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

The client publishes a schedule, or adopts one. Each item carries a code, a description tight enough to measure against, a unit and a price. You don’t price the repair from scratch: you list the codes that describe what was done and multiply by the quantities.

You don’t usually bid the rates themselves. You bid a percentage adjustment to the whole schedule (plus 8%, minus 3%), and that’s how tenders on identical schedules get 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 doesn’t work at that volume. 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 straight away. That 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 isn’t renegotiated per job.

If you want social housing repairs work, you’ll price on a schedule. It isn’t optional. Firms that can’t transact on one stay 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 isn’t on that timetable.
6. 06Client-side variation. A schedule written for planned work being used for reactive repairs won’t reflect your actual costs.

The rates are fixed by the schedule before you tender. What you get paid depends on the codes and quantities recorded on the visit.

The practical defence is discipline in the field. Every item of work done has to be captured on the visit, on the device, by the person who did it. Rebuild the week from memory on a Friday and you’ll under-measure every time.

A useful test. If you can describe the work in advance well enough to price it, quote it. If you can’t describe the work but you can describe the units it’ll be made of, use a schedule. If neither, dayworks, and expect the client to push back.

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 doesn’t, 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 don’t know it, you’re guessing at the percentage.

NoteRun your last 200 jobs through the schedule before you bid. If they wouldn’t have covered their own cost, no percentage adjustment inside the plausible range fixes 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’s a bolt-on to any plan, priced against your contract.

It sits alongside the Reactive Maintenance module, which runs the repairs themselves on priority SLAs measured from report time. Measured work captured on site lands in the same job costing picture as everything else, so you don’t wait until year end to find out whether the percentage you bid is holding up.

Estimark doesn’t ship a licensed copy of the NHF or NSR schedules, because those are the client’s or the publisher’s to provide. You load the rate set you’re contracted to.