Materials Supply Agreements: Quarries, Concrete and the Prices That Move Under Your Bid

A contractor prices a subdivision road package in March. The quarry sends through a rate for road base, the concrete supplier sends a schedule, the tender goes in, and everyone waits. Award lands in July. Mobilisation is August. The first load is called off in September.

The quotation was valid for thirty days. It expired in April, four months before anyone looked at it again. The contract price did not expire — it is fixed for the duration. The gap between those two facts is where the margin went.

This is the most common way a competent civil SME loses money on a job it priced correctly. Not through poor productivity, not through a bad estimate, but through the difference between a supplier quote and a supplier commitment. Materials supply agreements are the mechanism that closes that gap, and most small contractors never ask for one because the quotation looks like a document that binds somebody.

The quote that expires

A written quotation is an offer. It is capable of becoming a contract when you accept it, on its terms, within its validity period. Three features of that sentence do the damage.

The validity period is short and the tender period is not. Thirty days is a common default. Australian civil tenders routinely take three to six months from close to first delivery, and longer where funding approvals or land access sit in the middle. Your supply pricing is stale before your contract starts.

Acceptance happens at order, not at tender. Using a quote to build an estimate is not acceptance of it. Nothing is agreed until you place a purchase order and the supplier accepts it — by which time the rate may have moved, and the supplier is entirely within their rights.

The supplier’s terms travel with the quote. Most quotations attach or reference standard trading terms, and those terms usually contain a price-variation right, an availability qualification, and a delivery regime that suits the supplier’s plant rather than your program. You are not negotiating a rate on a blank page; you are accepting a document that was drafted to protect somebody else.

None of this is sharp practice. Suppliers face the same input volatility you do, and a quarry that holds a rate for six months on an unfunded tender is carrying risk for a job that may never happen. The point is not that suppliers are unreasonable. The point is that a quotation is a starting position, and treating it as a locked cost is a decision you are making without realising it.

The materials that matter, and how each behaves

Civil materials do not share a risk profile. Treating them as one line called “materials” in an estimate hides the fact that each moves for different reasons, on different timescales, and is secured by a different kind of arrangement.

Material	How it behaves	What actually secures it
Quarry products — aggregate, road base, sand, rock	Freight-dominated. The delivered rate is largely a function of distance from the pit, not the material. Source-approved products are not interchangeable	A rate schedule tied to a named pit, with cartage stated separately and the source nominated
Concrete	Perishable and scheduled. Cannot be stockpiled, cannot be ordered early, must be batched and placed the same day. Batch-plant capacity and travel time bound what is possible	A rate schedule plus a booked pour slot. The rate is the easy part; the slot is the constraint
Asphalt	Plant campaigns and temperature. Plants run to a program, mixes are produced in runs, and placement is season- and weather-bound. Small tonnages are expensive to schedule	A rate plus a production window, and clarity on minimum quantities and out-of-hours supply
Steel, reinforcement and pipe	Lead-time and import exposure. Price moves on global inputs and exchange rates; availability moves on shipping and mill schedules	A purchase order placed early, with delivery dates and mill or test certification specified
Imported fill	Same freight logic as quarry products, plus a quality question about what you are importing and whether it conforms	A nominated source and conformance evidence, not just a rate
Spoil disposal — the reverse flow	Priced per load out, driven by haul distance to the receiving facility and by how the material classifies. A classification change can multiply the cost	A confirmed receiving site, its gate rate, and its acceptance criteria — before you excavate

Two rows deserve emphasis because they are the ones estimators under-treat.

Concrete is a scheduling product, not a purchasing product. On kerb, channel, footpath and driveway work the rate per cubic metre is rarely what determines whether the job makes money — it is small loads, waiting time, cancelled pours, and crews standing while a truck sits in traffic. Our guide to concrete works tenders covers how those jobs are actually priced; the supply-side lesson is that a good rate booked into a bad slot is a bad deal.

Spoil disposal is a materials risk running backwards. It is priced, secured and specified the same way an incoming material is, and it fails the same way — the receiving site changes its rate, tightens its acceptance criteria, or fills up. A bulk earthworks or drainage job with unconfirmed disposal is carrying an open-ended cost that no one has quoted.

