Your GC Asked for a Manpower-Loaded Schedule. Here Is What They Mean and What to Submit.
A request for a manpower-loaded schedule is the general contractor asking one thing: how many workers will you put on each of your activities in their schedule, and what does that add up to week by week? The dates and activities stay theirs. You send back crews, a chart of the totals, and the assumptions behind both.
You may see it written as: man-loaded schedule, resource-loaded schedule, labor-loaded schedule, manpower loading chart or manpower histogram. It is the same request. For the full definition and a worked example with real numbers, see what a manpower-loaded schedule is. This guide is about the email in your inbox: what to send, what the GC will check, and how to keep it from being returned.
Why is the GC asking me and not their scheduler?
Because the crews are yours. The GC's scheduler owns the logic and the dates, but only you know how many people the work takes and how many you can actually send. Owner specifications and GC subcontracts put that split in writing, which is why the request lands on you.
On public work it often starts with the owner. The US Department of Veterans Affairs scheduling section for design-build projects says:
Participation and input of key construction personnel from the general contractor and the major subcontractors is a mandatory requirement in the baseline schedule development.
Source: VA Section 01 32 16.16, Article 2.3.A. The Army Corps of Engineers says it more briefly: "Designers, Subcontractors, and suppliers working on the project must also contribute in developing and maintaining an accurate Project Schedule" (UFGS 01 32 01.00 10, paragraph 3.1).
GCs pass the requirement down in their subcontracts. Two examples from documents that are publicly available:
- Turner's Subcontractor Procedures Manual (dated November 5, 2013, Section VIII): "The Turner Project Schedule shall be used as the basis for Subcontractor planning." Every work item the subcontractor lists carries a Crew Size, defined as the "Average number of craftsmen, excluding supervision, required daily for the duration of the Work Item", and a Production Rate. (Manual released through a city's public records request)
- Mortenson's general provisions for subcontractors (Exhibit G, paragraph G.1): "Subcontractor shall submit to Construction Manager a detailed, resource loaded field installation schedule for all disciplines of Work confirming Subcontractor's ability to meet or improve upon the CPM schedule." (Exhibit G, published with a request for proposals)
These are examples, not a survey. Plenty of GCs ask for the same thing in other words, or only in an email. If your subcontract has a scheduling exhibit, read it before you reply: it usually says what format they want and when it is due.
How firm the requirement is varies. On Army Corps work, workers per day are loaded only "if directed by the Contracting Officer". On VA work it is mandatory, and progress payments wait on approval of the resource-loaded schedule. Our article quotes both. Either way, a GC who asks you is usually being asked by someone above them.
What exactly should I send back?
Six things, in a spreadsheet or a PDF, or in the GC's own template if they sent one:
- Your activities, exactly as the GC wrote them. Their activity IDs, names, start and finish dates, from the schedule revision they sent. They will match your numbers to their schedule by ID, so do not rename or re-split their activities.
- A crew for every activity. Average workers per day is the usual unit. If they asked for man-hours, give hours. Either way, say which, and say how many hours a day you assumed.
- The trade on every activity, if you employ more than one. Carpenters hang the board and finishers tape it, and GCs and owners often want them counted separately. The VA's trade codes (CARP, PLAST, ELEC and so on) and the Corps' responsibility codes exist for this.
- A chart of total workers per week, with the peak week marked. This is the manpower histogram, and it is the first thing most GCs look at.
- The schedule version and data date you loaded against, so nobody compares your crews with the wrong revision.
- Your assumptions and flags. Shift length and any overtime, activities that share one crew, work by others that you did not load, and any duration you think is too short for the crew you can send.
Item 6 is the one subs skip, and it is the one that protects you. A crew you flagged in writing as tight is a very different conversation three months later from a crew you simply loaded.
What is a Level 3 (or Level 4) man-loaded schedule?
"Level" describes how much detail a schedule carries. A Level 3 schedule is the GC's full-project schedule, the one they coordinate the job with and report from each month. A Level 4 schedule breaks part of that work into the shorter activities the field actually runs. So a "Level 3 man-loaded schedule" usually means crews on the GC's own activities, while "Level 4" asks you for more detail.
| Level | Usually called | Usually built by | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Master schedule or executive summary | Owner, then kept up by the GC | Milestones only; nothing to load |
| 2 | Summary master schedule | Owner, then kept up by the GC | Major areas and phases; nothing to load |
| 3 | Project coordination schedule | GC | Load crews on the GC's activities as written |
| 4 | Working level or execution schedule | GC, the trades, or both | Break your activities into shorter work items, then load those |
| 5 | Detail schedule, Lookaheads or Weekly Work Plans | The people running each work area | Plans for the next few days or weeks |
The names follow a widely used five-level convention. Mosaic Project Services' paper on schedule levels lays it out and notes that a Level 4 schedule "should be resource loaded at least in the near term and include detailed crew movements".
