What should be included in a builder’s quote?

A builder’s quote should include the company’s full details and insurance, an itemised breakdown of labour and materials, preliminaries, any provisional or PC sums, a written list of exclusions, overheads and profit, VAT, a programme with a start date and duration, a staged payment schedule, a written process for variations, and a validity period. If any of those are missing, the price you are looking at is not really a price.

Most homeowners we speak to have three quotes in front of them and no way of telling which one is honest. That is not a failure of intelligence, and it’s a failure of format. Builders write quotes however they like, so one arrives as a fourteen page itemised document and the next arrives as a WhatsApp message with a number.

Citizens Advice found that nearly three in ten people who hired a trader for work on their home in the last eighteen months ran into an issue, and that more than eight in ten of those who tried to sort it out hit a barrier doing so. A large share of those problems aren’t caused by bad builders. They’re caused by a document at the start of the job that never said clearly enough what was included.

So here’s a checklist. It’s the same one we run every quote through before it reaches a homeowner. If you need more help tell us about your project and we can jump on a call!

Quote or estimate? Check the word before you check the number

Before anything else, look at what the document calls itself, because the two words mean very different things and confusing them is one of the most common ways homeowners end up paying more than they expected.

A quote is a fixed price offer for a defined scope of work, and once you’ve accepted it in writing it generally forms a binding contract, which means the builder can’t move off that figure unless the scope changes. An estimate is a considered best guess, and it’s allowed to move.

Plenty of documents are headed “Quotation” and then contain wording further down that quietly makes the whole thing provisional, so read all the way to the end rather than trusting the heading. The Federation of Master Builders is clear that a quote gives you an accurate breakdown of the project and an agreed price, provided the specification doesn’t change, and that last clause is where the whole game gets played. It’s also why the scope section matters far more than the total.

The 12 things a builder’s quote should include

1. Who’s actually quoting

You want the company name, registered address, company number if it’s a limited company, VAT registration number if they’re registered, and evidence of both public liability and employers’ liability insurance. All of that sounds like admin, but it isn’t, because if the company named on the quote isn’t the company on the bank details, or the insurance expired four months ago, you’d much rather know now than after a flood.

Check out how we at The Page vet our builders, and make sure they’re legit before you’re ever matched.

2. A scope of works you can actually read

The single most useful thing in any quote is a description of the work broken into recognisable stages, covering strip out, structural alterations, first fix plumbing, first fix electrics, plaster, joinery, kitchen installation, tiling, flooring, second fix, decoration, making good and snagging.

Phrases like “works as discussed” or “as per site visit” are the ones to worry about, because they aren’t shorthand for a shared understanding, they’re room to argue later. If the quote doesn’t describe the job in enough detail that a builder who’d never visited could price it from the page, then it isn’t a scope, it’s a memory.

3. Labour and materials, itemised

You want to see where the money actually sits, because a single lump sum tells you nothing about whether the builder has understood the job and it makes negotiation impossible, given that you can’t challenge a number you can’t see inside.

Itemisation protects the builder just as much, because when a homeowner changes their mind about the flooring in week six, a quote with a flooring line already in it has an obvious starting point for the conversation, whereas a quote without one has an argument.

4. Preliminaries

Preliminaries, or prelims, are the costs of running the site rather than building anything, so they cover scaffolding, skips and waste removal, welfare facilities, temporary protection, site management and supervision, insurance, power and water.

On a London refurbishment they routinely account for ten to fifteen per cent of the total, and they’re the most common place for a cheap looking quote to be cheap, because a builder who hasn’t priced scaffolding hasn’t stopped needing scaffolding.

Prelims are also time related, which is worth understanding before you sign anything. If the programme slips by three weeks, then the prelims are the part of the price that wants to grow.

5. Provisional sums and PC sums, with what they assume

A provisional sum is a placeholder for work that isn’t yet fully defined, while a prime cost (PC) sum is an allowance for an item you haven’t chosen yet, most often tiles, sanitaryware, ironmongery, kitchen units or worktops.

Both are entirely legitimate, and any honest quote on a project with unfinished design decisions will contain some of each. The danger is a provisional sum set deliberately low in order to keep the headline figure attractive, because if a quote allows £2,000 for sanitaryware across two bathrooms and you’ve been sending your builder pictures of Drummonds baths, then that gap is going to land on your final invoice rather than theirs.

For every provisional and PC sum, the quote should state what it covers, what quality or quantity has been assumed, and when the figure needs to be fixed. Then add them all up, because if the provisional sums come to more than about fifteen per cent of the total, you don’t have a price, you have a range.

6. Exclusions and anything “by others”

This is the section that decides whether a quote is genuinely cheap or simply short.

A good quote states plainly what isn’t in the number, and the common exclusions on London jobs include building control fees, party wall surveyor costs, structural engineer’s fees, temporary works design, asbestos survey and removal, appliance supply, window supply, curtains and blinds, floor finishes, final decoration, landscaping, and making good to neighbouring properties.

“By others” means the builder has assumed someone else is doing it and has priced nothing for it, and that someone is usually you.

One quote can look £9,000 cheaper right up until the point you notice it excludes external making good and floor build up. We’ve seen exactly that happen, and it’s covered further down.

7. Overheads and profit

Every builder charges overheads and profit, so the only real question is whether they show it, and it typically sits somewhere between ten and twenty per cent, either as a stated line or spread invisibly across the rates.

A builder who states it openly isn’t being expensive, they’re being legible. A builder showing no margin at all has either buried it or hasn’t priced it, and the second of those should worry you rather more than the first.

8. Contingency

A contingency is money set aside for what nobody can see yet, which means the rot behind the plaster, the wiring that no longer meets the current regulations, and the drain that runs where no drawing says it does.

