Indian public works does not ask you to invent a rate — it asks you to price against a published schedule and tender a percentage above or below it. That is a different job, and it needs different tools: import, dating, controlled uplift, and a defensible analysis for every item the schedule does not carry.
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If you prepare CPWD or state PWD tenders, most of your rates are not yours. They are the schedule's. The work is holding that schedule accurately, adjusting it honestly for station and for date, and analysing the handful of items it does not cover — and a spreadsheet is a poor place to do any of that, because a spreadsheet cannot tell you that a rate is eighteen months old.
BillMate is for exactly that shape of work: a sole practitioner, a small consultancy, or a contractor's estimator with a bill to price and a percentage to decide on. It runs offline, on your own machine, for one payment.
On every other market page on this site, the surveyor builds a rate from constituents they price themselves. In Indian public works that is the exception rather than the rule. The Delhi Schedule of Rates, and the state schedules that follow its pattern, already carry a rate for most of what you will measure. Your bill is priced at those rates before a contractor sees it, and the contractor's entire bid is one number: a percentage above the schedule, at par with it, or below it.
So the questions a tool has to answer here are different ones. Not what is this worth, but: which edition of the schedule is this, when was it published, has it been adjusted for my station, and which of these items is not in it at all?
BillMate does not ship the schedule, and will not. We bundle no published cost data in any market — not BCIS, not SPON'S, and not the DSR. It is a government publication with its own terms; holding a current copy is your responsibility, not something a software licence should quietly hand you. Why we take that position everywhere.
What BillMate does instead is hold your copy properly. Import the schedule as a CSV or Excel file, map its columns once, and every row lands in the rate library with its edition recorded as the source and its publication month as the date. From then on it behaves like any other rate: it prices a bill in one pass, it carries its provenance onto the exported document, and it starts warning you at 12 months — which, for a schedule that is revised every year or two, is precisely the reminder that matters.
Item numbers in the schedule's own chapter form, quantities in the schedule's own units — and one item, deliberately, that the schedule does not carry.
| Item | Description | Unit | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.8.1 | Brick work with common burnt clay F.P.S. bricks of class designation 7.5 in superstructure, in cement mortar 1:6 | cum | 22.48 | ₹9,842 | ₹2,21,248.16 |
| 4.1.3 | Non-schedule item. Cement concrete M20 (1:1.5:3) in RCC work; rate as per the analysis submitted with this tender | cum | 18.60 | ₹10,486.22 | ₹1,95,043.69 |
| 5.2.2 | Thermo-mechanically treated bar reinforcement for RCC work, including bending, binding and placing in position | quintal | 42.60 | ₹8,240 | ₹3,51,024 |
| 11.3.1 | Cement plaster 1:6, 12 mm thick, on brick walls internally | sqm | 268.40 | ₹1,124 | ₹3,01,681.60 |
| 6.1.2 | Kota stone slab flooring 25 mm thick over 20 mm base of cement mortar 1:4, jointed and polished | sqm | 96.80 | ₹2,340 | ₹2,26,512 |
| 13.1.1 | Distempering with oil-bound washable distemper of approved brand, two coats over primer | sqm | 186.20 | ₹486 | ₹90,493.20 |
| 19.1 | Provisional sum for external development and horticulture, to be expended as directed | sum | 1 | ₹3,50,000 | ₹3,50,000 |
| Carried to collection | ₹17,36,002.65 | ||||
Illustrative project and illustrative rates — not a quotation, and not a reproduction of any edition of any schedule. Item 2.8.1 carries the quantity the dimension sheet below casts; item 4.1.3 is the non-schedule item, carrying the rate the analysis below arrives at, and it is the one line here you would have to defend in a negotiation. Note the units the schedule works in — cum, sqm and reinforcement by the quintal. One rate is an AI draft and is marked as one, on screen and on the exported document, which also counts them.
A contractor does not reprice the bill line by line. They read it, decide what they can do it for, and quote a single percentage against the schedule.
| Line | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Total at schedule rates | Every item above, priced at the published schedule | ₹17,36,002.65 |
| Tendered percentage | 4.75% below the schedule — the whole of the contractor's bid | −₹82,460.13 |
| Amount of the tender | What the contractor is paid the work at | ₹16,53,542.53 |
| Goods and services tax | 18% on the tendered amount, at the rate you set | ₹2,97,637.65 |
| Gross tendered amount | Carried to the covering letter | ₹19,51,180.18 |
Computed from the bill above, 25 August 2026, so the two cannot drift apart. Why this matters for how you keep rates: when the entire bid is a percentage against a published schedule, the accuracy of your copy of that schedule is the accuracy of the tender. A stale edition does not produce a slightly wrong bill — it produces a bill that is wrong by the whole of whatever the schedule moved by, on every single line, in the same direction. That is the argument for dating a rate and flagging it at 12 months, and it is sharper here than in any other market on this site. On GST: BillMate does not know your tax position and does not work it out — you set the label to GST and type the rate, and it is applied to the sub-total after preliminaries and contingency.
