A formal amendment to an agreed scope of work, adjusting deliverables, timeline or price. The mechanism that keeps contracts honest, and the mechanism through which a winning bid recovers its margin.
Individually, most change orders are reasonable. That is what makes them dangerous: each one is approved on its own merits while the cumulative commercial picture drifts somewhere nobody signed up to.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Approve the next tranche knowing the full picture: operators who have priced changes from the vendor side can review the drift, confidentially.
Get independent perspectivesA change order is a documented, mutually agreed modification to an existing contract or statement of work: added scope, altered specifications, revised dates, adjusted price. It exists because real projects change, and because changes made informally become disputes made formally.
A vendor who priced aggressively to win did not intend to lose money; they intended to recover it. The change order is how. Once a supplier is embedded, each change is negotiated without competitive pressure, priced against the cost of switching rather than the cost of the work. The buyer's approvers see one change at a time, usually sized just below the threshold that would trigger scrutiny. The question a decision-maker should ask is never whether this change order is justified. It is what the total contract value has become, and whether the original award decision would survive that number.