There's no statutory standby rate in Canada — whether a crew sitting idle on a delayed delivery or a missing inspector is billable depends on your contract type and, just as much, on whether you documented the cause the same day.
Short answer
It depends on your contract, and on your paper trail. Under cost-plus (CCDC 3), standby time is simply part of the actual cost being reimbursed. Under stipulated-price (CCDC 2), it isn’t automatically billable — if the owner’s own delay caused the idle time, you have to claim it as an extra, the same way any other change is claimed, which means it needs to be documented, not just invoiced.
Under a CCDC 3 cost-plus arrangement, standby time is simply part of the actual cost being reimbursed — the fee structure doesn’t distinguish productive hours from idle ones caused by someone else’s delay. Under a CCDC 2 stipulated-price contract, standby time isn’t automatically billable at all: the lump sum assumed a certain sequence and pace, and if the owner’s own delay caused the idle time, that has to be claimed, not simply added to the next invoice.
There is no separate “standby time” rule in Ontario construction law — it runs on the same documentation logic as any other claim for extra payment. Treadstone Law’s guidance on extras is blunt about it: “verbal instructions with no paper trail make it hard to prove the extra was requested, let alone at what price.” A crew standing around because the site wasn’t ready is exactly the kind of claim that gets disputed months later if nobody wrote down why, for how long, and who was told.
The same article’s advice applies directly here: “Keep dated notes of verbal instructions if a written change order isn’t practical in the moment,” and “Track extras separately from the base contract so the value of each is clear.” A standby claim without a dated log showing the cause and duration is a materially weaker claim than one with a same-day entry behind it.
This is exactly what a daily log entry is for. Procore’s Daily Log tool, used widely on Canadian projects, has a dedicated “Delay” category alongside Manpower and Equipment entries — precisely the kind of contemporaneous record that turns “we think we lost half a day” into a claim you can actually stand behind. See whether that log needs a signature to hold up and how to handle the verbal instruction that caused the delay in the first place.
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