What Actually Moves Your Price Between Tender and Final Account

You price a job on a Tuesday. By the time you're on site six weeks later, half your numbers are wrong. That's not bad luck, it's the nature of pricing work in this trade, and the contractors who protect their margin are the ones who know exactly which lines move and why.

Materials don't sit still

Steel, timber, plasterboard, anything with a supply chain behind it can shift in price between your tender and your order date. If you priced off a rate you had in your head from the last job, you're already behind. The only way round this is pricing off current supplier numbers at the point you tender, not memory.

Labour is the line everyone gets wrong

Day rates for trades vary by region and by how busy the local market is that month. A groundworker's gang in the south costs a different number to the same gang further north, and subbies price differently depending on what else they've got on. Get this line soft and the whole estimate is soft with it.

The site itself changes the number

Access, parking, working hours, noisy neighbours, a tight urban plot, all of it lands in your preliminaries. Two jobs with identical drawings can carry very different costs once you account for what the site actually throws at you. Contractors who skip this and price preliminaries as a flat percentage are the ones who end up covering the difference themselves.

Get the base measured right first

None of this matters if your starting quantities are off. Every driver above, material movement, labour rates, site conditions, only makes sense against an accurate set of quantities taken properly off the drawings and broken down against NRM2. Guess the quantities and you're stacking uncertainty on uncertainty. Get them right and you can see exactly where a price change lands and by how much.

We measure jobs from drawings every week and break them down against NRM2 so you know what you're pricing and where your risk sits. Send your drawings and we'll get you a set of quantities you can build a proper price on. If you want to see the kind of detail we work to first, see a sample estimate.

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