On US federal construction work, nobody has to show you the site before you price it any more.
That is not a figure of speech. Under the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, the model deviation for Part 36 removes the requirement to provide for a site inspection during the solicitation phase — previously at FAR 36.210 and 36.523— along with the requirement to hold a preconstruction conference after award, previously at 36.212 and 36.522. Both decisions now sit with the acquisition team, and the guidance moves into the FAR Companion Guide as best practice rather than obligation.
First, what this is and is not
It is not a ban. A contracting officer who wants to run a site visit still can, and many will, because it is obviously sensible. The Companion Guide even tells them how.
What has gone is the guarantee. “Usually happens” and “has to happen” are different things to build a bid on, and only one of them can be relied upon when you are deciding how much contingency a line needs.
It is also not brand new. The Part 36 model deviation has been operating since 2025; what changed this year is that the rule to make it permanent was published as a proposed rule on 23 June 2026, with comments closing a month later. The direction of travel is settled. It is worth understanding before it stops being news.
Two more removals worth knowing about
- The “12 percent rule” is gone. “Performance of Work by the Contractor”, formerly at 36.501 with its implementing clause at 52.236-1, required a prime to perform a specified minimum percentage of the total contract work with its own forces. It has been removed.
- The supplemental sealed-bidding requirements at 36.213 are removed. Teams wanting sealed bidding are pointed to Part 14 instead.
The self-perform change matters more to an estimator than it first looks. Take away the floor on how much a prime must do itself and more scope moves to subcontractors at bid time — which means a larger share of your submitted number is somebody else’s number, arriving by email, on their assumptions, at their level of qualification.
One requirement that did not go, incidentally: an independent government estimate must still be prepared for anything above the simplified acquisition threshold, and must be given to the contracting officer before receipt of any proposals. There is still a number you are being measured against. You still cannot see it.
Why an optional site visit is a bigger change than it sounds
A site visit is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which an estimator resolves the things the documents do not settle.
The specification says one thing and the drawing implies another. A schedule item says “make good” and does not say to what standard. There is a line for demolition and no indication of what is behind the wall. Standing on the site, you look, and you know. Reading the pack at a desk, you decide — and a decision made at a desk with incomplete information is an assumption.
Assumptions are not the problem. Every bid is full of them and always has been. The problem is what happens to an assumption nobody wrote down.
Then the part that fails
Six weeks later the query arrives. Which pipe class did you allow? Did your rate include dewatering, or did you read the note in the annexure as the principal’s risk? When the drawing and the spec disagreed, which one did you price?
At that moment there are only two possible answers, and they look identical from the outside:
- “We considered it, took a view, and here is the view we took.”
- “We missed it.”
A recorded assumption is a commercial position. An unrecorded one is a mistake, whether or not it actually was — because nothing survives to say otherwise. Remove the site visit and you increase the number of these moments per bid, without changing anything about how most estimates are kept.
What we do about it
FieldTaskora does not price your work. A person sets the rates. What the product is for is making sure none of the reasoning behind them can hide, drift, or quietly go missing.
- An unknown and a conflict are not the same thing. An unknown is a question to put to the engineer. A conflict is something the documents settle twice, differently— a materially worse position, because you can comply with one answer and breach the other. Conflicts are drawn first, and drawn in the colour that means stop.
- The pre-bid pass reads the specification, not just the form. It drafts the questions worth asking before you price, each with why it matters and a citation back into the client’s own document, so the question arrives with its evidence attached.
- Some checks need no AI at all.Arithmetic that does not add, cells that contradict each other, and instructions buried in a workbook where a reader would miss them — those are structure, and they run on every upload.
- Every rate can say who set it and why.Give a reason when you set it and the reason becomes the line’s note. Nothing is silently overwritten.
- Unpriced stays unpriced, visibly. The total says how many lines it is missing rather than absorbing them into a lump.
- When the form is reissued, what moved is held back. Rates carry forward where the scope did not change; anything whose scope did is put in front of a person rather than assumed.
None of that substitutes for walking the site. It is what you are left with when you cannot.
The honest summary
Deregulation that reads as a favour to bidders is often a transfer of risk to them. Fewer mandatory steps in a solicitation means fewer guaranteed opportunities to find out what you are actually pricing, and the consequences of not finding out do not move — they stay with whoever signed the number.
The bids will still go out. They will simply rest a little more on document interpretation and a little less on having been there. Which makes the record of how you read it the thing worth keeping.
Sources: the FAR Council’s Part 36 deviation guide on Acquisition.GOV, and the American Subcontractors Association’s analysis of the Part 36 changes, which is where the removed sections and the “12 percent rule” are set out. This describes the model deviation and the proposed rule as they stand; it is general information about estimating practice, not legal or contractual advice — read the solicitation you are actually bidding, and take advice on it.