The FMB advises setting aside at least ten per cent of the total project cost, and more for older properties or anything structural. Tim Phillips of Quantiv, quantity surveyor for the Homebuilding & Renovating Show, breaks it down further by risk profile, suggesting five to ten per cent for a new build on a clear site, ten per cent for a standard extension, fifteen to twenty per cent for the renovation of an older property, and twenty per cent or more for listed buildings or structural alterations. Given how much of London’s housing stock is Victorian and how much of our work is listed, that upper band is the one most of our homeowners should be planning around.

Some builders carry a contingency inside their quote while others expect you to hold it yourself, and what matters is that you know which of those you’re dealing with and that you’ve actually got the money set aside. A realistic quote carrying a contingency is more honest than a lower one that pretends surprises don’t happen in Victorian houses.

9. VAT, stated explicitly

VAT at twenty per cent on a £180,000 refurbishment comes to £36,000, which isn’t a rounding error, it’s a kitchen.

Some builders quote inclusive of VAT, some quote exclusive, and some aren’t VAT registered at all, so when you put three quotes side by side and one of them has quietly applied VAT while the others haven’t, the comparison is already meaningless before you’ve read a single line item. Check every quote for this before you check anything else, because we’ve run a three way tender where only one of the contractors had included it.

Certain works do attract reduced or zero rating, including some conversions of empty properties and changes to the number of dwellings, so it’s worth asking rather than assuming.

10. Programme, start date and duration

A price with no programme attached is only half a quote, so you should be seeing an expected start date, an estimated duration on site, and ideally the sequence of the key stages.

Programme is also the most underrated way of comparing builders. When one contractor says four weeks and another says nine for the same schedule of works, that gap is telling you something about their crew size, their other commitments, or their understanding of the job, and there’s a very real cost to you if you’re renting somewhere else while the work happens.

11. A payment schedule tied to stages, not dates

Payments should be linked to work completed rather than to the calendar, so a reasonable structure on a residential refurbishment might run from a modest deposit or mobilisation payment through staged payments at defined points such as completion of strip out, completion of first fix and completion of plastering, with a final payment held back until snagging has been signed off.

Be cautious about anything heavily weighted to the front, because a payment schedule that asks for sixty per cent before anyone has lifted a hammer is transferring the entire risk of the project onto you. A retention of around five per cent held for a defects period, typically six or twelve months, is both normal and sensible.

12. A written variations process, and a validity period

Variations are changes to the agreed scope, and they’re the single biggest cause of a final bill that doesn’t match the quote. Jeremy Gray, head of external affairs at the Federation of Master Builders, puts it plainly: “Every change should be costed and approved in writing before it’s carried out.”

The quote should say how that’s going to work, covering who prices a change, how quickly they’ll do it, in what format, and who signs it off. Get all of that agreed at quote stage and the awkward conversation in week seven becomes a piece of paperwork instead of an argument.

Finally, look for a validity period, because materials and labour rates move and a quote written in March isn’t automatically still standing in September. Anywhere between thirty and ninety days is normal, and if there isn’t one on the page at all then it’s worth asking how long the figure will hold.

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Same house, same drawings, three builders, a £29,000 gap

Here’s what all of this looks like in practice, taken from a refurbishment we tendered in south west London. Three vetted contractors priced the same schedule of works and visited the same property, and the figures came back at £169,771, £181,180 and £199,120 before VAT.

That’s an apparent saving of £29,349 for going with the cheapest, except that when we went through the three of them line by line:

• One builder had priced a package of repointing, scaffolding and external decoration at somewhere between £9,700 and £17,400, while the other two hadn’t mentioned it at all, and the work still needed doing.
• The steelwork varied by 56 per cent between two of them, £11,900 against £18,500, which usually means somebody has misread the structural drawings.
• One quote allowed £1,250 for a boiler, supply and fit, which isn’t a boiler, it’s a deposit.
• Patio works were either incomplete or marked TBC on two of the three.

Once those gaps had been closed and the quotes were genuinely like for like, the real range turned out to be roughly £185,000 to £200,000. The £29,000 saving was mostly a difference in what had been written down rather than a difference in what the job would actually cost.

We see the same pattern constantly, and on a north London refurbishment and rear dormer, three quotes came in at £126,900, £138,710 and £145,675, and the lowest of them was missing floor build up and external making good worth around £9,000 while also being the only one of the three not showing VAT. Once that had been adjusted properly, the ranking between the three of them changed entirely.

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How The Page helps to review quotes with you

We believe in helping homeowners to learn and understand so that they can make decisions confidently, based on knowledge and clarity, not hopes and dreams. We support all homeowners to understand each quote, compare any differences, and understand why some elements have a higher cost attached. No gate-keeping, no lack of control, and no decisions made for you. 

This is why the quote review isn’t an afterthought – it’s built into our process:

1. We brief your Pagers properly so quotes are comparing like-for-like
2. We review every line item with you to spot gaps, inconsistencies, or red flags
3. We help you understand what you’re paying for and whether it’s reasonable
4. We push back on vague pricing so you know exactly where your money’s going
5. We guide you through trade-offs between cost, service level, and timeline

Because here’s what we believe: you shouldn’t need a construction background to get a fair deal on your renovation. Transparency isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the foundation of how we work.

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The bottom line

A good quote tells you more than just the price. It tells you whether the builder has properly assessed your job, how they operate, and whether they’re being honest about what it will take.

Don’t just pick the cheapest number. Pick the quote that gives you confidence you know what you’re signing up for, which might, in fact, be the lowest number!

Get in touch and let’s take the stress out of comparing builders so that you can renovate with confidence.