What are as-built drawings? As-built vs record vs existing conditions

Four drawings people call "as-built"

There is no single legal definition, and the terms get mixed up all the time.^[1] This is how they are generally used:

As-built and record definitions: Great American Insurance Group, 2022.^[1] Construction and existing-conditions rows: common usage.

Drawing	What it is
Construction drawings	The design: what the architect or designer intends to build, issued for permit and construction.
As-built drawings	The contractor's marked-up construction drawings, showing in red or another color where the work differs from the design. Made during construction, handed over at the end.
Record drawings	The design professional's clean set at completion, folding in change orders, addenda and the contractor's as-builts. In AIA B101-2017, "as-constructed record drawings" are the ones commonly called as-builts.
Existing-conditions drawings	A measured drawing of a building as it stands today, made before a remodel or addition. Often requested as "as-builts" for an old house that never had any.

What is on an as-built drawing?

• The original plans, with every field change marked: moved walls, rerouted pipes and ducts, relocated outlets, changed openings.
• Actual locations of things that were placed in the field, such as services and equipment.
• Notes on substitutions and anything built differently from the contract documents.

Their value is everything the design set does not show. When you open a wall years later, the as-builts tell you what is behind it.

Why the word "as-built" matters to an architect

"As-built" sounds like a promise that the drawing is exact. A professional liability insurer warns design professionals that when an owner asks them to draw "as-builts" of an existing building, the term suggests an exact, certified depiction of actual conditions, and advises adding disclaimers and avoiding drawings titled "As-Built" where possible.^[1]

The practical answer: when you measure an existing house, title the sheet "Existing conditions" and say how and when it was measured.

Do I need as-built drawings for a remodel?

You need to know what is there. For most older homes, nobody kept the as-builts, and the original construction drawings, if they exist, often no longer match after years of changes. So the remodel starts with an existing-conditions drawing: measure the house as it stands, draw it to scale, and design from that.

If as-builts or permit drawings do exist, use them for what a measurement cannot see, like what runs inside the walls, and scan the rooms as they stand today.

How to get existing-conditions drawings today

Way	What you get
Tape, sketch and CAD redraw	A drawing, after 30-90 minutes on site and 2-4 hours of redraw for a three-room apartment, by one scanning vendor's estimate.[2]
Laser scanning service	A point cloud and a model. In a 2026 study, capture, registration and modelling of a house and two office floors took 20 hours.[3]
iPhone or iPad Pro with PlaceAnew	A measured floor plan, a 3D model and a DXF from one walk. In the same study, an app on the same Apple RoomPlan technology took 32 minutes.[3]

Step by step: how to create an as-built floor plan, and what an iPhone scan captures.

What a scan can put on the drawing, and what it cannot

A scan puts down what is visible: walls, rooms and their areas, doors, windows, openings and furniture. It does not see inside walls, judge condition, or find property lines. What it sees, it measures: in our own office, all 7 wall lengths that compare one to one with a hand-measured plan came within 2.5 inches, median under 1 inch.^[4] Interior walls come in as lines, the way a layout plan shows them, and anything PlaceAnew estimated is marked "estimate", so the drawing says plainly what was measured.

Questions about as-built drawings

Architects: see PlaceAnew for architects.