How to quote a fit-out project properly

Start with a proper measured survey, not a walk-round guess

Every bad quote starts the same way: someone walks the site with a tape measure and a notepad, eyeballs a few rooms, and builds a price from memory back at the office. On a domestic extension that might just about work. On a fit-out, it doesn't - too many trades, too many junctions between them, too much that's hidden until you open something up.

Do a proper take-off. Measure every room: floor area, wall lengths, ceiling heights, door and window openings. Note existing services - where the incoming electrics, water and data are, what condition the ceiling void is in, whether there's asbestos documentation for the building. Photograph everything, room by room, and log it against your drawing so you can check quantities later without a second site visit. If there's no up-to-date drawing, get one, even if it's just a marked-up plan - pricing off a landlord's ten-year-old floor plan is how you miss a stud wall that's moved.

The survey is also where you catch the things that turn a tidy job into a loss-maker: low soffits that kill your ceiling void, a lift that won't take a pallet of plasterboard, single-phase power where you need three-phase for the kitchen extract. Every one of those is cheap to deal with at quote stage and expensive to deal with in week three.

Break the job into work sections

Don't price a fit-out as one lump sum built up in your head - split it into work packages and price each one on its own merits. A typical commercial fit-out breaks down roughly as:

• Strip-out - removal of existing fit-out, soft strip, skips, asbestos survey/removal if applicable
• M&E - mechanical and electrical: containment, cabling, lighting, small power, ventilation, heating/cooling, fire alarm
• Partitions and ceilings - stud walls, glazed partitions, suspended ceilings, fire-rated construction
• Joinery - reception desks, kitchens, bespoke units, skirtings and architraves
• Decoration - plastering, painting, wall finishes
• Flooring - screed, raised access floor, carpet tile, LVT, resin
• Furniture (FF&E) - desks, chairs, storage, signage, window treatments

Pricing this way does two things. First, it forces you to actually think through every element rather than relying on a gut-feel total. Second, it means when a client wants to value-engineer the job, you can show them exactly what comes out and what that's worth, instead of guessing at a percentage cut across the board.

Price labour, materials and subcontractors separately - don't blend them

Within each work section, keep three separate lines: your own labour, materials you're supplying, and subcontracted packages (M&E is almost always sub'd unless you're a specialist). Blending them into one number per section might look tidier on a spreadsheet, but it makes the quote useless for anything else - you can't job-cost against it, you can't spot which trade is eating the margin, and you can't quickly reprice if a supplier's numbers move.

Get subcontractor quotes in writing before you price, not verbal estimates you're rounding from memory. A sub who says "about four grand" on the phone has a habit of invoicing five. Build in your markup on sub-contracted packages same as materials - you're taking on the risk of managing them, so you should be paid for it.

Preliminaries - the stuff everyone forgets to price

Preliminaries ("prelims") are the costs of running the job that aren't tied to a specific trade, and they're the single most common thing left out or under-priced in a fit-out quote. They typically include:

• Site setup and mobilisation
• Welfare - toilets, canteen, drying room if it's a longer job
• Site management and supervision time (yours or a site manager's)
• Access equipment - scaffold towers, MEWPs, hop-ups
• Skips and waste removal, including any segregated waste for recycling
• Protection - floor protection, protecting existing finishes, dust screens if it's a live building
• Temporary power and lighting
• Site security and insurance for the duration

A rough rule of thumb: on a typical commercial fit-out, prelims run somewhere between 8% and 15% of the total job value, more on a live occupied building with restricted access or out-of-hours working, less on a straightforward empty shell. If you're not pricing prelims as a distinct line, you're either absorbing them into your labour rates (where they get lost and eroded over time) or you're simply not covering them.

Provisional sums and PC sums - use them properly, not as a get-out

A provisional sum is money set aside for work you know needs doing but can't price accurately yet - say, making good to a floor slab you can't inspect until the strip-out's done. A PC sum (prime cost sum) is for a specified item where the client hasn't chosen the exact product yet - sanitaryware, ironmongery, light fittings - so you carry an allowance based on a reasonable spec.