Freight is the real variable

For quarry products, the number that matters is the delivered rate, and the delivered rate is two things added together: the ex-bin price of the material and the cost of carting it to site. That freight component is also the main argument contractors make for owning a pit, and the reason most of them should not. Where you are loading or scheduling those trucks yourself, the duties set out in our guide to chain of responsibility for civil contractors apply to you as well as to the carrier.

On most jobs outside a metropolitan quarry belt, the cartage component is the larger of the two. That single fact reorders every priority on the supply side:

• Changing the pit changes the rate more than negotiating the material does. A hard-won discount on the ex-bin price is small against the difference between a pit forty minutes away and one seventy minutes away.
• Haul cost is a function of cycle time, not distance. Kilometres are a proxy. What you actually pay for is truck-hours — and traffic, road restrictions, load limits, site access, turnaround at the stockpile and turnaround at the pit all consume truck-hours without adding a kilometre. A short haul through a congested corridor can cost more than a long one on open road.
• Delivered rates from different suppliers are not comparable unless the source is the same. Two quotes for the same product from different pits are two different prices for two different jobs.

The estimating consequence is direct: pricing a job without fixing the source is pricing an unknown. If your estimate carries a delivered rate but no named pit, you have not priced the material — you have priced a hope that whoever supplies it will be at the distance you assumed. The build-up discipline that prevents this is covered in our guide to preparing civil works cost estimates, where material and cartage are separate resources rather than a single blended figure.

Separating them also gives you something to negotiate. Where the material is competitively priced but the cartage is not, you may be able to collect with your own trucks or a subcontract carrier. Where the cartage is the supplier’s advantage, a further discount on the material is worth very little and you should stop asking for it.

The document ladder, and what each actually binds

Contractors use “we’ve got a price” to describe four very different situations. They sit on a ladder, and the rung you are on determines what you are carrying.

Rung	What it is	What it binds
Verbal indication	A number over the phone or across a counter	Nothing. Useful for a feasibility check, unusable in an estimate you intend to defend
Written quotation	An offer, with a validity period and the supplier’s standard terms attached or referenced	The supplier, only until validity expires, and only on their terms. Usually qualified by availability and a price-variation right
Rate schedule / period supply agreement	Agreed rates for a stated period, across whatever you order	Pricing for the period. Usually no volume commitment either way — which cuts both ways when supply is tight
Project-specific supply agreement	Named project, estimated volumes, a stated price basis, a delivery program and a term running to practical completion	The most you will get: price certainty tied to your actual job and its actual duration

Most small civil contractors live on rung two and believe they are on rung four. The move worth making is from a quotation to a project-specific supply agreement on the two or three materials that dominate the job. It is not a legal exercise and it does not require a lawyer for a modest package — it requires asking the supplier to state, in writing, the price basis and the period, against your project and your program. It is also worth asking whether they hold an environmental product declaration, which is increasingly what a carbon returnable needs — see our guide to embodied carbon and decarbonisation.

What the standard qualifications actually do

Two phrases appear on nearly every quotation, and both transfer risk to you in ways worth naming plainly.

• “Prices subject to change without notice.” This converts your fixed price into their floating price. Where your head contract has no escalation mechanism, this phrase is the exact point at which the risk lands on you, and it usually survives right up to the moment you place each individual order.
• “Subject to availability.” This is the quieter of the two and often the more expensive. It means the rate is real but the supply is not promised. In a tight market it is the sentence that leaves you buying from a further pit at a worse delivered rate, having priced the near one.

There is a third issue that only appears when something goes wrong: whose terms apply. Your purchase order has terms, the supplier’s acceptance has terms, and they conflict. Sorting that out after a delivery dispute is far harder than agreeing a single set of terms once, at the start of a relationship, and referencing them on every order after that.

Matching supply terms to your head contract

This is the central discipline of the whole subject, and it is a single test: draw a line from the price mechanism in your head contract to the price basis in each supply arrangement, and find where they do not meet.

