Outsourced estimating is priced per project, not per hour. A standard renovation or extension estimate starts at £100, a house build at £150, and larger or more complex projects are quoted individually. Whether that fee is worth paying comes down to one sum, and it is not the one most builders do.
Most comparisons stop at the fee. That is the easy half. The harder half is what pricing the job yourself actually costs you: hours you never bill, tenders you do not get round to submitting, and the occasional job you win at a number you regret by week three. Below is how to work all of that out using figures you already have.
What outsourced estimating actually covers
An outsourced estimate is a fixed fee for a finished document. No retainer, no hourly rate, no minimum commitment. You send the drawings, you agree a price and a turnaround date before any work starts, and a priced estimate comes back.
The fee buys the measure as well as the price. Quantities are taken off the drawings properly rather than scaled by eye, which is the difference between an estimate you can defend in a meeting and a number you hope is roughly right. It also covers the software. A seat of professional takeoff software costs more over a year than several estimates do, and that cost does not go away on the months you have nothing to price.
What a normal project costs
Our published prices cover standard projects, which is most of what we price:
- Renovation from £100 for small work, from £150 for medium
- Extension from £100 for small work, from £200 for medium
- House build from £150 for small work, from £250 for medium
- Conversion from £150 for small work, from £200 for medium
Those figures assume a project of ordinary scope with a usable drawing set. Anything larger or more involved is quoted individually, with the turnaround date confirmed at the same time. Send the drawings over and you will have both before you commit to anything.
What pushes a job outside the standard range
Some jobs are not harder to price, just longer. These are the ones that get a tailored quote rather than a list price:
- Multiple units or repeated blocks, where the measure multiplies
- Structural complexity such as basements, steel frames, transfer slabs or significant groundworks
- Drawings that are incomplete, inconsistent between disciplines, or marked up by hand
- Phased works that need pricing as separate packages
- Services-heavy scope, where mechanical and electrical carry most of the value
- A deadline that compresses the work into a fraction of the normal window
Ask for a tailored quote on any of those and you get a fixed fee and a turnaround date, not an hourly meter. The point of quoting them individually is that a list price would have to assume the worst case, and you would end up paying for complexity your job does not have.
The sum that matters: cost per job won
Take a builder pricing domestic extensions and renovations. Round figures, so the arithmetic is easy to follow. Swap in your own as you read.
- You bid 24 jobs a year, roughly two a month
- Average contract value is £85,000
- You win one in four, so six jobs
- Your net margin is 12%
Twenty-four estimates at £150 each is £3,600 for the year. Six wins at £85,000 each is £510,000 of turnover, and 12% of that is £61,200 of margin.
So the year's estimating costs £3,600 against £61,200 of margin. That is just under 6% of the margin it helped bring in, or 0.7% of turnover. Spread across the six jobs you actually won, each win cost £600 in estimating to secure.
Run it again with your own bid count, hit rate and margin. The ratio is the useful part, not our numbers. And note what happens if the fee lets you bid 30 jobs instead of 24: at the same hit rate that is another job and a half a year, which is worth considerably more than the extra £900 in fees.
What pricing it yourself costs
Doing your own estimating is not free. It is unbilled, which is not the same thing.
Six hours is realistic for a domestic extension once you have read the drawings, measured the work, priced it and written it up. Twenty-four estimates at six hours each is 144 hours. That is eighteen working days, or the best part of four months of evenings.
Put your own value on those hours. If an hour of your time on site is worth £45, then 144 hours is £6,480 of your time set against £3,600 of fees. If the alternative was sleeping rather than earning, the number is different but it is not zero. Pricing at eleven at night is where missed items come from, and a missed item on a job you win costs a great deal more than the estimate did.
What about hiring an estimator in-house?
At a certain volume an in-house estimator is the right answer, and it is worth being straight about where that point is.
The comparison is not salary against fees. It is salary plus employer's national insurance or superannuation, pension, holiday cover, software licences, training and a desk, set against fees you only pay in the months there is something to price. Divide a fully loaded annual employment cost by your average estimate fee and you get the number of estimates a year at which in-house starts to win. Then ask honestly whether you hit that number every year, including the quiet ones.
Salary levels move and vary by region, so check current figures where you are rather than taking a number off a blog. We have written separately on when to bring in an external estimator and where the two options overlap.
What you should get for the fee
Price is only half of value. This is what a proper estimate contains, whoever prepares it:
- A fully detailed bill of quantities and cost plan with rates included
- Every trade broken into its individual components rather than a lump sum per trade
- Preliminaries measured and priced from the programme, not applied as a flat percentage
- Site management, insurances and site amenities carried as line items you can see
- Profit margin shown separately, so you can adjust it without rebuilding the estimate
- A schedule of assumptions and exclusions setting out exactly what has been allowed
Deliverables come back as an Excel bill of quantities, a Cubit file if you want to work on it yourself, and marked-up drawings showing what was measured and where. That last one matters more than it sounds: it is what lets you check the measure instead of taking it on trust.
On preliminaries in particular, be wary of anyone applying a percentage. BCIS covers why the figure varies so widely between projects, and the honest answer is that it depends on your programme rather than on a rule of thumb. Measurement standards exist for exactly this reason: NRM2 in the UK, ANZSMM in Australia and New Zealand. The RICS new rules of measurement set out the UK rules in full.
Questions worth asking before you pay anyone
- Is the fee fixed, or an estimate that can move once work starts?
- Is a turnaround date confirmed in writing before anything begins?
- Do you get the measure, or only the priced total?
- Where do the rates come from, and when were they last reviewed?
- Are preliminaries built up from the programme, or added as a percentage?
- What happens if the client issues a revised drawing halfway through?
The last one catches people out. Revisions are normal, and how a firm handles them tells you more about how they work than their price does.
Who this works for
- Builders
- Main contractors
- Subcontractors
- Developers
- Architects
FAQ
How much does an outsourced estimate cost? Standard projects start at £100 for a small renovation or extension and £150 for a small house build or conversion, rising for medium-sized work. Larger and more complex projects are quoted individually, with a fixed fee and a turnaround date agreed before any work starts.
Is estimating charged per hour or per project? Per project. You agree the fee up front and it does not move, so a job that turns out to take longer than expected is our problem rather than yours. There is no retainer and no minimum number of estimates.
How long does an estimate take? It depends on scope and drawing quality, which is why a turnaround date is confirmed alongside the fee rather than promised in advance. You will know both before you commit. If you have a tender deadline, say so when you send the drawings.
What do you need to price a job? Architectural drawings at minimum, plus structural, hydraulic and any finishes schedules if you have them. Send them as a OneDrive or Dropbox link rather than by email, so nothing is dropped for exceeding an attachment limit.
Is outsourcing cheaper than hiring an estimator? Below a certain volume, comfortably. Divide a fully loaded annual employment cost by your average estimate fee to find the number of estimates a year where in-house overtakes outsourcing, then check that against how many you genuinely price in a normal year.
Do I still need to check the estimate? Yes, and you should be given the means to. A priced total with no measure behind it cannot be checked. Marked-up drawings and an itemised bill let you verify the quantities against what you know about the job.
Where to start
If you have a set of drawings sitting on your desk, send them over and we will come back with a fixed fee and a turnaround date before anything is charged. Standard projects are priced from the list above; anything larger gets a tailored quote. We also handle tender pricing for contractors and full estimates and cost plans if you would rather hand over the whole pricing job.