Both are legitimate and clients expect to see them on a fit-out quote. What isn't legitimate is using a provisional sum to dodge doing the survey properly, or setting a PC sum artificially low to make the headline price look better, knowing full well the client will want to spend more once they see the sample board. State clearly what each sum is based on (the spec, the allowance per item, the assumption) so there's no argument later about what "provisional" actually covered.

Contingency: build it in, and say so

Refurb and fit-out work always turns up surprises once walls and ceilings come off - that's not a sign of a bad survey, it's the nature of working in existing buildings. Price a contingency of 5–10% on a relatively known building, rising to 10–15% on an older or poorly documented one. Show it as its own line rather than folding it into your rates. A client who sees "contingency 8%" understands what it's for; a client who finds out later that your day rate had a hidden buffer in it feels stitched up, even if the maths was fair.

Markup vs margin - know which one you're using

This trips up more people than anything else in pricing, and it quietly loses money every time it's confused. Markup is the percentage you add to your cost. Margin is the percentage of the sale price that's profit. They are not the same number.

Add a 20% markup to a £1,000 cost and you get a sell price of £1,200. But £200 profit on a £1,200 sale price is a margin of only 16.7%, not 20%. If you're pricing a job assuming 20% markup gives you a 20% margin, you're short by over 3 percentage points on every line - and across a whole fit-out that's real money. The formula: margin = markup ÷ (1 + markup). Decide which one your business actually targets, build your pricing tool around that, and stay consistent across quotes.

Make scope and exclusions crystal clear

Vague scope is where profitable jobs turn into arguments. List exactly what's included, section by section, and be equally explicit about what's excluded - building control fees, planning costs, out-of-hours working, making good beyond what's specified, dilapidations, furniture not listed, IT and data cabling if that's someone else's package. If a client assumes something's included because it wasn't specifically excluded, that's your problem, not theirs, once the contract's signed. Every assumption you've made in pricing (existing services adequate, no asbestos, standard working hours, unrestricted access) should be written down as a stated assumption, not left implicit.

VAT, the domestic reverse charge, and CIS

Standard-rated construction work is VAT at 20% in almost all commercial fit-out - don't assume the reduced or zero rate applies without checking. Since March 2021, the domestic reverse charge applies to most construction services between VAT-registered, CIS-registered businesses: if your customer is a contractor further up the chain (not the end user), you don't charge VAT on the invoice - they account for it themselves under the reverse charge. Get this wrong and you either under-collect VAT you owe HMRC, or you charge a contractor VAT they can't reclaim the normal way, which causes a real headache. Ask the customer, in writing, whether they're the end user or an intermediary before you raise the invoice.

Separately, CIS applies to the labour element of payments to subcontractors in construction. Verify each subcontractor's status with HMRC before the first payment - registered subs have 20% deducted at source, unregistered ones 30%. Materials aren't subject to CIS deduction, which is another reason to keep labour and materials as separate lines on your costing, not just on the client-facing quote.

Present it in clear sections, with validity and payment terms

However good the pricing behind it, the quote itself needs to read clearly. Present it by work section (strip-out, M&E, partitions, joinery, decoration, flooring, FF&E), with prelims, provisional sums, PC sums and contingency shown as their own lines. State a validity period - 30 days is standard for a fit-out quote, given material prices move - and be explicit about payment terms: deposit, stage payments tied to milestones, retention if applicable, and when the final balance is due. Vague payment terms cause more disputes than pricing errors do.

Getting all of this right by hand in a spreadsheet is entirely possible, it's just slow and easy to get wrong on a busy week - which is largely why job management software for project-based trades exists: to keep quoting, job costing and CIS/VAT consistent from one job to the next rather than rebuilt from scratch every time. If you're comparing options, most vendors publish their pricing so you can weigh it against what a single mispriced quote actually costs you.