Head contract	The mismatch to look for	What supply terms need to do
Fixed price / lump sum, no rise and fall	A thirty-day supply validity against a contract price fixed for the whole job. You carry every movement	Hold pricing to completion, or the exposure must be priced as an explicit allowance
Fixed price with a rise and fall clause	Basis risk — the head contract adjusts on one index, your supplier adjusts on their own costs. The two do not track each other	Match the adjustment mechanism where possible, or accept and quantify the gap between them
Schedule of rates	Your rates are fixed for the term but your volumes are not — so the supplier will not commit volume-based pricing either	Rates for a period, with a review mechanism, and no assumed volume discount you cannot earn
Multi-year panel or term arrangement	Rates set once and worked for years, against supply pricing renegotiated annually or more often	A supply arrangement with a review mechanism that mirrors the head contract’s — or an escalation allowance sized for the full term
Provisional sum or supply-only package	You may not be buying the material at all — but you are still exposed to when it arrives and whether it conforms	Clarity on who orders, who carries price movement, and who wears late or non-conforming delivery

The fixed-price row is the one that catches most civil SMEs, because it is the default shape of council and agency work. If the head contract is fixed with no adjustment mechanism and your supply quote is valid for thirty days, the escalation between those two dates is yours by default — not by negotiation. Our guide to rise and fall and cost escalation clauses covers how to ask for an adjustment mechanism during the tender period, which indices Australian contracts use, and how to price the residual when the answer is no. Read it alongside this one: the two problems are the same problem seen from opposite ends.

The second row is subtler and worth stating clearly. A rise and fall clause in the head contract does not eliminate your supply risk — it replaces price risk with basis risk. If the contract adjusts against a published index and your quarry adjusts against its own fuel, labour and blasting costs, the two will diverge, and the divergence is yours. That is still a much better position than no mechanism at all, but it is not a hedge. Labour moves the same way and under its own rules — the other half of the cost base is set out in our guide to awards, enterprise agreements and labour rates.

The schedule-of-rates row explains why rate-based work feels different on the supply side. Where the principal does not commit to volume, you cannot commit volume to your supplier, and the supplier prices accordingly. The trade-offs between the two contract shapes are set out in our comparison of schedule of rates and lump sum contracts.

Getting quotes to survive the tender period

Suppliers are asked for prices constantly and asked good questions rarely. Four questions change what you receive, and none of them are adversarial.

1. “Can you hold this through to award plus mobilisation?” Give them the actual dates — tender close, anticipated award, anticipated first delivery. A supplier who cannot hold for six months can often hold for three, and knowing which is the whole point of asking.
2. “What is this price indexed to, and when is your next review?” Suppliers have review cycles. Knowing that a review falls two months after your likely start date is worth more than a further discount, because it tells you exactly when your exposure begins.
3. “What happens if the program slips?” Civil programs slip for reasons neither of you controls. A hold that expires on a fixed calendar date behaves very differently from one tied to your delivery window.
4. “Is this subject to availability, and what does that mean in practice for this volume?” This surfaces the allocation question early, while you can still price around it.

Ask these before you need them. A supplier is far more willing to hold pricing for a contractor who asked at the estimating stage than for one who calls after award asking why the rate has changed.

Qualifying your tender without going non-conforming

Where a supplier will not hold, you have three options, and only two of them are safe.

Price the exposure as an explicit allowance and submit a conforming bid. This is almost always the right answer. It keeps you fully compliant, it is defensible in your own estimate, and it can be reviewed and adjusted rather than buried in a rate where it will be tightened out by whoever does the final price review.

Submit a conforming bid and offer an alternative alongside it. Where the exposure is large enough to be worth flagging — a long program, a bitumen- or steel-heavy job — an alternative that prices the work with a stated escalation mechanism gives the principal a genuine choice and gives you a second bite. The rules for doing this without disqualifying yourself are in our guide to non-conforming and alternative tenders: the conforming bid must stand entirely on its own, and the alternative must be separately and completely priced.

Write a qualification into the tender itself. This is the dangerous one. A note stating that your price is “subject to supplier pricing at time of order” is a departure from the conditions of tender, it makes your bid non-conforming in most evaluation frameworks, and on agency work it can see you excluded before your price is opened. If you qualify at all, qualify narrowly and specifically — a named material, a stated mechanism, a defined trigger — and never in a way that makes the total price conditional. A qualification that leaves the evaluator unable to compare your price against another tenderer’s is a qualification that loses you the job.

The better route in nearly every case is to raise it as a tender clarification question before submission rather than a qualification within it. A question is a normal part of the process. A qualification is a departure.

