Every rate in a schedule of rates was once a blank sheet of paper. Somebody sat down, listed what one unit of the finished item consumes — bricks, mortar, a mason's day, a helper's day — priced each ingredient at its basic rate, and added the margin the contractor is entitled to. That exercise is the analysis of rates, and an estimator who can carry it out from first principles is never at the mercy of a rate he cannot explain. This note walks through the anatomy of a rate, works one illustrative build-up end to end, and covers the housekeeping around it — carriage, justification statements and the basic-rate register.
What a rate is made of
Peel any analysed rate apart and you find the same five layers, in the same order:
- Materials, delivered at site. The quantity of each material one unit of finished work consumes — including unavoidable wastage — priced at its basic rate plus carriage to the work site. A brick is cheap at the kiln; what the analysis needs is its cost stacked at the wall.
- Labour, by output norms. Not a lump sum, but the fraction of a skilled and unskilled worker's day that one unit of the item absorbs, priced at the wage rates in force. This is where the task-norm concept (next section) does the work.
- Machinery and plant. Hire or usage charges for mixers, vibrators, compactors, cranes — expressed per unit of output, either from hire rates or from an hourly owning-and-operating cost divided by hourly production.
- Sundries. The small consumables and enabling costs that resist itemisation — water for the work, hand tools, minor scaffolding — usually taken as a small percentage of the material-plus-labour cost or as a lump-sum provision.
- Overheads and contractor's profit. A percentage on everything above, covering the contractor's establishment, supervision, financing, insurances and legitimate profit. Organisations fix this by rule — figures in the neighbourhood of 10–15% are common — and the analysis must use the percentage your rules prescribe, not a number remembered from elsewhere.
Two disciplines keep the layers honest. Every constant must refer to one unit of finished, measured work — the same unit the item is paid in. And nothing may appear twice: if scaffolding is a sundry inside the rate, it cannot also stand as a separate item in the estimate.
Task and output norms
The labour layer rests on a simple idea: over a normal working day, a tradesman of average skill working under average conditions produces a fairly predictable quantity of each kind of work. That quantity is his task (or out-turn), and its reciprocal is the labour constant the analysis uses. If a mason and his helpers together lay roughly one cubic metre of brickwork in a day, the analysis charges about one mason-day and one to two mazdoor-days per m³ — the helpers also carry bricks and mortar, so the unskilled constant runs higher than the skilled one.
Departmental analyses publish these constants trade by trade — so much excavation in ordinary soil per mazdoor-day, so much plaster per mason-day — and they embed assumptions worth remembering: ground-floor work, reasonable weather, materials within normal reach. Work at height, in confined spaces, or in hard rock earns adjusted constants or separate items, which is exactly why the printed analysis behind each schedule item repays reading. When you frame a rate of your own, quote the source of every constant you adopt; a constant with no pedigree is just a wish.
An illustrative build-up: 1 m³ brick masonry
Take one cubic metre of brick masonry in cement mortar 1:6 in superstructure. With modular bricks (190×90×90 mm laid with 10 mm joints), one m³ needs 500 bricks and roughly 0.23 m³ of wet mortar — about 0.31 m³ of dry mortar once the dry-volume factor, frog filling and wastage are allowed. Splitting 0.31 m³ in the 1:6 proportion gives about 0.044 m³ of cement (≈ 1.28 bags) and 0.27 m³ of sand. The labour constants and every price below are illustrative round figures for teaching only — they are not drawn from any organisation's schedule, and your own basic rates and norms will differ:
| Component | Quantity | Basic rate (illustrative) | Amount (₹) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bricks, at site incl. carriage | 500 nos | ₹7,000 / 1000 | 3,500.00 |
| Cement | 1.28 bags | ₹400 / bag | 512.00 |
| Sand, at site incl. carriage | 0.27 m³ | ₹1,800 / m³ | 486.00 |
| Mason (skilled) | 0.90 day | ₹700 / day | 630.00 |
| Mazdoor (unskilled) | 1.80 day | ₹500 / day | 900.00 |
| Water carrier | 0.20 day | ₹500 / day | 100.00 |
| Sundries — water, tools, low scaffolding @ 1% | — | — | 61.00 |
| Sub-total | 6,189.00 | ||
| Contractor's overheads & profit @ 15% (illustrative) | — | — | 928.00 |
| Analysed rate per m³ | 7,117.00 |
Read the table downward and the anatomy is visible: materials first, each carrying its carriage; labour next, as fractions of a day; sundries as a small percentage; the margin last, on the whole. Change any single basic rate — cement rises by ₹30 a bag — and the finished rate moves by exactly 1.28 × 30 × 1.15. That transparency is the entire point of analysing from first principles. The material constants above agree with our brickwork calculator and the consumption-norms table, which is how it should be — one set of constants across the whole office.
