Commercial
What is a hire period?
The hire period is the time a scaffold stays standing and on hire to the client. It runs from handover to strike, and it is charged separately from erecting and dismantling.
Scaffolding revenue has two parts. Erect and dismantle are one-off charges for the labour and the work. Hire accrues for as long as the material is on site and unavailable for any other job.
Quotes usually include an initial hire period, with a weekly or monthly rate beyond it. The initial period is often shown even when it costs nothing, because a client who sees no hire line concludes hire is free.
The hire period belongs to the structure, not to the contract. A job with eleven structures has eleven hire periods that start and finish independently, and treating them as one is how a firm discovers in July that three came down in April.
What goes wrong on site
- Off-hire dates tracked per job rather than per structure, so extended hire on one structure is invisible.
- A scaffold struck without anybody recording the date, leaving the end of the hire period unprovable.
- Overrun hire never invoiced because nobody was watching the clock on a job that had otherwise finished.