Allocation and availability — the risk nobody prices

Everything above assumes the constraint is price. In a strong market it is not. The constraint is whether the plant will supply you at all.

When a batch plant is running at capacity, or a quarry is selling everything it produces, supply is allocated rather than sold. Allocation follows relationship and history: long-standing customers with steady volume and clean payment records are supplied first, and new accounts wait. No rate you negotiate changes that ordering.

Three consequences follow, and they run against how most contractors think about procurement.

• The cheapest quote is worth nothing if you are last in the queue. A rate you cannot call off is not a rate. Ask directly where you sit in a plant’s priority order for the months your job runs.
• Relationship and payment history are commercial assets with measurable value. Paying suppliers on time is not only good practice — it is what buys you supply in the quarter when supply is short. Contractors who chase the last dollar on every order and pay slowly discover the price of that behaviour precisely when they can least afford it.
• Thin regional markets make you a price taker. Where one quarry sits inside economic haul distance, you have no leverage on rate and limited leverage on allocation. Recognising that early is worth more than a negotiating strategy — it tells you to secure supply rather than to shop it, and it is a legitimate input to whether you bid the job at all.

Availability risk is also the strongest argument for committing volume to a single supplier across multiple jobs. What you are buying with that commitment is not a discount. It is a place in the queue.

Credit, payment terms and the cash squeeze

Materials create a cash gap before they create a margin problem, and the gap has a predictable shape: suppliers commonly require payment on shorter terms than your principal pays you.

You buy and place material in one month, claim it at the end of that month, wait for the claim to be certified, and get paid some weeks later. Your supplier’s account, meanwhile, falls due on its own cycle regardless of whether your progress claim has been certified. On a materials-heavy job — pavement, drainage, concrete structures — that difference is funded out of your working capital, and it scales with the size of the job you win.

Three things to establish before you rely on an account:

• The credit limit, not just the terms. A limit set when you were doing small jobs will not carry a project three times the size, and the account stops when you hit it — usually mid-pour or mid-pavement run. Get the limit reviewed before you start, not when it trips.
• What the account is secured by. Credit applications commonly involve director guarantees and registered security interests over supplied goods. These are ordinary commercial terms, but they are terms you should read rather than sign at a counter.
• Whether the terms can move with the contract. Where a principal pays on longer cycles, some suppliers will extend terms on a named project, particularly where the volume is worth having. It is a reasonable request and it is rarely made.

This is the materials-side view of a problem that runs through every civil contract. Our guide to cash flow in civil construction contracts covers the full picture — claim cycles, certification, retention and the funding requirement a growing order book creates — and the supply side is usually the largest single component of it.

Specification compliance and the paperwork

A supply arrangement is not only a price. On agency and council work it is a conformance obligation, and the cheapest product that does not conform has a cost of one hundred per cent.

The specification families you will be working to

Each road authority maintains its own standard specifications, and materials are specified through them rather than generically.

Jurisdiction	Specification family	Note
Queensland	Transport and Main Roads technical specifications — the MRTS series, including MRTS05 for unbound pavements	Applies to supply and construction of unbound granular pavements using natural, quarried and recycled sources, or a combination
New South Wales	Transport for NSW QA Specifications — including 3051 for granular base and subbase materials	Developed for roadworks and bridgeworks contracts let by TfNSW or by local councils in NSW — so it reaches well beyond state roads
Victoria	Standard Specifications for Roadworks and Bridgeworks — including Section 812 for crushed rock pavement base and subbase, and Section 407 for hot mix asphalt	Section 812 defines classes with their own grading, plasticity and source requirements, referring back to source rock requirements in Section 801
Western Australia	Main Roads Western Australia specifications — the 500-series pavements group, including Specification 501	Covers pavement materials and construction requirements
All jurisdictions	Australian Standards referenced by those specifications — including AS 2758 for aggregates and rock for engineering purposes, AS 1379 for the specification and supply of concrete, and AS/NZS 4671 for steel reinforcement	AS 2758 is a multi-part series; concrete aggregates and sealing aggregates are separate parts with separate requirements

Two navigator points, because this is territory where confident generalisations cost money. First, these specifications are revised, and clauses, class definitions and test requirements change between editions — work from the edition named in your contract documents, not from the copy in your files or the version a supplier quotes at you. Second, do not accept a product description as a conformance statement. “VicRoads spec road base” or “3051 material” is a shorthand, not evidence. The evidence is the test certification, against the class and the edition your contract names.

