Construction disputes are getting bigger. Here is what the data shows

Arcadis has tracked global construction disputes for sixteen years running, and the trend line points one direction: disputes are getting larger and slower to resolve. The firm's 2025 Global Construction Disputes Report put the average US construction dispute at $60.1 million, with North American disputes taking an average of 12.5 months to resolve. Separately, coverage of the same report noted a 43% rise in the average value of North American construction disputes since 2021.

The Middle East has historically run even higher

An earlier Arcadis report recorded the Middle East as the highest-value region tracked, at an average of $91 million per dispute, against a global average of $43.4 million in the same report. The gap reflects the sheer scale of Gulf mega-programs: when a dispute happens on a project running into the billions, its knock-on financial exposure scales with it.

The three causes that never change

What is more striking than the dollar figures is how static the underlying causes have stayed. Across nearly a decade of Arcadis reports, the same three causes keep occupying the top of the list, in the same order:

1. Failure to properly administer the contract. Not fraud, not bad faith, simply a breakdown in the day-to-day discipline of tracking notices, correspondence, and deadlines.
2. Poorly drafted or unsubstantiated claims. A real, provable delay presented without the records to back it up loses to a weaker delay that is well documented.
3. Failure to understand or comply with contractual obligations. Arcadis has repeatedly pointed to this as a symptom of teams not having experienced advisors involved early enough.

None of these three causes is really about the underlying dispute at all. They are about process, the unglamorous discipline of contract administration that determines whether a genuine grievance turns into a paid claim or a written-off loss. That is precisely why the same three causes have topped the list for the better part of a decade: the underlying triggers for construction disputes change from project to project, but the administrative failures that turn a triggerable event into an unrecoverable one do not.

What this means for how you run a project

If contract administration failure is consistently the top cause, then the highest-leverage fix available to any contracts team is not better lawyers after the fact, it is better process during the project: notices sent inside the window, evidence filed as it is created, and claims built from a chronology instead of a memory.

This article is general information about how these contract mechanisms typically work. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for review of your specific contract by a qualified professional.