Glossary
Scope creep
Work delivered on a project that falls outside what was originally agreed in the contract or statement of work — usually added gradually, in small increments, without a corresponding change in price or timeline.
Common examples
- A client requests a fourth revision round when the contract specifies two.
- An unquoted page, feature, or deliverable gets added mid-project without a scope discussion.
- A retainer originally scoped for one channel gradually expands to cover several.
Why it's hard to catch
Scope creep almost never arrives as an obvious, single large request. It arrives as a series of individually reasonable-sounding asks, spread across many email threads, which makes it easy to approve each one without noticing the pattern. See the full breakdown in What Is Scope Creep?