You approved an estimate. The invoice came back higher. Now what?
Where Subpart J reaches the pole, the utility must itemize its estimate and its final invoice and document the basis of every charge. On a cooperative, municipal, railroad or government owned pole, or in a state that regulates attachments itself, it frequently need not. Either way, an itemized line does not tell you whether the charge belongs to you. So the question is not whether the number is right. It is whether you have any way to find out.
Which one fits depends on two things: whether you are checking one bill or protecting a whole build, and whether the bill is make-ready or rent.
Which one is you?
Every pole carries two bills. Make-ready is paid while you build. Rent is paid for as long as you stay.
One bill to check
A make-ready estimate or invoice looks wrong.
20% of savings, stepping down to 10%. Paid only if the pole owner adjusts the charge.
The build keeps going
Your build keeps submitting poles, and the estimates keep coming.
Every estimate checked before you pay. The plan is set by poles submitted.
until the build ends
One invoice, or 2,000 poles or fewer
One rent invoice to check, or 2,000 billed poles or fewer with that owner.
20% of savings, stepping down to 10%. At this size a subscription is not worth selling you.
More than 2,000 billed poles
One pole owner bills you rent on more than 2,000 poles.
Every rent cycle checked. Set by Billed Poles, one engagement per pole owner. How Billed Poles are counted.
every year
Building and already attached?
Run both. Project Monitoring covers the new build and Recurring Rent Monitoring covers the poles you already pay rent on. They are counted separately and never substitute for each other. Not sure which? Start with a free check.
There is no plan to choose here and no checkout. Every engagement starts with the free check, and the Order that prices it is written afterwards. Rates, bands, definitions, the term and the project cap are in the Client Service Agreement, which governs if this page and that agreement differ.
What each one costs
- ✓ One estimate or invoice
- ✓ Plain-language findings summary
- ✓ No account, no card, no sales follow-up
- ✓ 20 / 15 / 12 / 10 percent, stepping down as savings grow
- ✓ Nothing upfront, nothing unless the owner adjusts the charge
- ✓ You keep at least 80 percent of everything found
- ✓ Every estimate checked before you pay
- ✓ Success rate halved: 10 / 7.5 / 6 / 5 percent
- ✓ First month credited against the first fee earned
Or skip the percentage entirely
A not-to-exceed fixed fee with no success component, priced from the same scope as monitoring. Offered by default to public agencies and cooperatives, and available to any client on request. Choose it when a budgeted number matters more than sharing the upside.
The trade, in one line of arithmetic
Monitoring charges a monthly fee and halves the percentage. So it pays for itself once the success fee a single audit would have charged you exceeds twenty-four times the monthly fee.
monitoring costs less when fee > 24 × monthly
| Plan | Poles submitted for make-ready | Monthly | 12 months | Break-even in success fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project | up to 500 | $395 | $4,740 | $9,480 |
| Build | 501 to 2,000 | $795 | $9,540 | $19,080 |
| Program | 2,001 to 5,000 | $1,195 | $14,340 | $28,680 |
Read that column as: if a year of single audits would have cost you more than this in success fees, monitoring costs you less. In the first year the figure is lower still, because the first month is credited against the first fee earned. The plan is not a choice between three prices. It is set by how many poles you submit for make-ready, so the build picks the plan and the real decision is monitoring against single audits at that size.
More than 5,000 poles
Make-ready is submitted to each pole owner separately, so a build spanning several pole owners runs as several monitored projects, and each takes the plan its own submitted count earns. Where more than 5,000 poles are submitted to a single pole owner on one project, Program applies plus $0.06 per pole per month for each pole above 5,000, with no ceiling. At 15,000 submitted poles that is $1,795 per month. The count is taken on the last day of each billing month and that month is billed on it. It does not step back down, because monitoring of a pole does not end when its estimate is approved: the invoice and the true-up arrive later and are audited then.
Where a state restricts fees measured by a recovery
Some states restrict or prohibit a fee measured by another party's recovery when the person charging it is not a lawyer. Illinois is one. For a project there we charge a fixed fee instead of the success fee: the same monthly figure your submitted pole count would earn under Project Monitoring, charged once. $395 up to 500 poles, $795 for 501 to 2,000, $1,195 for 2,001 to 5,000, and above 5,000 poles $1,195 plus $0.06 for each pole submitted above 5,000, still charged once. It is earned when we deliver your Findings Report, and it is payable whether or not anything is recovered. The states this applies to, and what applies in each, are in the Jurisdiction Schedule in Section 12 of the Client Service Agreement.
