What Is a 90% CD?

Every sheet that will be in the bid set should exist, including details, schedules, and diagrams. Door, finish, equipment, and panel schedules should be filled from the plans, not left as column headers. Specification sections should be edited, with products and execution matched to the drawings. Cross-references between a detail bubble and a sheet number should resolve.

Quality control at this gate is comparison work. Does the wall type on the plan exist in the partition schedule? Does the spec section cited on the drawing exist in the project manual? Does the structural general note still describe a slab the architectural section abandoned at 60%? Those mismatches survive into the bid set when nobody reads across documents.

Some owners submit for permit at 90%, accepting that the permit set and the bid set may diverge by an addendum. Others wait for 100% so the authority having jurisdiction and the bidders see the same sheets. Either path needs a decision written down. A permit comment that changes a rated wall has to reach the bid set, or the contractor prices the wrong assembly.

Issued for construction comes later still. It is the bid set plus the addenda issued during bidding, assembled so the field is not flipping between a base set and a stack of addendum sketches. A 90% CD title block does not mean issued for construction.

Fair 90% comments fix errors, coordination misses, and specification conflicts. They should be specific: sheet, detail, and the correction. "Redraw the west elevation" at 90% is a scope change wearing a review stamp. If the owner wants that change, it needs a fee and schedule conversation, not a line in the comment log.

Consultants owe the same discipline. A structural comment that revises a beam size at 90% has to hit the architectural section, the mechanical clearance, and the spec for steel. Late size changes that stay inside one discipline’s model are how the issued set contradicts itself.

The architect or engineer of record logs each comment with a disposition, revises the sheets, and back-checks the revision clouds. Sealing happens on the issue, not on the 90% review copy. Specifications get the same back-check, because a drawing revision that changes a product without editing the spec section creates the first RFI of the job.

Teams that treat 90% as the issued set, and then slip in unreviewed edits before bidding, lose the point of the gate. The bid documents should be the reviewed set plus agreed changes, with a revision record a bidder can follow.