"Four to six weeks" is the number most PEB contractors quote for a building of a thousand square metres, and it can be true — for the part of the job that happens after the steel lands on site. It is not a programme. A programme is what happens between your enquiry and your handover, and that is usually three to five months.

Here is where the time actually goes, so you can plan a plant shutdown or a lease start against something real.

The phases, and what each one waits for

1. Enquiry to a firm quotation — 3 to 10 days. A quotation cannot be firm without a site assessment and enough information to size the structure. If a contractor prices from an area figure alone, what you have is a budget, not a firm price, and the difference will surface later as a variation. Time here depends almost entirely on how fast the site can be visited and how complete your brief is: span, eave height, crane capacity and duty, mezzanine loads, insulation, and what the building has to do.

2. Design and drawing approval — 2 to 4 weeks. This is the phase that is most often under-estimated, and the one where the client has the most control. The clock includes structural design, GA drawings, and your review. If the client's engineer takes ten days to return markup, that is ten days on the programme — and it is the most common reason a PEB job runs late.

3. Order to fabrication — 4 to 8 weeks. Steel has to be bought, cut, drilled, welded, blasted and painted. This is where in-house fabrication changes the schedule: when the fabricator and the erector are the same company, the programme is one queue rather than two contracts negotiating a slot.

4. Mobilisation and erection — 4 to 8 weeks. Erection rate depends on area, span and access. Frames go up quickly; the envelope takes longer than clients expect, because every sheet, flashing and fastener is a manual operation at height.

5. Floor, services, handover — 3 to 6 weeks, overlapping. Floor slab works, doors, electrical, fire compliance and the defect list. Much of this can run concurrently with erection if it is planned to.

For a typical 1,000–2,000 sq m industrial shed with no crane, a realistic overall window is 14 to 20 weeks from a firm order, assuming drawings are approved promptly. Warehousing with a defined flatness specification, dock levellers and fire systems runs longer, because the floor and the fire strategy are their own projects.

The four things that actually move the date

Most explanations for a slipped PEB programme name the weather. Weather matters, but it rarely moves a date by months. These four do:

Drawing approval. Everything downstream waits on it. Appoint someone on your side with authority to approve, and agree in advance what a "no comment" review looks like.

Foundation readiness. Steel cannot be erected onto an incomplete plinth. Civil work and PEB fabrication must run in parallel, from the same programme, with the anchor bolt positions coordinated and cast before the columns are needed. A PEB supplier who does not coordinate with your civil contractor is handing you a delay with a straight face.

Crane and access. Sites with restricted access, buried services or live plant around the footprint take longer to erect. On plant sites, the shutdown windows are the programme — a weekend outage gives you two days of erection, not seven.

Changes after fabrication starts. Cutting steel is not editing a document. A late change to a span, a door position or a crane rating is a re-fabrication, and it will be at the back of the queue. This is the single largest source of variation in the industry.

What a credible programme looks like

Ask for the programme as a bar chart with named dependencies, not as a single number. You want to see:

  • Which activities run in parallel, and which genuinely cannot.
  • The date fabrication starts, and what has to be true for it to start.
  • Where the client's own obligations sit: approvals, foundations, power, access.
  • A stated assumption list. A programme without assumptions is a wish.

A contractor who will not put a date in writing, with the assumptions shown, is telling you they have not thought about it in that much detail.

Cost and time are the same conversation

Almost every lever that shortens a PEB programme costs money, and every lever that saves money adds time — a longer span means heavier steel and a slower erection; a cheaper floor specification may need more curing. It is worth deciding which of the two you are optimising for before you ask for a price. What actually drives the cost of a PEB building covers the other half of this.

If you are working to a fixed date — a lease start, a shutdown window, a season — tell us the date first and let us build the programme backwards from it. Request a quotation or see how we approach PEB work in Odisha.