What the arithmetic leaves out, and it matters more than the arithmetic
Break-even assumes the same errors get caught either way. They will not be. A single audit cannot catch what you have already paid without opening a dispute. An estimate reviewed before approval turns that fight into a corrected number. If you have no appetite for disputing paid invoices, the estimate-stage review is the only part of this that can help you at all.
Which budget it comes out of
Most people compare these two on price. There is a faster question and it usually settles it: which budget does the money come from? On a funded build those two are not the same size, and only one of them was sized for make-ready in the first place.
The monthly fee belongs to the build, not to the overhead.
A fee against money you get back
Nothing is committed until something is recovered.
- When you pay
- After the pole owner concedes the charge. Never before, and never at all if they do not.
- Which budget it comes from
- None, until there is a recovery. The fee is taken out of the recovery itself.
- What your controller is looking at
- A credit against a construction cost you already capitalized, with a fee netting against it.
- What it asks of you
- Nothing to budget, nothing to encumber, nothing to defend in a budget review.
A cost of constructing the plant
A monthly line that runs only while make-ready runs.
- When you pay
- Monthly, during construction, which is when the estimates you are checking arrive.
- Which budget it comes from
- The make-ready line of the capital budget, alongside engineering, inspection and construction management.
- What your controller is looking at
- A third-party service performed during construction, on the cost of the asset being constructed. Ask whether it belongs in the asset rather than in the period.
- What it asks of you
- One line in the project budget, per project, for the length of the project.
Why this decides it faster than the break-even does
An operating line is an argument with a budget that was set last year and knew nothing about your poles. A construction line is an argument with a budget that was built for make-ready and is already carrying it. That is the same fee landing in two very different conversations.
What monitoring costs as a share of the make-ready spend it checks
Drawn on a scale of zero to four percent. The bar shrinks as the build grows, because the plan fee steps up more slowly than the spend it is watching.
Make-ready spend modeled from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute's published BEAD pole parameters at their base case. Not PoleProof client results, and not a projection of what any build will spend or save. The annual figures are twelve months of the published plan fee.
Take the treatment to your accountant as a question
Whether a cost is capitalized turns on your own capitalization policy, your materiality threshold and your auditor's judgment. PoleProof does not give accounting or tax advice and none of the following is any. Two things are worth putting in front of the person who does.
Where the cost may sit
Under ASC 360-10-30-1 the cost of an asset includes the costs necessarily incurred to bring it to the condition and location necessary for its intended use, and third-party engineering, inspection and construction-management services during construction are routinely treated that way. The question for your auditor is whether a service whose only function is to establish the correct amount of a construction cost, performed while that cost is being incurred, sits in the same place.
Why capitalizing may not defer the deduction
Capitalized into telecommunications plant, the cost generally lands in property with a recovery period of twenty years or less, and 100 percent bonus depreciation under section 168(k) was made permanent for qualified property acquired after 19 January 2025. Where both hold on your facts, capitalizing does not push the deduction into later years, which removes the usual reason to resist it.
If you buy with grant money it is a different question, and a simpler one
Under 2 CFR 200 the test is whether the cost is allowable and directly benefits the project rather than whether it capitalizes. A monitoring fee is a service rather than equipment, so it is charged as a direct project cost and does not carry the prior written approval that 2 CFR 200.439 requires for capital expenditures. Confirm eligible-cost treatment with your Eligible Entity before you rely on it, and see the section further down on buying with public or federal money.
Recurring attachment rent is a different service, counted a different way
What Billed Poles are, and why they are not poles submitted
Billed Poles are the poles one pole owner actually bills you rent for, counted once each, however many attachments you maintain on a pole and however many times that pole appears across the invoices, true-ups and corrections for those agreements. We take the count from the most recent rent invoice that pole owner has issued, and take it again from each later one, so unlike the make-ready count it can move in either direction. Poles submitted for make-ready are a different count, and neither is used for the other: an operator that submits nothing for make-ready this year still pays rent on every pole it is attached to, and a build submitting a few hundred poles may be paying rent on many times that. Rent is billed by each pole owner separately, so rent under agreements with more than one pole owner runs as more than one engagement, and each takes the band its own count earns.