Source approval and registered sources

On some agency work the pit itself must be approved, not just the product. Queensland operates a quarry registration system: under MRTS05, the written permission of the Administrator is required before material is supplied to or used on site in accordance with the Transport and Main Roads Quarry Registration System, and supplementary material imported into those materials must also come from a source registered and operated under that system. The definition is broader than the word suggests — a quarry there includes pits and natural deposits such as sand sources, and may also include a material recycler. Transport for NSW maintains a register of materials serving a related purpose.

The practical consequence is significant and frequently missed: where source approval applies, you cannot swap pits to chase a rate. The cheaper quarry down the road is not an option unless it holds the relevant registration, and obtaining approval for an unregistered source is a process with a timeline, not a phone call. Confirm registration status at estimating stage, on the specific source you have priced.

The evidence chain the principal will actually ask for

Conformance is demonstrated through documents, and those documents are your supplier’s to produce. Establish at order stage — not at handover — that you will receive test certification for the supplied product, batch or mix records where applicable, and delivery dockets that identify what was delivered against what was ordered. That chain is what your inspection and test plan calls up, and a hold point cannot be released without it. Our guide to quality management plans and ITPs sets out how the documentation is structured; the supply-side point is that a supplier who cannot produce records on request has just become a program risk, because the work stops at the hold point until they do.

Recycled content

Recycled and reused materials are now a live procurement question rather than a preference. Victoria’s Recycled First policy requires contractors delivering Victorian transport projects to optimise their use of recycled and reused materials, with bidders required to demonstrate how they will do so — the policy takes a project-by-project approach rather than setting mandatory minimum targets, so contractors liaise with recycled materials suppliers to establish whether adequate supplies are available. The materials in scope include recycled aggregates, crushed brick, glass, crumb rubber and reclaimed asphalt pavement, among others. Sealing aggregate is a tighter specification again and is regionally constrained — see our guide to sprayed sealing and bituminous surfacing.

That structure — demonstrate optimisation, evidenced against actual supplier availability — is what makes this a supply-side question rather than a submission-writing one. A credible answer requires having asked your suppliers what recycled products they can actually deliver, in what volumes, conforming to which specification, before you write anything. Where sustainability is scored, our guide to sustainability and IS ratings in tenders covers how those responses are assessed. The supply-side discipline is the same one running through this whole guide: the claim has to be backed by a supplier who has confirmed they can supply it.

Provisional sums and supply-only packages

Sometimes you are not buying the material at all. Three arrangements change the risk profile, and each one is often misread as removing risk when it mostly relocates it.

Arrangement	What changes	What you still carry
Provisional sum for a material package	An allowance stands in for a cost that is not yet known, and is adjusted against actual cost	The obligation to procure competently and to substantiate what you spent. Margin treatment on the adjustment is a contract question, not an assumption
PC sum for a nominated product	A stated allowance for a specified item; the supply cost is carried by the principal’s allowance	Handling, placing, program and interface. A PC sum covers the item, not what you do with it
Free-issue / supply-only	The principal buys and supplies the material; you place it	Everything that is not price — delivery timing, storage, double handling, quantity shortfalls, and what happens when the material arrives late or non-conforming

Free-issue deserves the most caution, because it looks like the safest of the three and behaves like the least. You have surrendered control of the thing your program depends on while retaining every obligation that depends on it. Before pricing a free-issue package, establish who bears the delay cost when material does not arrive on the programmed date, who bears the cost of rejecting and returning non-conforming product, and where in the contract those two answers are written down. If they are not written down anywhere, that is the finding.

How these items are set up, priced and adjusted is covered in our guide to bills of quantities, provisional sums and PC sums.

Negotiation levers a small contractor actually has

A civil SME will not out-negotiate a tier-one contractor on rate. It can compete on everything else, and the levers below are the ones that work at small volume.

