When you start planning a remodel, one question usually crowds out the rest: how much is this going to cost — and can I trust the number? It’s a fair worry. Most horror stories you’ve heard about remodeling aren’t about bad craftsmanship; they’re about a budget that quietly doubled while the work dragged on. A fixed-price remodeling contract exists to solve exactly that problem. It puts a clear total on the table before construction begins and shifts the risk of hitting that number off of you and onto the builder.
Below is an honest look at the contract structures you’ll encounter in Seattle, why we recommend fixed price for most projects, and the situations where a different structure genuinely makes more sense.
The contract types you’ll encounter
Before you can weigh the value of any one structure, it helps to know the field. On a residential remodel, you’ll generally run into three:
Fixed price
The scope is defined, the price is the price, and the risk of delivering that scope for that number sits with the contractor. If a subcontractor’s bid comes in higher than expected or a task takes longer than planned, that’s the builder’s problem to absorb — not a surprise on your invoice. Legitimate changes are handled separately through a change order, but the base contract holds.
Time-and-materials (also called cost-plus)
Time-and-materials and cost-plus are the same thing under two names: you pay the actual cost of labor and materials as they occur, plus a markup. There’s no firm total up front — you find out what the project cost when the last nail is driven. It’s flexible, which sounds appealing, but that flexibility comes at a real price we’ll get to below.
Not-to-exceed
A not-to-exceed is a cap layered on top of a cost-plus arrangement — you bill actual cost plus markup, but with a ceiling (“no more than 10% over this estimate”). It’s a middle ground that keeps some of the flexibility of cost-plus while giving you a worst-case number to plan against.
Why we recommend fixed price for most remodels
In our early years, like many growing firms, Crescent Builds worked mostly under time-and-materials and cost-plus contracts. As our planning process matured — complete drawings, defined scopes, trade pricing locked in before construction — we noticed something: our projects consistently landed on the budget we’d set during estimating. That raised an obvious question. If we had the systems to estimate accurately, why not give clients a firm price from the start and stand behind it? We moved off time-and-materials about a decade ago, and it’s been our standard ever since — roughly 99% of our design-build projects.
The reason is accountability. A fixed price puts the pressure where it belongs: on the builder to plan thoroughly, estimate honestly, and manage the job to the number everyone agreed on. It gives you a clear total and — just as importantly — a payment schedule tied directly to production, so you always know what’s coming and when.
A payment schedule tied to real progress
On our fixed-price projects, payments track the build, not the calendar. After the planning phases, roughly 20% is collected before production begins and the remaining 80% is spread evenly across construction, each installment matched to work happening on site. If the schedule shifts, the remaining payments shift with it. That structure creates shared accountability: we don’t get ahead of the work, and you’re never paying for progress that hasn’t been made.
The honest case against time-and-materials
Time-and-materials is the highest-risk structure for a homeowner, and it’s worth being direct about why. A T&M project starts as a rough estimate, and the true cost isn’t known until the work is finished. The industry is full of stories of projects that ran twice the time and twice the budget — and under time-and-materials, the client pays that final bill regardless of how the hours added up or how the trade bids came in. The structure removes the builder’s incentive to estimate accurately or plan the pre-construction phase thoroughly, because any overrun simply flows through to you.
That’s the trade-off hiding inside “flexible.” Some clients don’t realize how much risk they’re taking on, so we’d rather say it plainly: on a defined remodel, cost-plus and time-and-materials move the budget risk from the contractor to you.
When a different structure makes sense
Fixed price is our recommendation, not a rule — and we do offer time-and-materials, cost-plus, and not-to-exceed when a project genuinely calls for it. Two situations come up most often:
- Open-ended work. When the scope truly can’t be defined in advance — some repair, restoration, or investigative work where you don’t know what you’ll find until you’re in it — forcing a fixed price would just mean padding it with guesses. A cost-plus arrangement, often with a not-to-exceed cap, fits that reality better.
- Moving faster than fixed-price planning allows. A fixed price is only possible because of thorough up-front planning, and that planning takes time. If a client wants to start faster than that process allows, a cost-plus or not-to-exceed structure can get shovels moving sooner — as long as everyone understands the risk that comes with it.
For our Repair + Refresh work, time-and-materials is often the right call for exactly these reasons. The point isn’t that one structure is always right; it’s that the structure should match the work — and that you should understand the risk you’re accepting either way.
How fixed price fits our design-build process
A firm price is only trustworthy if the planning behind it is real. That’s where our design-build process does the heavy lifting. Before we ever quote a fixed number, we develop detailed drawings, write clear scopes of work, finalize selections and specifications, and gather competitive trade pricing on coordinated documents. That pre-construction rigor is what lets us stand behind the price — the number reflects the true, thoughtfully scoped cost of your project, not a buffer padded against uncertainty.
It also changes how the build itself feels. Because the design, plan, and trade pricing are settled before demolition, production runs like pressing play on a program we’ve already engineered. We still expect the unexpected — especially the first third of any remodel, the discovery phase, when opening walls in an older Seattle home can reveal odd framing, hidden water damage, or a subfloor that needs reinforcing. But those genuine unknowns are handled cleanly through our change-order process, separate from the base price, rather than tangled up with things we could have nailed down earlier. And when scope is reduced or refined, clients see credits, not just add-ons.
It’s the same discipline behind our award-winning work, including a 2026 national Chrysalis Award for our Olympic Hills whole-house remodel. Whether you’re comparing bids or just starting to plan, ask any builder how they structure their contracts and their payment schedule — the answer tells you a lot about who’s carrying the risk. It’s one of the questions we cover in How to Choose a Remodeling Contractor in Seattle and it pairs closely with Why Online Remodel Cost Estimates are so Often Wrong and The Common Remodeling Mistakes Worth Avoiding. If you’d like to talk through your project and which structure fits it, Contact Us; you can also browse Our Work to see the range of work firsthand.