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Clauses · FAR · Termination

FAR 52.249-14 Excusable Delays

Does the regulation require it to flow down?

No

The prime includes it in cost-type subcontracts for risk symmetry: (b) of the clause only shields the prime from default over a sub's failure if the cause was beyond the control of BOTH and the item was not obtainable from another source in time — so the prime mirrors the regime into the sub

A clause can reach your subcontract without a mandate. Once it is in your document, it is a contract term all the same. The missing mandate is a fact about the regulation. It is not a ruling on your order.

Checked against acquisition.gov on 2026-08-04 · edition APR 1984 · base v0.9.3 Read the text ↗

What it makes you produce

2 items for your checklist, slowest first.

  1. Nothing to send now2

    It does not hold the order. It decides what money moves later — what you can claim, what can be claimed from you, and what can be held back — and none of that changes after signature.

    • A request to the buyer to ascertain the facts and extent of the failure, with the record of the cause behind it — the delivery schedule is revised only where the causes in (a) are found

      FAR 52.249-14(c)

    • For a delay coming from your own supplier, the record that the cause was beyond the control of both of you and that the item could not be bought elsewhere in time

      FAR 52.249-14(b)

When it is used

Prescribed at 49.505(b) for cost-reimbursement, time-and-material AND labor-hour contracts. It reaches the sub because the prime includes it in cost-type and hourly-rate subcontracts — there is no regulatory flow-down mandate. (Trigger corrected 2026-08-05: the v0.3–v0.5 entry said cost-reimbursement only — a defect caught by the CACI Schedule B answer-key test, the benchmark's one loss. The correction then survived only in this prose: the v0.7.0 AST pass re-encoded the condition as `eq cost-reimbursement`, dropping the second value, and the clause silently regressed to the losing answer until the regression suite caught it on 2026-08-05. Encoding repaired the same day — the machine test now reads `in [cost-reimbursement, tm-lh]`.)

Read closely

The clause carries no notice requirement at all — (a) lists the excusable causes, (b) handles a supplier's failure, and (c) puts the contractor's request at the front of everything. Nothing happens until you ask. Where the buyer directs an alternate source in writing, that direction is followed, and without a record made at the time the delay reads as plain nonperformance.

The 7 templates that name it, with the line
155CORPDOC 4A — FAR/DFARS Flowdown Provisions for Cost-Reimbursement/T&M Subcontracts under a DoD Prime ContractLockheed Martinline 358233RTX Flowdown of U.S. Government Contract Clauses Under U.S. Government ContractsRTXline 1214105Raytheon TC-002 — Supplement 1: Government Contract Provisions from the FARRTXline 278255GD Mission Systems SCM-TMP-005 — General Provisions, Firm Fixed Price PO under U.S. Government Contract (Non-Commercial)General Dynamicsline 1175243GD Mission Systems SCM-TMP-048 — T&M Purchase Orders for Non-Commercial Items in Support of a U.S. Government ContractGeneral Dynamicsline 2132122GD Mission Systems SCM-TMP-095 — FFP Purchase Orders for Commercial/COTS Products or Services in Support of a U.S. Government ContractGeneral Dynamicsline 1035273BAE Systems Inc. USGOVA — FAR/DFARS Flow Down Provisions for Subcontracts/Purchase Orders under a U.S. Government (DoD) Prime ContractBAE Systemsline 935

Source: acquisition.gov, FAR 52.249-14 and 49.505(b) (verified 2026-08-04)

This is research, not legal advice. It states what the regulation says about this clause and cites the paragraph behind it. It does not rule on your order, and it does not rule on whether a prime's markings are correct.