1. Aggregate volume across jobs, not within one. Your annual spend with a supplier is a real number even when no single job is large. Present it that way and negotiate at the account level, once a year, rather than job by job.
2. Commit to a term. A stated commitment to a single supplier for a period is worth more to them than a slightly larger one-off order, because it lets them plan production. It is also the thing that buys allocation priority when supply tightens.
3. Take delivery in their quiet season. Suppliers have peaks and troughs like you do. Material taken when the plant is under-utilised is worth more to them than the same tonnes at peak, and where the product can be stockpiled without deterioration, this is real money for nothing.
4. Collect rather than take delivered. Where you own trucks with spare capacity, or can backload against work you are already doing, taking the cartage in-house is often the largest single saving available on quarry products — precisely because freight dominates the delivered rate.
5. Be an easy customer to schedule. Accurate call-offs, adequate notice, no cancelled pours, clean site access, trucks turned around quickly, and invoices paid on time. Suppliers price difficulty even when they do not itemise it, and the contractor who does not waste their trucks gets better service in the quarter that matters.

Lever five is the one most often dismissed and most often decisive. Every hour a truck spends waiting on your site is an hour the supplier cannot sell to anyone else, and it is recovered from you eventually — in the rate, in the priority order, or in how quickly your calls are returned.

When the price moves anyway

Sometimes you do everything above and the price moves regardless. There are three routes, and taking them in the wrong order wastes the strongest one.

First, check whether the contract already answers it. Read the special conditions rather than relying on memory of the tender. Where an escalation mechanism exists, the movement may be recoverable — subject to the notice discipline and claim timing that apply to any entitlement.

Second, separate escalation from entitlement. This distinction is worth real money and is regularly missed. A price rise on a material you always knew you had to buy is escalation. A cost increase because the scope changed, the quantity grew, the ground was different, or the principal directed something new is a claim — and it is valued under the contract’s own machinery rather than absorbed. Our guide to variations in civil construction contracts covers how those are identified, notified and valued. A meaningful share of what contractors experience as “materials went up” is actually unclaimed entitlement wearing the wrong label.

Third, have the commercial conversation with the supplier. A supplier who values a continuing relationship will sometimes share a movement, hold pricing on the balance of a job, or bring a delivery forward so you buy at the earlier rate. Approach it with the specifics — the order, the volumes, the dates, the original quotation — rather than a general complaint. Re-sequencing to buy earlier is frequently the most effective response available and costs nothing to consider.

Substituting a source is a specification decision, not a purchasing one

The instinctive response to a price rise is to find another supplier. On civil work that instinct is dangerous, and it is worth stating as a rule.

Where the source is nominated, registered or approved under the contract, changing it is a change to the specified work. It may require the superintendent’s approval, fresh conformance testing, and — where a registration system applies — a source that already holds the registration. A cheaper pit that is not registered is not a saving; it is non-conforming material that has to be removed at your cost when someone checks the dockets. The right sequence is to establish that the alternative source is acceptable, in writing, before you place an order against it.

This is also why the source belongs in the estimate. A job priced against a named, registered pit can be defended, checked and adjusted. A job priced against “road base” cannot.

Checklist

Before you price

• Which two or three materials dominate this job’s cost, and how long is the program over which they will be bought?
• Is the source named in your estimate — a specific pit, plant or supplier — with cartage priced separately from the material?
• Does the specification require a registered or approved source, and does your priced source hold it?
• What is the validity period on each quote, and how does that compare with anticipated award plus mobilisation?
• Is the quote qualified by availability, a price-variation right, or both?
• Is disposal of spoil confirmed — receiving site, rate and acceptance criteria — or open-ended?
• Does the head contract have any escalation mechanism, and if not, is the residual priced as an explicit allowance?

Before you rely on a supply arrangement

• Which rung of the ladder are you actually on — verbal, quotation, rate schedule, or project-specific agreement?
• Does the arrangement state the period, the price basis and any review mechanism in writing?
• Whose terms apply, and are they referenced consistently on every order?
• Where do you sit in the supplier’s allocation priority for the months this job runs?
• Is the credit limit sufficient for this job’s peak, and has it been reviewed?
• Will you receive test certification, batch or mix records, and dockets that match what you ordered?
• On free-issue or PC-sum material, who bears late delivery and non-conforming product, and where is that written?

