb a bad steel swing and the other would be insolvent if it landed. The grid measures the risk in the job. It does not measure your capacity to survive that risk if it goes against you, and that capacity is real information the six axes ignore. A thinly capitalized shop should read a borderline score more conservatively than a well-cushioned one. It also assumes the input-cost regime is legible enough to score at all. Axis 1 asks you to rate volatility, and in a genuinely chaotic policy environment, where a proclamation can move a commodity 20 percent overnight, the honest answer is that you do not know, and no score captures deep uncertainty cleanly. When you cannot even score axis 1 with a straight face, that is itself the signal: shorten your exposure window, tighten your bid expiration, and lean toward structures that let the price move, because the thing you cannot forecast is exactly the thing a fixed number forces you to guess. Section 232 duties on steel and aluminium reached 50 percent in 2025 and derivative categories were widened well past raw metal (White & Case; Bureau of Industry and Security), which is the kind of regime shift that can turn a well-scored axis 1 into a guess between one bid and the next.
Section 8
The fitness test
You are using this grid correctly if, on your next quote, you can name the six axis scores out loud, point to the band they land you in, and then name whether an override applies and why. You are still picking contract types by habit if every job you bid comes out fixed-price regardless of what is in it, because a portfolio that never varies its contract type is a portfolio that is either taking risk it is not paid for on the volatile jobs or leaving simplicity and price-certainty advantages on the table on the stable ones. You are not ready to rely on the grid, and you should stay on plain fixed bids while you fix the gap, if you cannot honestly score axis 6, your own documentation discipline. Cost-plus and GMP structures reimburse documented cost, and a contractor who cannot produce clean per-job actuals cannot run them without bleeding disputes. Build the job-costing muscle first. Then the grid opens up the contract types that the muscle makes safe to use.