What is a Schedule of Rates, and when should you price work with one?

The client publishes, or adopts, a schedule. Each item has a code, a description precise enough to be measurable, a unit and a price. A repair is then priced by listing the codes that describe what was done and multiplying by the quantities.

The contractor does not usually bid the rates themselves. They bid a percentage adjustment to the whole schedule — plus 8%, minus 3% — which is how tenders on identical schedules are compared. Some contracts run several percentages: one for responsive repairs, another for voids, another for out-of-hours.

On an SOR contract you compete on a percentage, not on a price. Everything else is fixed before you tender.

Because the alternative is unworkable. A housing association with 8,000 homes might raise 25,000 repairs a year, most of them worth under £200. Quoting each one individually would cost more in administration than the repairs cost to carry out.

A schedule solves several problems at once:

• No quote and no approval step, so the operative can be sent immediately — which matters when Awaab’s Law timescales are running.
• Predictable unit costs for budgeting across a whole stock.
• Comparability between contractors and between years.
• A defensible audit trail for public money.
• A defined standard of work attached to each item, so the specification is not renegotiated per job.

If you want to work on social housing repairs, you will price on a schedule. It is not optional, and being unable to transact on one is what keeps firms out of that market.

The rate assumes an average job. Your actual costs vary hugely around that average, and every source of variation is your risk.

1. 01Travel and access. The rate is the same for a ground-floor flat five minutes away and a top-floor maisonette forty minutes away with no parking.
2. 02No access. Turning up to a locked door produces a small abortive-visit payment at best, and often nothing.
3. 03Under-measuring. Operatives who record two codes when five items of work were done are working for nothing. This is the single largest leak on SOR contracts.
4. 04Composite items. Some codes bundle work that takes far longer than the rate implies. Find them before you bid the percentage, not after.
5. 05Material price movement. Schedules are updated periodically, usually annually. Your merchant is not on that timetable.
6. 06Client-side variation. A schedule written for planned work being used for reactive repairs will not reflect your actual costs.

On SOR work, the money is made or lost in measurement, not in the rate.

The practical defence is discipline in the field. Every item of work done must be captured on the visit, on the device, by the person who did it. A weekly reconstruction from memory always under-measures.

A useful test: if you can describe the work in advance well enough to price it, quote it. If you cannot describe the work but you can describe the units it will be made of, use a schedule. If you can do neither, dayworks — and expect the client to resist.

1. 01Which schedule and which edition. NHF version numbers matter; rates move between editions.
2. 02How the schedule handles travel, access, out-of-hours and abortive visits. If it does not, those costs come out of your percentage.
3. 03Whether materials are inside the rates or reimbursed separately.
4. 04The uplift mechanism and the review frequency for the rates themselves.
5. 05How work is verified and what evidence is required for payment — photographs, signatures, timestamps.
6. 06The variation and dayworks route for work no code describes.
7. 07Retention, if any, and the payment terms. An SOR contract is still a construction contract, so the Construction Act payment regime applies.
8. 08Your own historical cost per visit. If you do not know it, you are guessing at the percentage.

NoteRun your last 200 jobs through the schedule before you bid. If they would have earned less than they cost, no percentage adjustment inside the plausible range will fix that.

The Schedule of Rates module holds coded rate sets in an NHF-style structure, applies a per-client uplift percentage, and prices works orders and invoices from the codes rather than from free text. It is a £199-a-month bolt-on to any plan, and it is what you need in order to transact on a social housing repairs contract at all.

It sits alongside the Reactive Maintenance module at £299 a month, which runs the repairs themselves on priority SLAs measured from report time. Measured work captured on site goes into the same job costing picture as everything else, so you can see whether the percentage you bid is actually working.

Estimark does not ship a licensed copy of the NHF or NSR schedules — those are the client’s or the publisher’s to provide. You load the rate set you are contracted to.