Pricing a tender this year: what's actually changed and what hasn't

Every year someone tells you pricing has changed completely. Mostly it hasn't. What has changed is quieter than that, and it's the kind of thing that catches you out if you're still pricing the way you did a couple of years back.

Material costs aren't moving together

Timber, steel, plasterboard, cement, they don't all move at the same rate or in the same direction. A material that was expensive two years ago might have settled, while something else has crept up without anyone noticing. If you're pricing a job using a blended sense of "materials are up" rather than checking the actual current cost of what you're actually buying, you're guessing at exactly the part of the job that moves the most.

Lead times are back in the conversation

For a while, getting materials on site quickly wasn't something you had to think hard about. That's not reliably true any more for every item. Some products still turn up fast. Others have a lead time that needs building into your programme and, if it's long enough, into your preliminaries. A tender that doesn't account for a genuine wait on a key item is a tender that's already wrong on price, even before it's wrong on programme.

The basics still decide who wins

None of that changes what actually wins a job: a bill of quantities that has everything measured properly, priced against current rates, with nothing missing and nothing padded. A contractor pricing off a rushed takeoff and old rates is going to lose to one pricing off a proper measure and current numbers, whatever else has changed this year.

Price this year's job on this year's numbers

The trend that matters isn't a list of buzzwords, it's whether your pricing reflects what materials and time actually cost right now, on the job in front of you.

We measure every job to NRM2 and price it against current UK rates, so the tender you submit is built on where things actually stand, not where they stood last time you looked.

Send your drawings and we'll price the job against current numbers. See a sample estimate to see how it's laid out.

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