A QA/QC Checklist for Civil Plan Sets

Most plan set errors aren't exotic. They're the slope that falls the wrong way, the detail that points to a sheet that was renumbered three revisions ago, the setback that quietly stopped meeting code when the building footprint shifted. None of it is hard to catch on its own. What's hard is catching all of it, on every sheet, every time, late in the schedule.

So instead of one long list, review the way a firm actually splits the work: in passes, each with a single job. Below are the four QA/QC passes we'd make before a civil set goes out, and what each one looks for. Run them in order, and resist the urge to fix as you go. Redlining pulls your attention off the next sheet.

Pass 1: Grading and drainage

This is where the costly, in-the-ground mistakes live. Every check here asks one question: does water actually go where the plan says it goes?

• Every paved area drains to an inlet, and the slope toward it meets your jurisdiction’s minimum (often around 1–2% for pavement and about 0.5–1% along curb flowlines; check the local standard).
• No flat spots or birdbaths at crossings, doorways, or accessible routes.
• Spot elevations agree with the contours around them, and with the profile sheets.
• Finished-floor and pad elevations sit above the surrounding grade, with positive fall away from structures.
• Inlet rims sit below the surrounding finished grade, and pipe inverts run downhill end to end.
• Detention and water-quality volumes and outfall conditions match the drainage report.

Pass 2: Accessibility and code

These are the findings that don’t surface until a plan checker or an inspector catches them, and by then they’re expensive. Most come down to holding a measured value against a published limit.

• Accessible routes stay within running-slope and cross-slope limits (5% running and 2% cross under the 2010 ADA Standards), including across driveways and at landings.
• Accessible parking stall and access-aisle counts, widths, and slopes meet the applicable standard.
• Setbacks, easements, and right-of-way dimensions match the current site plan and the latest entitlement conditions.
• Fire access (turning radii, aisle widths, hydrant spacing) meets the local fire code.
• Curb ramps, detectable warnings, and landings are called out and dimensioned.

Pass 3: Standards and completeness

The unglamorous pass. Nothing here sinks a project on its own, but a set full of small inconsistencies reads as a set nobody checked, and that impression follows you into the next review.

• The sheet index matches the actual sheets: numbers, titles, and count.
• North arrow, scale, and bar scale are present and correct on every plan sheet.
• Every legend symbol and line type appears in the drawings, and every one in the drawings is in the legend.
• Abbreviations are defined, and callouts use the same terms across sheets.
• Title block, revision number, and issue date are current and consistent set-wide.
• No leftover placeholder text, “XX” dimensions, or draft markups.

Pass 4: Cross-sheet coordination

The hardest pass to do well, because it can’t be done one sheet at a time. These errors survive a careful page-by-page review precisely because no single page is wrong. The conflict only exists between two sheets.

• Every detail callout points to a detail that exists, on the sheet it claims.
• Utility crossings clear each other and match between the utility plan, the profiles, and the details.
• Dimensions and elevations for the same feature match across plan, profile, and detail.
• Structure and pipe IDs match between the plan and the drainage and utility tables.
• Match lines align, and adjoining sheets reference each other correctly.
• Anything that moved this revision moved everywhere it appears.

Where the checklist breaks down

The checklist isn’t the hard part. Anyone who’s run QA/QC knows most of it by heart. The hard part is running it completely and consistently on the fourth set this week, when the coordination pass alone means holding a dozen sheets in your head at once. Manual QA/QC takes four to eight hours you rarely have, and the one item you skim past is the one that comes back as a field RFI. (For what those misses tend to cost, see the plan set errors we see most often.)

That gap is why we built CivilPlanAI. It runs these same passes, with a separate reviewer for grading and drainage, for standards and code, for quality, and for cross-sheet coordination, across every sheet of a set in minutes. It reads the actual linework and callouts rather than a text layer, and pins each issue to the drawing with a location and a confidence level. It doesn’t stamp anything and it doesn’t overrule you: it drafts, and you approve, edit, or reject each finding. You stay the engineer of record, and your judgment goes to the calls that need it.