What Does Issued for Construction Mean?

A 90% review set, a permit set, and a bid set can all be "the latest PDFs" in someone’s inbox. The purpose line in the title block tells a reader what decision the issue supports. Issued for review invites comments. Issued for bid invites a price. Issued for construction invites work in place. Mixing them is a documentation error with a cost.

Good practice is one conformed set: the IFC sheets physically or digitally include addendum changes, with revision clouds and a revision schedule. Handing the field a bid set plus a separate addendum binder asks every foreman to perform document control. Some will. The wall does not care which ones did.

Industry Foundation Classes is the open format used to exchange a building model between authoring tools. People export "an IFC" from Revit or Archicad. That file can represent design intent at almost any phase. It is not a statement that the drawings are issued for construction.

Search results collide on this constantly. If the question is about a stamp, a transmittal, or what the contractor should build, the answer is the drawing status. If the question is about a model that will not open, or about LOD and coordination, the answer is the file format. Say which one you have in your hand before you follow a workflow.

Construction still produces ASIs, construction change directives, change orders, and bulletin drawings. Those modify the contract documents after the IFC issue. The field set has to record them, usually as later revisions. An IFC stamp on revision 0 does not override revision 4.

Inspectors and subcontractors should be able to name the revision they built from. Closeout record drawings start from that history. A project that distributed IFC once and then emailed sketches has an as-built problem already, months before substantial completion.

The design professional of record issues the sealed drawings. The owner or construction manager transmits them to the contractor under the contract’s document protocol. A contractor’s markup, a shop drawing, or an unsealed sketch can be useful and still not be the IFC set. Building from anything else is a risk the contract usually assigns to the contractor.

Permit sets deserve the same care. An authority having jurisdiction may approve a set that later gains an addendum. The IFC set and the approved permit set need a written crosswalk when they differ, because the inspector enforces the permit set and the contract enforces the IFC set.