Why a price per square metre isn't a price for your job

It's the quickest way to price a job, and it's usually the way it goes wrong. Take the floor area, multiply by a rate you used on the last similar job, and you've got a number in five minutes instead of five hours. It feels efficient right up until the job's on site and the number doesn't hold.

Why the shortcut fails

A rate per square metre carries every assumption from the job it came from: the ground conditions, the specification, the access, the amount of external works, all baked into one figure and quietly applied to a job that might share none of those things. Two extensions of the same floor area can carry completely different costs depending on foundations, drainage runs, roof form or how easy the site is to get materials onto. A square metre rate can't tell the difference. A measured takeoff can.

What measuring the actual job gets you instead

When you measure off the drawings, item by item, you're pricing what's actually there rather than what was there on a different job with a similar floor area. A longer run of drainage costs more. Difficult access costs more. A simpler roof costs less. None of that shows up in a per square metre rate, and all of it shows up in a measured takeoff.

That's the difference between a number that survives contact with the site and one that quietly falls apart by week three, once the ground's opened up or the access turns out to be worse than it looked on the drawing.

Where the shortcut still has a place

A per square metre figure isn't useless. It's fine for a very rough early conversation before there's anything to measure properly. It just isn't a number to bid a tender on or manage a budget against, and too many jobs get priced that way because there wasn't time to do it properly.

Send us the drawings you've got and we measure the job to NRM2, element by element, and price it on current UK rates, so the number reflects what's actually on the drawing rather than what a rough rate assumes is typical.

Send your drawings and get a price built on the job in front of you, not an average of every other job like it.

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