Construction Pay Application Template

An AIA G702/G703 pay application (also called an application for payment, progress billing, or draw request) is the industry-standard two-part document a contractor submits to an owner or architect to request payment for work completed during a billing period. G702 is the one-page summary — original contract sum, change orders, total completed to date, retainage, previous payments, and current amount due. G703 is the continuation sheet — a line-by-line schedule of values showing scheduled value, work previously completed, work this period, materials stored, total to date, percent complete, and balance to finish for every division of work. Owners, architects, and lenders rely on the G702/G703 format because it forces the contractor to show their math — you cannot hide progress claims or retainage calculations inside a narrative invoice.

The G702 is a nine-line summary at the project level. Line 1 is the original contract sum. Line 2 is the net change by approved change orders. Line 3 is the contract sum to date (1 + 2). Line 4 is total completed and stored to date, pulled from G703 Column G. Line 5 is total retainage (split into 5a on completed work and 5b on stored materials). Line 6 is total earned less retainage (4 − 5). Line 7 is the sum of all previous certificates for payment. Line 8 is the current payment due (6 − 7). Line 9 is the balance to finish including retainage (3 − 6). The G703 is a line-item schedule with ten columns — item number, description of work, scheduled value, work from previous applications, work this period, materials presently stored, total completed and stored to date, percent complete, balance to finish, and retainage. Totals from G703 flow up into G702 Line 4.

Yes, completely free. No email required, no account, no trial period, no watermark. Download the editable HTML file, fill out the G702 summary and G703 schedule of values in your browser, and print to PDF or save offline. The template mirrors the AIA G702/G703 layout but is not an AIA document and is not endorsed by the American Institute of Architects. It is suitable for internal use, subcontractor-to-GC billing, and owner-billed projects that do not mandate AIA-branded forms. If your contract requires the official AIA form, use this template as your working draft and transcribe the final numbers into the AIA document.

Retainage (or retention) is a portion of each pay application held back by the owner until the project is substantially complete, as insurance that the contractor will finish the work and correct any defects. Typical retainage on U.S. commercial construction is 5 to 10 percent of completed work, often reduced or released after a milestone (substantial completion, punch list complete) under terms negotiated in the contract. Some states cap retainage by statute on public works (commonly 5 percent). The G702 splits retainage into two lines: 5a on completed work and 5b on stored materials — because some owners reduce retainage on stored materials once a bill of sale is provided. Your contract governs the exact percentage, the milestone for release, and whether stored materials are treated separately.

For a single project or a small portfolio, yes. This free template covers the entire G702/G703 format — application header, contract sum, change orders, schedule of values, retainage split, previous certificates, current payment due, and signatures. What the template does not do is auto-reconcile change orders, auto-generate line-item percent complete from daily progress data, track lien waivers against pay apps, or forecast cash-flow gaps across a portfolio. Platforms typically priced at several thousand dollars per user per year per publicly available pricing do those workflows, and Plan of Day does them at a small fraction of that. The template is the right tool if you want G702/G703 today without signing up for anything; Plan of Day is the right tool when you want the reconciliation, forecasting, and lien-waiver tracking automated.

Lien waivers are the documents that protect the owner from mechanics liens filed by subcontractors or suppliers after payment. On most projects the contractor must submit conditional waivers with the pay application (effective on payment) and unconditional waivers the following period (acknowledging prior payment received). Subcontractor waivers typically track the same cadence. The template includes a Supporting Documentation section with checkboxes for conditional, unconditional, subcontractor, and stored-material waivers — but the waivers themselves are separate documents attached to the pay app. Best practice: never release payment without the current-period conditional waiver, and never accept a pay app in the next period without the prior-period unconditional waiver. Plan of Day tracks these waivers automatically against each pay app and flags missing or stale waivers before the GC submits.

Yes. Approved change orders adjust the contract sum and therefore the pay application. On the G702, the net of all approved change orders (additions minus deductions) goes on Line 2, and Line 3 (contract sum to date) reflects the adjusted total. Each approved change order should also appear as its own line item on the G703 Schedule of Values with its own scheduled value, or be reflected as an adjustment to an existing line item — whichever your owner or architect prefers. Pending change orders (PCOs), requests for change (RFCs), and change order requests (CORs) are NOT included in Line 2 until approved. The template includes a Change Order Summary section that feeds Line 2, so you can document the approved CO pool that supports your contract sum adjustment. Keeping pending and approved change orders straight is one of the most common sources of pay app disputes.

A typical monthly pay application on a mid-size commercial project takes 2 to 4 hours to prepare manually: gathering subcontractor pay apps, reconciling change orders, calculating percent complete per line item, computing retainage, checking lien waivers, and assembling supporting documentation. Large projects with 50+ line items and many subcontractors can take a full day. The bottleneck is not the G702 itself — that is just arithmetic. The bottleneck is reconciling percent complete with actual progress on the ground, matching subcontractor waivers to their pay apps, and confirming which change orders are approved this period. Plan of Day eliminates the bottleneck by pulling percent complete from daily progress data already captured in the field, auto-matching lien waivers to pay apps, and tracking change-order approval status in real time — the pay app generates itself at the end of the billing period with the numbers already reconciled.