The main contractor's tender pack lands in your inbox mid-week. A folder of drawings, a spec, a scope of works for your package, a pricing schedule to fill in, and a return date that already feels too close. You're on site all week, so the pricing happens in the evenings, if it happens at all. This is where estimating services for subcontractors earn their keep, and it's also where a lot of trade contractors lose money without noticing until the job is half built.
What you're actually being asked to price
A main contractor's enquiry isn't a neat description of your work. It's the whole project's information with your bit somewhere inside it.
The scope of works tells you what they think is in your package. The drawings show what the architect and engineer have designed. The spec tells you the standard it has to be built to. These documents don't always agree, and when they don't, it tends to be the subcontractor who carries the difference.
So the first job isn't measuring. It's reading. Go through the scope line by line and find each item on the drawings and in the spec. Note anything the scope mentions that you can't find, and anything on the drawings that clearly sits in your trade but isn't in the scope at all. Check the drawing revisions against the list in the enquiry too, because pricing from a superseded sheet is an easy way to get caught out. Those notes become your qualifications later.
Scope gaps between trades
Most of the money lost on subcontract packages isn't lost on the main quantities. It goes at the edges, where one trade's work meets another's.
- Who forms the openings in blockwork for M&E, and who makes good afterwards
- Whether the drylining package includes fire stopping at service penetrations
- Whether the groundworker's drainage price includes the final connections or stops at the last manhole
- Who supplies and fixes lintels, cavity closers and DPCs around the windows
- Who provides, adapts and moves the access your trade needs
Every one of those can be read two ways. If the main contractor's reading is "you" and yours is "not me", you find out on site, with nothing in your price to cover it. A bill of quantities that every subcontractor prices from helps here, because it forces the boundaries onto paper. Plenty of packages go out without one, though.
The fix is dull, and it works. Write down where your package starts and stops, item by item, and put it in your tender as a clear list of inclusions and exclusions. Most main contractors can work with a clearly qualified price. What causes trouble for everyone is a cheap number that turns into a string of variations once you're on site.
Measure your own trade, don't borrow someone else's numbers
Sometimes the enquiry arrives with quantities already filled in. It's tempting to just put your rates against them and send it back.
Be careful. Those quantities may have been measured for a different purpose, taken from an earlier revision, or measured in a way that doesn't match how your trade actually gets built. A plasterer cares about reveals, beads and ceiling heights. A roofer cares about hips, valleys and abutments, not just the plan area. A single generic quantity can hide all of that.
Measuring your own package from the drawings gives you quantities you understand and can stand behind. If they differ from the main contractor's figures, that difference is useful. Either you've found something they missed or they've included something you didn't spot, and both are worth knowing before you submit. We've covered what a full measure picks up in what a proper quantity takeoff catches that a quick measure misses.
Measure to a recognised standard
Measuring to NRM2 isn't about paperwork for its own sake. It means every item is described and measured the same way each time, so your quantities can be compared with the main contractor's, questioned line by line, and updated cleanly when the drawings are revised.
Where estimating services for subcontractors fit in
You know your trade. Your rates, your gang sizes, how long a job really takes and where it usually goes wrong. What you rarely have is a spare few days to sit down and measure a full package off a set of drawings before a deadline, while also running the jobs you've already won.
Good estimating services for subcontractors don't replace that knowledge. They take the measuring and the first pass at pricing off your hands, so your evenings go on checking and adjusting rather than scaling drawings.
At MPE we measure your package off the drawings to NRM2, price it on current UK rates for where the job is, and deliver it to your tender deadline for a fixed fee agreed before we start. If the main contractor has already sent a scope or a pricing schedule, send it with the drawings and we'll price against it. There's more on how our estimating for subcontractors works on the service page. If you're a smaller trade business pricing direct work rather than packages, our estimating for trades page covers that side.
What comes back is a measured, itemised price. You can put your own rates over it, check any quantity against the drawings, and use it to fill in whatever schedule the main contractor asked for.
Before you send the price back
Run through this before the email goes:
- Every scope item found on the drawings, or flagged as unclear
- Drawing revisions checked against the enquiry list
- Inclusions and exclusions written out, especially at trade boundaries
- Attendances, access, welfare and waste: whose are they?
- Programme assumptions stated, because a squeezed programme costs money
- Payment terms and retention read, so the risk is reflected in how you price
None of this is complicated. It's just easy to skip when the price is due tomorrow and you're still on the tools. Our piece on pricing a package when half the information's missing covers what to do when the enquiry is thinner than it should be.
Price the package you can see, qualify the parts you can't, and don't let the edges of your scope turn into free work.