Turner's manual is a Level 4 request in practice. It asks for work items of no more than 15 days, says that work items "shall not include work in more than one location or work by more than one trade", and ties each one back to the project schedule activity that contains it. If you are asked for Level 4 detail, ask the GC how they want the extra activities numbered before you invent IDs that do not exist in their schedule.
What does the GC check before accepting it?
Whether your numbers can sit next to every other sub's numbers in their schedule and still make sense.
| What the GC checks | Why it matters to them | How to pass |
|---|---|---|
| Activity IDs and dates match their current revision | They will copy your crews into their schedule file | Load from the latest revision and state its data date |
| Every one of your activities has a crew | A blank row reads as zero workers | Check the list against your scope; mark work by others |
| The crews make the durations believable | A duration that typically needs 20 carpenters when you list 8 is their risk too | Flag durations you cannot meet instead of loading a crew you will not send |
| The hours agree with your estimate | Contracts that load hours often require them to balance to the estimate | Compare total hours or mandays with your bid before you send |
| The peak is realistic | They add every sub's peak for the hoist, parking, laydown and site safety | Mark your peak week and confirm you can staff it |
| Trades are separate | Specs and owners ask for manpower by trade | One trade per activity row |
| The units are clear | Crew sizes and hours look alike in a table | Put the unit and hours per day in the column headers |
Why do manpower-loaded schedules get sent back?
Most rejections come down to a handful of avoidable problems:
- Wrong revision. The crews were loaded against last month's schedule, so the IDs and dates no longer match.
- Renamed or re-split activities. The GC cannot match your rows to theirs.
- The same crew everywhere. Four workers on every activity, whatever its length or quantity, tells the GC nobody thought about it.
- Hours that do not reconcile with your estimate or your bid.
- No trade split from a company that employs more than one trade.
- No assumptions. Without the shift length, an 8-hour crew and a 10-hour crew look the same.
The GC is strict about this for a reason. The Corps' specification warns the prime contractor that failing its requirements "may result in the disapproval of the preliminary, initial, or periodic schedule updates and subsequent rejection of payment requests until compliance is met" (UFGS 01 32 01.00 10, paragraph 3.2.3). When their payment depends on the schedule, your crews are part of it.
What happens if the job falls behind?
Your loaded schedule becomes the baseline. When a project slips, the owner's first remedy is often more people. The VA's specification lists it first among the contractor's required remedial actions:
Increase construction manpower in such quantities and crafts as necessary to eliminate the backlog of work.
Source: VA Section 01 32 16.16, Article 3.3.A. The Corps asks for a written recovery plan that details "which activities will be accelerated by adding additional crews, longer work hours, extra workdays, etc." (UFGS 01 32 01.00 10, paragraph 3.9).
When that request reaches you, the chart you sent earlier is your evidence. It shows the crews you planned against the GC's dates at the time, and whether the slip came from your work or from durations that were squeezed around you. Keep a dated copy of every version you send. When a revised schedule arrives, re-load it and compare the new peak with the old one; our article covers what to do when revision 2 arrives.
Do I need Primavera P6 to do this?
No. The GC's schedule PDF already holds every activity, ID and date you need; you add the crews. In Labor Loader you drop the PDF into the free sandbox, pull your scope by keyword, and load crews in the manpower loader, which draws the chart as you type. Nothing is saved. With a free account you can save the project, export the table and chart to Excel, CSV or PDF, and compare the next revision against this one. To try the chart on its own first, the manpower loading chart generator needs only dates and hours.
By hand, the same job means copying your activities out of the PDF into a spreadsheet, adding crews and building the chart, then doing it again for every revision.
A reply you can adapt
Attached is our manpower-loaded schedule for [scope], loaded against your schedule revision [number], data date [date]. Crews are average workers per day, by trade, at [8] hours per day. Our peak is [number] workers in the week of [date]. We have flagged [activity IDs] where the durations are tighter than the crew we can provide, and [activity IDs] are by others and not loaded. Any schedule date revisions or additional work will change these calculations.