Lead, lift and carriage
"Basic rate at site" hides a calculation of its own. Materials are quoted ex-source — ex-kiln, ex-quarry, ex-godown — and the analysis must add carriage: the cost of moving the material over the lead (horizontal distance from source to site) and, within the site, the lift (vertical raising beyond the initial height the base rate covers). Carriage schedules price the first kilometre or so relatively high — loading and unloading dominate short hauls — and taper per-kilometre thereafter, with mechanical and manual transport priced separately.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the same schedule item can legitimately carry different at-site rates on two works, purely because the brick kiln is 4 km from one and 40 km from the other — which is why leads are recorded on the estimate's cover page and why copying an old estimate wholesale imports someone else's geography. Second, when work climbs — masonry above the initial storey height, concrete lifted floor by floor — the extra lift appears either as an adjusted labour constant or as a separate lift item. Forgetting it flatters the estimate and starves the bill.
Market rates and the justification statement
When an item has no entry in the schedule of rates — a proprietary product, a new specification, a trade the schedule never covered — its rate must be built from market prices, and a bare figure will not survive scrutiny. The office prepares a justification statement (the market-rate analysis): the same first-principles build-up as above, but with each basic rate supported by evidence — dated quotations from more than one supplier, prevailing wage notifications, published price lists — all kept on the file. The overheads-and-profit percentage follows the organisation's rules, and the finished analysis goes up for approval by the authority competent to sanction such rates before the item enters the estimate.
The same machinery serves at tender scrutiny: a justification statement built on current market rates is the yardstick against which a quoted premium or rebate is judged reasonable. Either way the logic is identical — a rate is defensible exactly to the extent that its ingredients are. How such non-schedule items sit inside the estimate is covered in our note on preparing a detailed estimate.
The basic-rate register
Because every analysis is only as current as the prices inside it, a well-run office keeps a basic-rate register: one authoritative list of material rates (ex-source and at-site), labour wages by category, and machinery hire rates — each entry carrying its source and effective date. The register is maintained in one place, revised when a notification or a fresh set of quotations arrives, and every analysis in the office draws from it rather than from private figures. The payoff is consistency: two estimates framed in the same month cannot quietly price cement two different ways, and when an auditor asks where ₹400 a bag came from, the register answers with a date and a reference.
Where software earns its keep
Nothing in an analysis of rates is conceptually hard; the difficulty is clerical scale. A working estimate carries hundreds of items, each analysis references dozens of basic rates, and many analyses share the same ingredients. Done on loose sheets, that web decays — one sheet is updated, its siblings are not. Estimation software keeps the web intact:
- One basic-rate register, enforced. Every analysis points at the same rate entry, so a material cannot be priced inconsistently across items.
- Recomputation on change. Revise one basic rate and every analysis that consumes it — and every abstract those analyses feed — recomputes at once, with the arithmetic beyond doubt.
- Justification statements as a by-product. The same build-up that prices the item prints as the market-rate justification, in the office's standard proforma, with the sources on record.
- Carriage handled once. Leads and carriage rates entered once per work flow into every at-site material price, instead of being re-derived item by item.
That is the estimating half of what eTAB Works-Estimator™ automates — the analysis, the register and the recomputation — so the engineer's time goes into the constants and the judgement, not the casting and checking.