Float looks like free time. It is not. Every day of float on a schedule exists because someone budgeted a duration, paid for general conditions across it and sequenced the work with room to spare. Float is the owner's money in disguise, and on most projects nobody is keeping the receipts.
Who owns it?
Many contracts say float belongs to the project. It sounds fair. In practice it usually means first come, first served. A contractor activity that runs late in March uses up the float, and the owner decision that runs late in May now lands straight on the critical path. The owner did not cause the slip, but the owner is now the one who delayed the project.
Some contracts go the other way and give float to the contractor, or let it be sequestered with preferential logic and stretched durations. Either way the effect is the same. Float stops being a shared buffer and becomes a weapon in the claim that comes later.
How float gets spent without anyone noticing
- Erosion by update. Two days here and three days there, each one too small to raise in a meeting.
- Hidden by constraints. A milestone constraint makes the critical path look healthy while the work behind it slides.
- Hidden by missing ties. Activities with no successor show huge float that does not exist. Fix the logic and the float vanishes.
- Spent on the wrong path. The near-critical path burns its float first, and the lead changes hands without a word.
What owners should do
- Decide float ownership in the contract in plain words, and decide how float consumed by owner changes is treated before the first change arrives.
- Put owner activities in the network: decisions, approvals, owner equipment, utility work and move-in. Float you cannot see is float you cannot protect.
- Report float on the driving path every update, with a trend line, not a single number.
- Log who consumed float and why, month by month. That log turns a future argument into a simple lookup.
- Ask about any activity whose float changed sharply without a progress reason. That is usually a logic edit nobody mentioned.
Float never disappears. It gets spent. The only question is whether anyone wrote down who spent it.
Senior scheduler, AdenTurton
Our independent schedule review traces float on every update, and change and contract management records the time impact of each change before it is approved. To see how fast one delay eats the float, try the Delay Impact Simulator.
