A school job, a suspended slab over the gym, four weeks from pour. The tender lists "place and finish, suspended slab" as a single scope line. The forming sub assumes finishing is included because the line doesn't split it; the finishing sub assumes placing is someone else's problem because that's how it's worked on their last ten jobs. Nobody catches the mismatch until the pre-pour meeting, and by then it's a schedule problem, not just a pricing one.
That's the single most common ambiguity in this trade, and it's worth settling before anything else: on a structural deck, the crew that pours and vibrates takes on formed-surface risk. Honeycombing and defects revealed at strip belong to whoever vibrated the pour. A finisher who works only the top surface after someone else places and vibrates is following standard practice, not dodging work. The tender rarely states this as clearly as the trades themselves understand it.
What's undisputed
- Interior concrete floor work of every kind — placing and finishing slabs on grade and slabs on deck, plus finishing (not placing) of suspended structural slabs. FF/FL tolerances, specified finish (trowel, broom, float, polished), sealers, hardeners, densifiers, curing methods and compounds all sit here — the finish type drives labour far more than the square footage does.
- Interior CIP curbs, pads, stairs and infills — cooler and freezer curbs, aisle curbs, housekeeping curbs and pads, interior stairs, ramps, infills, pits and trench infills. Small-quantity, high-count items; a bid that prices only the big flatwork areas misses a real chunk of the linear-foot and each-count work.
- Exterior pads and flat slabs a finishing crew pours — equipment, generator, garbage-enclosure and transformer pads, frost slabs, patios and amenity slabs, loading dock aprons. Outside the building but inside this trade's normal work, distinct from the municipal and civil flatwork excluded below.
- Everything that directly governs the above — mix designs, exposure classes, air entrainment, joint types and layout, slab reinforcement (mesh, rebar in slabs, fibre), pour sequencing, under-slab vapour barrier and expansion joint materials, and any required mockups. The technical backbone behind every item above it, not a separate scope.
Site flatwork is a judgment call, not a rule
Walkway paving with its own thickness, reinforcement, finish and joint details, exterior building steps, CIP planting-bed curbs, and slab bases under unit pavers are finishing scope only on tenders where site flatwork is heavy enough to warrant its own package. On a lighter site scope, the same items can sit just as easily with the sitework or landscape trade. There's no default here. The split depends on how the specific tender packages its exterior work — read per tender, not assumed from the last job.
What crosses to another trade
- Municipal and roadway concrete — OPSD-style sidewalks, exterior curb-and-gutter, barrier and depressed curbs, and roadway or asphalt structures. These follow municipal standards, not the building spec, and belong to civil or sitework contractors.
- Civil and sitework infrastructure — catch basins, manholes, headwalls, thrust blocks, retaining walls. Concrete, but not this trade's concrete.
- Foundations — footings, foundation walls, piers and grade beams belong to the forming trade. The nuance: floor-finishing implications where a foundation wall or grade beam intersects a slab this trade does finish stay included, even though the foundation element itself doesn't.
- Other trades' elements that merely touch concrete — precast supply, masonry, anything that only anchors to or bears on the slab. Contact with concrete isn't the same as concrete scope.
Five places the price hides
- FF/FL tolerances stated outside Division 03. Flatness and levelness numbers routinely sit in Division 01 quality requirements or in structural general notes rather than the finishing section — and the tolerance class is one of the biggest single drivers of labour on a polished or superflat floor.
- Under-slab vapour barrier product and thickness. Often specified in 07 26 00 or shown only on a wall-section detail, not written into Division 03 at all. The mil thickness and named product change the price, and neither shows up where a finishing-focused read would naturally look.
- Moisture testing and flooring-compatibility requirements. MVER/RH testing, curing-compound compatibility with adhesives, and "no curing compound under flooring" directives usually appear in the Division 09 flooring sections, not Division 03 — the clause that dictates your curing method is filed under someone else's trade.
- Joint layout and sawcut timing on the drawings. Structural general notes frequently carry sawcut depth and timing requirements, and joint-layout restrictions, that the spec text never repeats. Read the drawings for this, not just the section.
- Placement method restrictions and pour sequencing. Laserscreed prohibitions, maximum pour sizes, checkerboard sequencing, and cold- or hot-weather concreting requirements read like boilerplate and represent real priced work — schedule and labour method both change on a clause that's easy to skim past.
Everyone else's fingerprints on this floor
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Forming/placing trade | Who forms slab edges, curbs and pits; on suspended slabs, they pour and vibrate while this trade finishes the top surface — pour timing and access windows decide the finishing crew's night. |
| Reinforcing trade | Mesh and slab rebar supply versus install — slab reinforcement is included scope here, but the documents may assign supply or placement to a rebar sub. |
| Flooring trade | Surface prep, moisture mitigation and sealer compatibility at the slab/flooring boundary — who grinds, who tests, and whose product governs the outcome. |
| Waterproofing trade | Under-slab membrane versus vapour barrier — a membrane spec in Division 07 can displace the vapour barrier this trade would otherwise be carrying. |
| Mechanical & electrical | Housekeeping pads, trench infills, sleeves and embeds — poured by this trade but located and sized by others, so late M/E changes land here. |
| Sitework trade | The exterior flatwork line — building-adjacent pads and aprons are included here, municipal flatwork is the sitework contractor's, and the boundary is drawn per tender. |
Go back to that suspended slab: read its notes specifically for a placing/finishing split before assuming the line means you own the whole pour, then read Division 01 and the structural general notes for the FF/FL numbers, sawcut timing and pour-method restrictions the finishing section never repeats. That's the pass that keeps a correct area count from turning into an argument at strip.