The short version

• A quotation is an offer with an expiry date. A fixed-price contract is a commitment without one. Materials supply agreements exist to close that gap.
• For quarry products, freight dominates the delivered rate — so fixing the source matters more than negotiating the material, and an estimate without a named pit has not priced the material at all.
• Match the supply arrangement to the head contract’s price mechanism. Fixed price with no rise and fall plus a thirty-day validity means you carry the escalation, by default rather than by decision.
• Ask for validity through to award plus mobilisation, ask what the price is indexed to, and price the residual explicitly rather than qualifying your tender into non-conformance.
• In a tight market the constraint is allocation, not price. Payment history and being easy to schedule buy supply that no discount will.
• Conformance is a supply obligation: right specification family, right edition, registered source where required, and the test records to prove it.
• Swapping pits to chase a rate is a specification decision. Get it approved in writing before you order, or the saving becomes a removal.

References

This guide is general information for Australian civil construction businesses and is not legal, financial or engineering advice. Supply terms, credit arrangements, specification requirements and source approval systems differ by supplier, jurisdiction, agency and contract, and the technical specifications and standards named here are revised over time. All examples are illustrative and no prices, rates or test requirements are stated. Always work from the tender and contract documents, the edition of the specification your contract names, and the supplier’s actual written terms.

• Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads — Transport and Main Roads Specifications, Category 5 (Pavements, Subgrade and Surfacing), including Technical Specification MRTS05 Unbound Pavements. The specification’s application to the supply and construction of unbound granular pavements, with material from natural, quarried and recycled sources or a combination of these able to be used; the requirement for the written permission of the Administrator prior to material being supplied to or used on site in accordance with the Transport and Main Roads Quarry Registration System; the requirement that supplementary material imported for use in those materials also come from a source registered and operated in accordance with the Quarry Registration System; and the definition of quarry as including pits and natural deposits such as sand sources, and, in relation to the quarry registration system, potentially including a material recycler.
• Transport for NSW — QA Specification 3051: Granular Base and Subbase Materials for Surfaced Road Pavements, and the TfNSW Register of Materials. The specification setting out requirements for granular materials used as unbound material, material to be modified and material to be bound in the base and subbase courses of surfaced pavements, from naturally occurring, manufactured or recycled sources; the exclusion from its scope of requirements for transport, placing, compaction, sampling and testing of placed material during pavement construction; and its development for use with roadworks and bridgeworks contracts let by Transport for NSW or by local councils in NSW.
• VicRoads / Victorian Department of Transport and Planning — Standard Specifications for Roadworks and Bridgeworks, including Section 812 Crushed Rock for Pavement Base and Subbase and Section 407 Hot Mix Asphalt. Section 812’s description of crushed rock as rock fragments produced by the crushing, scalping and screening of igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary source rock conforming to the requirements of Section 801, with or without additives, produced in a controlled manner to close tolerances for grading and plasticity; and its definition of classes together with their grading, strength, plasticity and source requirements.
• Main Roads Western Australia — Specification 501 Pavements, within the 500-series Pavements group of the Main Roads WA technical library, covering pavement materials and construction requirements in Western Australia.
• Standards Australia — AS 2758 Aggregates and rock for engineering purposes (a multi-part series, with Part 1 covering concrete aggregates and Part 2 covering sealing aggregate for sprayed bituminous surfacing, and referring to test methods in related standards); AS 1379 Specification and supply of concrete, setting out minimum requirements for the materials, plant and equipment used in the supply of concrete, the production and delivery of concrete in the plastic state, and the uniformity of mixing; and AS/NZS 4671 Steel for the reinforcement of concrete, specifying requirements for the chemical composition and mechanical and geometric properties of reinforcing steel. Editions and part numbering change over time; the edition that applies is the one named in the contract documents.
• Victoria’s Big Build / ecologiQ — Recycled First Policy and associated guidance materials. The requirement for contractors delivering Victorian transport projects to optimise their use of recycled and reused materials, with bidders on government infrastructure projects required to demonstrate how they will do so; the policy’s project-by-project approach, which does not set mandatory minimum requirements or targets and instead has contractors liaise with recycled materials suppliers to determine whether adequate supplies are available; and the range of materials in scope, including recycled aggregates, glass, plastic, timber, steel, ballast, crushed brick, crumb rubber and reclaimed asphalt pavement.