Issued for Construction (IFC)

Engineering documents move through a ladder of issue statuses — issued for review, for approval, for tender, for design — and issued for construction is the top of it: the revision the contractor is entitled to build from and the owner is entitled to hold the work against. The IFC set is the contractual reality of the design; earlier revisions exist for history, not for building.

Not to be confused with the other IFC in this glossary — Industry Foundation Classes, the open data schema for building information models. The two share nothing but the abbreviation, and both appear in the same project correspondence, which is why careful documents spell at least one of them out.

IFC status goes wrong in two directions. Building from non-IFC revisions — a superseded print in a site office, a "for review" copy that looked final — is the classic field error, and revision control exists to prevent it. The subtler failure is IFC-in-name-only: documents stamped IFC that still carry holds and clouds, released to keep the schedule's document counts green. An IFC drawing with a hold on it transfers the hold to the site, where it costs the most to resolve.