What is contingency in a quote?

Contingency is budget or hours set aside in a quote to cover reasonable unknowns discovered once work is under way, without treating every surprise as a formal change request.

What it means in practice

No scope, however well written, anticipates everything. A contingency line accepts that up front and prices it in, rather than pretending the quote is exact. It's most often expressed as a percentage of the fixed subtotal, commonly somewhere around 10–15%, so it scales automatically with the size of the job rather than being a guessed flat figure. Contingency covers reasonable technical unknowns within the agreed scope of work; it isn't a licence to absorb genuinely new requests, which is what scope creep is and what a change request is for.

Being upfront about a contingency line, rather than quietly padding every other figure to cover the same risk, is usually the more honest, and more defensible, way to price uncertainty.

Example

A £20,000 rebuild carries a 10% contingency line, calculated automatically as a percentage of the subtotal. When the client adds two sections later, the contingency figure recalculates with them, staying proportionate without anyone re-doing the sum by hand.