Before anything gets priced, the scope needs to be nailed down in writing. What's included, what's excluded, who's supplying what. A vague scope means every item you price is a guess, and guesses don't hold up when a variation dispute lands on your desk mid-contract.
That's the first item on any decent construction pricing checklist, and it's the one most often skipped because the drawings have just landed and the deadline is Friday. The rest of the list follows the same logic: a handful of checks that take minutes each and catch the things that otherwise surface months later as a loss.
Why a construction pricing checklist beats memory
Experienced builders carry a lot in their heads. That's a strength until the week you're tired, running two jobs and pricing a third at the kitchen table. Memory skips things. It skips them in the same places every time, too: the items that don't appear on a drawing.
A written checklist doesn't make you a better estimator. It makes you a consistent one. Every job gets the same questions asked of it, whether it's a garage conversion or a block of flats. If you want the longer list of where rushed tenders go wrong, the rushed tender always misses the same things goes through it in more detail.
The seven checks, in the order they matter
- Scope first, numbers second. Write down inclusions, exclusions and free-issue items before you open a rate. If the client hasn't said who supplies the kitchen, ask, or state your assumption on the price.
- Labour and materials priced separately. Don't fold labour and materials into one figure per item. Material costs move with the market, labour costs move with availability and site conditions, and if they're mixed together you can't tell which one's eating your margin.
- Preliminaries and site set-up. Welfare, scaffold, skips, plant on hire, supervision, temporary services. Priced against the programme, not as a round figure.
- Professional fees and third-party costs. Surveys, inspections, testing and anything else outside the build itself gets its own line rather than being buried in "general costs".
- Contingency, priced honestly. Linked to the actual gaps in the information, not added as padding.
- Site conditions and access. Ground conditions, working hours, parking, deliveries, neighbours. Anything site-specific that changes how the work gets done.
- A final review against the drawings. One last pass before it goes anywhere.
Seven items. None of them clever. The value is in doing all seven on every job.
Prelims and site conditions: the two that bite hardest
Site set-up, welfare, plant on hire and supervision are costs that sit outside the measured work but still have to be paid for every week the job runs. They get missed more often than any measured item because they don't show up on a drawing.
The fix is to price them against the programme. Say a job runs for twelve weeks. Welfare cabin, toilet, skip exchanges and a site manager's time all scale with those twelve weeks. If the job slips to sixteen, so does every one of those costs. A flat percentage hides that link completely, which is exactly why it's so easy to under-price.
Site conditions work the same way. Two jobs with identical drawings can cost very different amounts once you factor in a narrow side access, restricted delivery hours or a soft ground report. These get missed when a checklist is copied from job to job without anyone looking at the actual site, or at least at the photos and the site plan.
If it doesn't appear on a drawing, it's the item most likely to be missing from your price.
Contingency you can explain
Contingency isn't a padding figure added to make a client feel better. It should reflect the actual gaps and unknowns in the information you were given at pricing stage.
The thinner the drawings, the higher the contingency needs to be, and that relationship should be explainable. A useful habit: list the specific unknowns first (no structural drawings yet, no drainage survey, finishes schedule "to be confirmed") and then decide what each one could reasonably cost you. The contingency becomes the sum of real risks rather than a number picked because it felt about right.
It also helps when you're challenged. A client who asks why the contingency is what it is gets a list, not a shrug. And when a risk is closed off (the drainage survey comes back clean, say) you know exactly which part of the contingency can come out.
Running the final review properly
Once the checklist's been worked through, go back over it against the drawings one more time before it's submitted. This final pass, done properly and not rushed, is what separates a price that holds up from one that unravels on site.
- Drawing revisions. Are you pricing the latest revision of every sheet, not just the plans?
- Cross-references. Anything shown on a section or detail but not on the plan? Those are the items that slip through.
- Double counting. Is anything priced twice, once as a measured item and again inside a subcontract quote?
- Exclusions list. Does your covering letter say clearly what you haven't priced?
- Arithmetic. Totals, carried forwards and any percentages checked by someone other than the person who built them, if you can manage it.
It doesn't have to take long. It has to happen every time, which is the whole point of having a construction pricing checklist in the first place.
A rule of thumb before you send it
Read your price back as if you were the client's QS looking for holes. For each of the seven checks, can you point to where it's dealt with in the price, even if the answer is "excluded, see note"? If there's a check with no answer at all, that's where your margin is most exposed.
If you'd rather have that work done for you, our construction estimating services measure every element off your drawings to NRM2 and price it on current rates local to the job, with the assumptions written down where you can see them.