A small difference that changes the sheet: where other methods describe the wall thickness, CPWD measures it, so it takes a column of its own.
| Times | Dimensions | Squaring | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 39.08 0.23 3.00 |
26.97 | Superstructure walls, floor to underside of slab. Centre-line girth 39.08 — the 40.00 external perimeter less one wall thickness at each of four corners. Note the third dimension: this trade is measured in cum, so 0.23 is measured, not described. | |
| 6/ | 1.50 1.20 0.23 |
2.48 | Deduct six window openings, 1500 × 1200. Timesing 6/. |
| 3/ | 1.00 2.10 0.23 |
1.45 | Deduct three door openings, 1000 × 2100. |
| 9/ | 1.80 0.23 0.15 |
0.56 | Deduct RCC lintels over the openings — they are measured with the concrete, not with the brickwork. |
| Cast into the bill | 22.48 | cum | |
Three dimensions on the first line rather than two, because the trade is billed by volume. The lintel deduction is the instructive one: those 0.56 cum are real brickwork you are not building, and they belong with the concrete instead — measure them in both places and you have billed the same space twice. Whether a particular opening or lintel is deducted at all is a question for the specification and your preambles, not for the software; BillMate does the arithmetic you ask for and keeps the working behind the quantity. The full walkthrough, including measuring on screen from an image of the drawing.
Constituent by constituent, in the shape an analysis of rates takes, down to the labour designations a checker will expect to see.
| Constituent | Quantity | Unit | Cost | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Material Cement, 43 grade OPC — 8.06 bags per cum | 8.06 | bag | ₹425 | ₹3,425.50 |
| Material Coarse sand, screened | 0.42 | cum | ₹1,850 | ₹777 |
| Material Stone aggregate 20 mm nominal size, graded | 0.84 | cum | ₹1,650 | ₹1,386 |
| Material Water charges and curing | 1.00 | item | ₹45 | ₹45 |
| Labour Mason, first class — laying and finishing | 0.17 | day | ₹1,150 | ₹195.50 |
| Labour Beldar — batching, mixing and placing | 1.75 | day | ₹840 | ₹1,470 |
| Labour Bhisti — water carriage and curing | 0.90 | day | ₹840 | ₹756 |
| Plant Concrete mixer 0.4 cum with hopper, including operator | 0.07 | day | ₹2,400 | ₹168 |
| Plant Needle vibrator, including operator | 0.07 | day | ₹950 | ₹66.50 |
| Net cost | ₹8,289.50 | |||
| Overheads and establishment charges, 10% | ₹828.95 | |||
| Profit and risk, 15% on net cost plus overheads | ₹1,367.77 | |||
| Unit rate per cum | ₹10,486.22 | |||
Illustrative constituent costs for Delhi, 25 August 2026. These are an illustration of the method and are not current market rates — price every line against your own suppliers and the current minimum wages before you submit anything. One thing to watch: a published analysis of rates typically adds a single 15% for the contractor's profit and overheads together. BillMate's defaults apply 10% and 15% separately, which compounds to about 26.5% — if your analysis is going to be checked against the published convention, set overheads to zero and leave profit at 15%.
The labour lines are the ones that make this recognisable as an Indian analysis rather than a translated European one: mason, beldar and bhisti, measured in days rather than hours, because that is how the coefficients are published and how a checker will read them back. Materials in bags and cum, plant by the day. Get the shape right and the arithmetic is the easy part — the same method, worked in another market.
A schedule is published for one station, and work anywhere else is adjusted to it by a published cost index. That adjustment is a percentage applied to a whole schedule — which is, exactly, the operation BillMate already performs.
General observations about how these markets differ, not price data, and deliberately no index figures: those are published by the authority that publishes the schedule, and reproducing them here would be the same mistake as bundling the schedule itself. What BillMate gives you is the mechanism — uplift a whole schedule by a percentage, restrict it to one currency or one search, preview the before-and-after on real rows, and apply it as a single undoable operation that records the uplift in each rate's provenance rather than overwriting its history. How the library works.
| Description | Unit | Rate | Location | Priced | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brick work, F.P.S. class 7.5, cement mortar 1:6, superstructure | cum | ₹9,842 | Delhi — schedule | 2026-04 | Published schedule | Current |
| Ditto, uplifted to station cost index | cum | ₹11,318.30 | Mumbai | 2026-06 | Uplifted schedule | Current |
| Cement concrete M20 (1:1.5:3) in RCC work | cum | ₹10,486.22 | Delhi — Dwarka | 2026-06 | Own build-up | Current |
| TMT bar reinforcement, cut, bent, bound and placed | quintal | ₹8,240 | Delhi — schedule | 2026-04 | Published schedule | Current |
| Distempering, oil-bound washable, two coats over primer | sqm | ₹486 | Delhi — Dwarka | 2026-06 | AI draft | Unverified |
| Providing and fixing anodised aluminium windows | sqm | ₹6,480 | Delhi — schedule | 2024-09 | Published schedule | Stale |
Read the source column. Two of these came from the published schedule; one is the same item uplifted to a station index, and it says so rather than pretending to be a published figure; one is your own analysis; one is an unverified AI draft. The last is a schedule rate from 2024 and is flagged stale — on a percentage tender that single row would be quietly wrong by two editions. Illustrative rates, not market evidence and not a reproduction of any schedule.
Hindi and Tamil are two of the 6 interface languages. By default the terms of art stay in English — BOQ, Preliminaries, Contingency, Taking-off, Rate build-up, the unit symbols and GST — because most surveyors read those as fixed terminology whatever language the rest of the screen is in. If you would rather have them localised, Translate technical terms in settings does that.
Numbers follow the project's own locale, which for a rupee project means digits are grouped in lakhs and crores. The gross figure in the tender above renders as ₹19,51,180.18, not as ₹1,951,180.18 — a difference that looks trivial written down and is not, because one of those is a number a client's engineer can read at a glance and the other is a number they have to stop and count. It is the same everywhere the figure appears: on screen, in the exported PDF, and in the CSV, which is written as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark so Devanagari and Tamil descriptions open correctly in Excel rather than as a screen of question marks.
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Every market above has a page of its own, and two of them say plainly that no national method of measurement ships for them — see what "localised" means here.
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