Construction companies often assume SR&ED doesn’t apply to them because the end product is a building, not a patent. But construction projects regularly involve exactly the kind of technical uncertainty the SR&ED program was designed to reward — it’s just embedded in site conditions and engineering decisions rather than a formal research project.
Where Construction Firms Commonly Find Eligible Work
- Developing a construction methodology for site conditions — soil, seismic, structural, or environmental — that standard practice and building codes don’t directly address
- Engineering solutions to integrate new materials or systems where the interaction with existing structural elements can’t be reliably predicted
- Solving unexpected technical problems discovered during construction that require a genuinely new approach, not just a change order
- Developing new formwork, staging, or construction process techniques to meet project constraints existing methods can’t achieve
Where It Generally Doesn’t Apply
- Standard construction following established building codes and manufacturer specifications
- Project management, scheduling, and cost estimation
- Routine change orders that don’t involve resolving new technical uncertainty
- Using established construction methods on a new site with no unusual conditions
Your Project Doesn’t Have to Be Called “R&D”
If your engineering team is testing new materials, developing new processes, or solving technical problems that existing knowledge and standard practice can’t resolve, that work may deserve an SR&ED review — regardless of what the project was called internally.
Where the Evidence Usually Already Exists
Engineering change notes, site meeting minutes discussing technical problems, structural analysis revisions, and correspondence with engineers of record are often already being generated on construction projects. The gap is usually in recognizing which of these documents point to eligible experimental development, not in creating new records from scratch.