What you send is the recurring rent invoices, the rate calculations and the true-ups and corrections the pole owner issues under your attachment, joint use or license agreements. What you get back is a Findings Report, the same deliverable as every other column: what the agreement and the applicable rules allow, what they do not, and the citation each conclusion rests on. The engagement runs over its term rather than producing a separate deliverable each month, because a pole owner issues a rent invoice on its own cycle and the corrections that follow one arrive when the pole owner issues them.
| Billed Poles | Monthly |
|---|---|
| 2,001 to 5,000 | $195 |
| 5,001 to 20,000 | $195 plus $0.06 for each Billed Pole above 5,000, to a maximum of $495 |
| above 20,000 | $495 plus $0.02 for each Billed Pole above 20,000 |
The fee above 5,000 rises by $0.06 for each Billed Pole rather than stepping at a threshold, so a count that grows past a band edge moves the fee by cents per pole instead of by a step. It stops rising at $495, which is reached at 10,000 Billed Poles and holds flat from there to 20,000. On top of the monthly fee the success component is the same halved bands the monitored columns carry, 10 / 7.5 / 6 / 5 percent of Actual Savings, stepping down as savings grow at the same breakpoints.
The first month is credited against the first fee earned
Your first monthly fee is credited against the first fee we earn on a Recovered Amount or Avoided Amount for that engagement. If that first fee is smaller than the credit, the balance carries to the next one we earn on the same engagement, and to each after that, until it is used up. The credit is given once per engagement and it is not reduced by the passage of time.
At 2,000 Billed Poles or fewer there is no subscription, and no price
We do not offer Recurring Rent Monitoring below 2,001 Billed Poles. There is no figure in this row because there is nothing to subscribe to at that size, not because it is withheld. Send the rent invoices as a single audit instead: nothing upfront, and you pay only out of amounts the pole owner actually credits, refunds or corrects. At that count that is the better instrument rather than a smaller plan, and saying so is cheaper for both of us than selling you a subscription you would not use.
If you want to know whether any of this applies to you, the place to start is the same one as everywhere else on this page: send one recent rent invoice as a free check. Rates, bands, the definition of Billed Poles, the term and the project cap are set out in the Client Service Agreement, which governs if this page and that agreement differ.
What is actually at stake
How it goes
If you buy with public or federal money
The fixed fee is usually the right instrument
A percentage of savings is not a fixed price, so it cannot be encumbered cleanly and you have to estimate total value anyway. The not-to-exceed fee gives you one number to put on a requisition. That is why it is the default offer to public agencies and cooperatives rather than something you have to ask for.
Where the annual figure sits
The federal micro-purchase threshold rose to $15,000 on 1 October 2025. Over twelve months all three named plans fall below it: $4,740, $9,540 and $14,340. That is true of the three named plans rather than of every case: a single project carrying the per-pole increment above 5,000 crosses the threshold above roughly 5,900 submitted poles. Under 2 CFR 200.320(a)(1) a micro-purchase may be awarded without soliciting competitive quotations where the recipient considers the price reasonable and documents that conclusion.
Read that as a planning fact, not a shortcut
Your own threshold governs, not the federal default. A recipient sets and documents its own micro-purchase threshold based on internal controls and risk, it must be permitted under state, local or tribal law, and it may self-certify up to $50,000. Some entities set theirs lower. Nothing here is priced for the purpose of keeping a purchase under a threshold, and none of this is procurement advice.
The term, so there are no surprises
Recurring Rent Monitoring is engaged per pole owner on a 12 month initial term, on the same footing: it does not renew automatically into another fixed term, it continues month to month afterwards, and either side can end it on 30 days notice.
Monitoring is engaged per build project on a 12-month initial term. It does not renew automatically into another fixed term. After the initial term it continues month to month and either side can end it on 30 days notice. You can also elect month to month from the start. If your funding is subject to appropriation and funds are not appropriated, you can end it at the end of the funded period without penalty. Free checks and single audits carry no term at all.
Start with one document
The free check costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If it finds nothing, you have learned that too, and that is worth knowing before the next estimate arrives.
Run a free checkSee what we check, and what we will notIllustrative only. The break-even figures are arithmetic on the published rates, not a projection of what any build will save. PoleProof does not guarantee that any audit will identify overcharges, that any amount will be recovered or avoided, or that any pole owner will accept any finding.
PoleProof is not a law firm and its findings are not legal advice. Nothing here is procurement, legal, accounting, tax or financial advice, and nothing here should be relied on in deciding how to account for any cost. Rates, bands, plan sizes, definitions, the term and the project cap are set out in the Client Service Agreement, which governs if this page and that agreement differ.
Last reviewed 12 August 2026. The rates and term stated here are taken from the Client Service Agreement. Charter RDOF return per its April 2024 letter to the FCC Wireline Competition Bureau, ECFS 10425099581567. Micro-purchase threshold per the FAR inflation adjustment effective 1 October 2025. Capitalization of directly attributable construction costs per ASC 360-10-30-1; capital expenditure approval per 2 CFR 200.439; permanence of 100 percent bonus depreciation under section 168(k) for qualified property acquired after 19 January 2025 per the Act of 4 July 2025.