Formwork

Formwork is the temporary structure — plywood, engineered panels, or proprietary modular systems — built to hold wet concrete in its intended shape until it hardens and can support itself. Once the concrete cures, most formwork is stripped and often reused.

It is required for nearly every cast-in-place concrete element: footings, walls, columns, slabs, and beams. The type and complexity of the formwork depend on the shape, height, and finish the concrete needs.

Formwork is a significant cost in concrete work — often rivaling the concrete itself — because of the material and the labor to build, brace, and strip it. Quantifying formwork by contact area off the drawings as part of a concrete takeoff is exactly the workflow Quotr is designed to speed up.

For concrete subcontractors, formwork is where much of the labor cost and schedule risk lives. For estimators, it is a line that is easy to underestimate if you only price the concrete volume.