Hi, I'm assisting one of my clients as CDM-C / Principal Designer for a house building project. In order to establish my own fees I am trying to get an understanding as to how much (as a percentage) a client would typically allocate for the planning, managing, monitoring and co-ordinating of health and safety in the pre-construction phase of a project. Is there a general rule of thumb that a client would work to, e.g. say I will allocate 10% of the value of a £1,000,000 project for health and safety? Many thanks!

If you manage to get your client to spend 10% of project value on health and safety then you are in the wrong career and your unrivalled negotiating talents would be put to a much better use in the United Nations. Regards

I think it unwise to attempt to consider the CDM/Principal Designer roles as interchangeable in terms of costs/fees. There's a world of difference between "coordinating" (in the often woolly contextual interpretation of CDM2007 Regulation 20, where CDM-C fees for the type of Project you describe could be typically less that 1%) and being the person in charge of the pre-construction phase. (Regs 5(1); 11 and 12 of CDM2015.