The QS Shortage: What It'll Cost You and Your Projects in 2026

An insight-led session exploring the real commercial pressures shaping the QS market today, including the ongoing shortage and its impact on project delivery. Built for experienced commercial leaders, the session combines clear market insight with open discussion, bringing together client-side and contractor perspectives across multiple sectors. Everything shared is rooted in real-world commercial experience and focused on helping attendees make better, more strategic decisions in a constrained market.

Why we’re running it...

The QS shortage isn’t coming.

It’s already here, and it’s getting worse.By 2026, the gap between demand for commercial capability and available QS talent will be wider than most businesses are prepared for. Not because there aren’t people, but because:

• Fewer QSs are entering the profession
• Experienced QSs are leaving earlier
• Project complexity is increasing faster than capability
• And most businesses are still treating this as a recruitment problem, not a commercial risk

The result isn’t just hard hiring.

It’s:

• Projects delayed
• Margins eroded quietly
• Disputes escalating
• Teams stretched thin

Most leaders feel this pressure but very few have stepped back to properly understand why it’s happening and what it will cost them over the next 18–24 months.

That’s why we’re running this session.

Last year, we brought commercial leaders together to talk openly about QS hiring and retention. The feedback was clear:

This time, we’re going further lifting the lens from hiring to the wider QS shortage and its impact on projects, margins, and delivery in 2026 and beyond.

This is not a recruitment seminar.

And it’s not a sales pitch.

It’s a live, commercial briefing built on years inside the toughest commercial capability market in UK construction: Quantity Surveyors.

We’ll share what we’ve learnt by operating at the sharp end seeing where projects succeed, where they quietly fail, and where the shortage is already biting hardest.

The session will cover:

• Why the QS shortage exists (and why it’s structural, not cyclical)
• Where it shows up first on projects long before anyone resigns
• Why traditional responses (more adverts, more money, more pressure) don’t work
• What leading companies are doing differently to protect delivery and margin
• The system that works in a constrained market not to “win talent”, but to sustain commercial capability

Some of this insight gets shared one-to-one.

Some of it gets learned the hard way.

But it’s never shared in full, in one place.

This session is the exception.

And because it’s live, you decide where we go deeper your projects, your teams, your risks. The answers you leave with will be the ones that matter to you.

This session is designed for people who feel the pressure commercially, not administratively:

• Commercial Directors & Commercial Managers
• MDs / Owners accountable for margin and delivery
• Operations & Pre-Construction leaders running QS-heavy teams
• HR / People leaders who partner closely with Commercial and Ops

If QS capability affects your projects, this is for you.

• A clear understanding of the QS shortage why it exists and why it will intensify by 2026
• Visibility on where commercial capability breaks projects, not just hiring processes
• Insight into what leading companies are doing now to avoid being caught short
• Practical frameworks you can apply immediately regardless of whether you’re hiring right now
• Live answers to your challenges because the conversation is shaped in the room

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher clearnorth.