Short answer. Yes. Article 1721 of the Civil Code says that if an act of the employer is required to carry out the work and he delays or fails to do it, the contractor is entitled to reasonable compensation. The amount weighs the delay against what the contractor saved or could earn elsewhere.
What the law says
If, in the execution of the work, an act of the employer is required, and he incurs in delay or fails to perform the act, the contractor is entitled to a reasonable compensation.
Civil Code, Article 1721 — Employer's Delay. Read the full provision →
The client's own delay can cost him
Many jobs cannot move without the client doing his part first: approving a design, releasing a site, delivering materials, or giving an instruction only he can give. The law recognises that the contractor should not silently absorb the cost of standing idle. It provides that if, in the execution of the work, an act of the employer is required, and he incurs in delay or fails to perform the act, the contractor is entitled to a reasonable compensation. The delay must relate to something the client was actually required to do for the work to proceed, not to an ordinary change of mind about design.
How the compensation is measured
The article does not hand the contractor a blank cheque; it sets a two-sided calculation. On one side the law counts the duration of the delay and the amount of the compensation stipulated in the contract. On the other it subtracts what the contractor has saved in expenses by reason of the delay or is able to earn by a different employment of his time and industry. In plain terms, a contractor who was left waiting but avoided costs, or took on other paying work meanwhile, cannot claim as if he sat fully idle at full price. The figure is the net loss, not the gross.
Why records of the delay matter
Because the amount turns on duration and on offsets, the contractor's paperwork decides the size of any recovery. It helps to have written the client each time an awaited act held up the work, noting the date it was needed and the date it came. Equally, the contractor should be honest about mitigation: what he could still do, what other work he took, and which fixed costs continued anyway. A clean timeline plus a candid accounting of savings and alternative earnings is what makes a claim for delay compensation credible rather than speculative.
The limits of this rule
This provision compensates lost time; it is not a penalty and it does not, by itself, let the contractor walk off the job. It also assumes the delay was genuinely the client's, so a contractor who was himself unready cannot dress up his own hold-up as the client's. If the client's failure is serious and continuing, other remedies about breach and rescission may come into play, but those are separate questions. For the narrow issue of being kept waiting by the client's required act, Article 1721 is the provision that says the contractor need not swallow that cost alone.