How to Price a Bill of Quantities (BOQ)

The Bill of Quantities is where construction tenders are won and lost. Price too high and you lose the 80 price points; miss a rate or misread a unit and you win a contract that bankrupts you. This guide covers how a BOQ is structured, how professionals price one, and where AI genuinely helps.

What a BOQ actually is

A BOQ is a measured list of every work item in the project, prepared by the employer’s Quantity Surveyor from the drawings. Each row has a description (“Concrete grade 25MPa in strip footings”), a unit (m³, m², kg, sum, item), a quantity, and two blank columns — rate and amount — that you fill in. Your tender price is the sum of every amount, plus preliminaries and VAT.

How professionals build a rate

Every rate is built from five parts:

• Materials — current supplier prices, including waste (5–10%)
• Labour — gang cost × production rate for the item
• Plant — owned or hired equipment time attributable to the item
• Overheads — site and head-office costs spread across the bill
• Profit & risk — your margin, tuned to how badly you want the job

Published rate guides and market-rate databases give you a starting point per item; your own cost records make them accurate.

The classic pricing mistakes

1. Unit errors — pricing per m² what the bill measures per m³.
2. Missed pages — a 200-page bill with two unpriced items can sink the whole margin.
3. Ignoring preliminaries — site establishment, supervision and insurance often run 8–15% of contract value.
4. Blindly copying rates — last year’s rates plus this year’s escalation is not a price, especially on materials like steel and cement.
5. Arithmetic slips — rate × quantity errors that evaluators correct against you, or that disqualify the bid.

Where AI helps — and where it can’t

AI is excellent at the mechanical layer: reading every page of an existing BOQ, extracting every row and unit, pricing items against market-rate data, checking arithmetic, and producing a clean priced workbook. SA Tenders AI does exactly this on Pro — it reads the tender’s own Bill of Quantities page by page, prices the line items, flags the ones that need supplier quotes, and works out the total and the implied CIDB bracket.

What AI cannot honestly do is create a BOQ from a scope description. “Construct a 2km access road” has no quantities — turning it into a priced bill requires a quantity take-off from drawings, specifications and site measurements. That is professional Quantity Surveyor or Engineer work, and any tool that pretends otherwise is guessing with your margin. If a tender has no BOQ or pricing schedule, SA Tenders AI says so plainly instead of inventing one.

A sane pricing workflow

1. Confirm the tender actually has a priced schedule (BOQ, pricing schedule or RFQ item list).
2. Run the AI read to extract and baseline-price every item.
3. Replace the flagged items with real supplier quotes.
4. Add preliminaries, check the arithmetic, and sanity-check the total against the market range for similar contracts.
5. Decide your margin last — deliberately, not by accident.

See it on a live tender: open any construction tender and run the AI bid price analysis.