How to price a BOQ off your own rate cards

Every estimator in Kathmandu owns two numbers for everything: the number the market quotes, and the number it actually costs you. The BOQ you win with is built on the second one. So the rate card you estimate from has to be yours, grown out of your own completed projects, not copied from a dalali rate sheet that was optimistic the day it was printed.

Here is how we build one, and how we keep it alive.

Your last five projects are the rate card

Take the last five jobs you finished. For each BOQ line you care about, work out what it truly cost you on site, not what you billed. Excavation for us runs about Rs 420 per m³ in normal soil with a short haul, because we measured it across three sites in Balen ward 8 with our own excavator and our own diesel. PCC 1:3:6 lands near Rs 8,900 per m³ at current aggregate and cement prices. Rebar Fe500, with cutting and binding labour, sits around Rs 1,12,000 per tonne.

Nobody handed us those rates. They fell out of our own purchase records, our own fuel slips, and our own wage bills. That provenance is the entire value. When a rate is yours, you know what's inside it, and you know which way it moves when diesel jumps Rs 12 a litre.

Most rate cards die the first time a client asks why concrete costs what it does. Own the number and you can defend it.

Where market rates betray you

The printed rate sheet has one job: to be low enough that somebody else's estimate loses. If you build your BOQ on it, you inherit somebody else's assumptions about labour productivity, haul distance, and wastage. I have watched contractors win a tender off a market rate and then spend the whole project discovering, line by line, which assumption was never true for them.

The usual offenders are the boring lines. Curing water. Scaffolding days. Night-shift lighting for a pour that slips. Carriage for aggregate when the highway has one of its weeks. A rate card built from your own projects carries these inside the number already, because you paid them.

Version it or lose it

A rate card is a photograph of a moving market, so it needs dates. Cement moved twice this year. Rebar drifted down in the spring and came back. If your rates have no version, then a quote from March and a quote from September are being compared by a client who does not know they're different documents.

So each revision of the quote carries the rates as they were that week. When the client comes back in Magh asking to reuse the Kartik price for rebar, you're not arguing. You're showing them a dated card, the way a bank shows you a dated exchange rate. This one habit has saved me more money than any negotiation tactic I know.

Defending the number

The push-back always comes, and it should, because a client who never questions your concrete rate is probably not reading the BOQ at all. When it comes, the conversation is short if the number is yours.

Why is your PCC rate above the market one? Because my card carries curing for fourteen days and carriage from the Bhotekoshi side, and the market sheet doesn't say what it carries. Here is the rate, here is what's inside it, here is the project it came from. Take it or line-item it, but there is no mystery in it to argue with.

Contractors lose quotes they should have won, and win quotes they should have lost, on rates nobody could explain. Your own rate card ends both. It takes an afternoon to start, and it gets more accurate with every job you feed it.