The handful of things that actually make a tender price hold up

Most tender prices that fall apart don't fall apart because the contractor's bad at his job. They fall apart because the number was built on shortcuts nobody had time to fix before the deadline. Strip away the noise and there are really only a few things that separate a number that holds up from one that doesn't.

Measured quantities, not a feel for the job

The first is simple to say and hard to do under deadline pressure: measure it properly. A quantity pulled from memory, or scaled up from a similar job, drifts from what the drawings actually show. Measure every element off the drawings to NRM2 and the quantity in front of you is the quantity the job needs, not an approximation of it.

Rates that reflect now, not last year

The second is pricing on current rates. Materials and labour move, sometimes month to month, and a rate you carried from a job priced a year ago is already out of date before you've submitted the tender. A rate built on what things cost today gives you a margin you can actually rely on, rather than one that's been quietly eaten by inflation you didn't account for.

Nothing missed, nothing folded into a guess

The third is completeness. Preliminaries, attendances, the small items that never make it into a rushed take-off, these are exactly the things that erode a margin over the life of a contract. A properly measured bill catches them because it's working element by element off the drawings, not working from what an estimator remembers to include.

Why this beats instinct, every time

None of this is complicated. It's just slower than guessing, which is exactly why it gets skipped when a deadline's close. 25+ years contractor-side tells you the same thing every time: the contractors who price this way aren't the ones who win every bid. They're the ones still standing after the jobs they do win.

Send your drawings and we'll measure the job to NRM2, priced against current UK rates, with nothing folded into a guess. Send your drawings for a fixed fee quote, agreed before we start. See a sample estimate to check the kind of breakdown you'd be working from.

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