Name: Ratebook 2026 — UK Builder's Estimating Spreadsheet
Brand: SJ Developments
SKU: RATEBOOK-2026
Price: 29.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

The problem

Free templates are free for a reason.

There are hundreds of construction estimating spreadsheets online. Nearly all of them are American, and none of them know anything about how a UK job actually gets priced.

Wrong currency, wrong units

Dollars and square feet. You spend an evening converting before you can price a single job, and every conversion is a chance to be out by a factor of ten.

No VAT logic at all

A US template has no concept of 20%, 5% for a two-year empty property, or zero-rated new build. So you bolt VAT on at the end and hope you picked the right rate.

No CIS, no regional variance

Nothing deducts 20% from a subcontractor's labour element. Nothing knows a job in Chester and the same job in Kensington are not the same job.

What is inside

Nine sheets. No filler.

Scroll through the workbook. Every screen here is the actual file, not a mock-up.

01 Start Here

How to drive it, in plain English, in about four minutes. Colour key, workflow, and what the file does and does not do.
02 Job Setup

One screen. Project type, floor area, spec tier, region, labour uplift, overheads, profit, contingency, VAT treatment. Change the region and all 176 rates reprice.
03 Rate Library

176 rates across subcontract measured work, trade day rates, materials and plant. Low, average and high for every line. Overtype any of them — it becomes your library after the first job.
04 Estimator

14 sections, preliminaries through to provisional sums. Pick a rate from the dropdown or type your own. Your override always wins and is never touched by the regional factor.
05 Summary

Cost by section, then the full build-up to the quoted price. Gross margin, mark-up and £/m² priced, calculated for you rather than guessed at.
06 VAT & CIS

Four VAT treatments with HMRC's actual conditions written beside each. Plus a CIS calculator that strips materials, plant and fuel before applying 0%, 20% or 30%.
07 Benchmark Check

Published £/m² bands for 14 project types across three spec tiers, adjusted for region and job size, with a live verdict on your number. Nothing else at this price does this.
08 Scope & Exclusions

9 inclusions and 18 exclusions written as finished clauses. Asbestos, party wall, planning fees, unforeseen ground conditions. Paste straight into a quotation.
09 Sources

Every rate source and every piece of HMRC guidance, with links, so you can check the working yourself instead of taking my word for it.

01 / 09

Worked example

A real 20 m² extension, priced line by line.

Single-storey rear extension, North West, standard specification. This example ships filled in, so you see a finished job the moment you open the file.

Net measured cost 14 sections, regional multiplier 1.03, size adjustment 1.20

£56,887

Overheads6% of cost of works

£3,413

Profit12% on cost plus overheads

£7,236

Contingency5%, adjustable

£3,377

Net price before VAT

£70,913

VAT20% standard rate — extension to an occupied dwelling

£14,183

Total payable

£85,096

Priced £/m²

£3,390

Benchmark band

£2,596–3,461

Verdict

IN RANGE

Gross margin

19.8%

Mark-up

24.7%

The £/m² comparison deliberately excludes provisional sums, because benchmark data covers the building work and not the client's undecided kitchen. Small jobs also genuinely cost more per square metre — prelims, welfare, scaffold, building control and management barely scale with area — so the file applies a size adjustment of ×1.35 under 15 m², ×1.20 for 15–24 m², ×1.05 for 25–39 m² and ×1.00 above 40 m². Getting that wrong is why most spreadsheets tell you a 20 m² extension looks expensive when it is priced correctly.

The bit that quietly ruins jobs

A day rate is not what a day costs you.

Most templates let you type £220 for a bricklayer and treat it as your cost. It is not. Everything below sits on top of it, and if you do not add it you are working for nothing while your spreadsheet tells you the job is profitable.

Employer's National Insurance on every hour you pay for
Holiday pay, pension, CITB levy, PPE and the rest of the on-costs
Non-productive time — travel, setting up, waiting on a delivery that did not turn up
Applied to labour rows only. Subcontract measured rates are already supply and fix, so uplifting them would double-count

Ratebook applies an all-in uplift of 70% by default, tagged per row, and you can change the figure in one cell.

The Rate Library sheet, showing low, average and high rates with each row tagged by type.

Tax, done properly

VAT and CIS, referenced to the guidance.

Not a dropdown with four percentages in it. Each treatment has HMRC's actual test written beside it, and every rule is cited on the Sources sheet so you can check it.

20% standard — extensions and alterations to an occupied dwelling (VAT Notice 708)
5% reduced — where a dwelling has not been lived in for the continuous two years immediately before work starts, or where the number of dwellings changes
0% — new dwellings, qualifying disabled adaptations, and energy-saving materials in Great Britain until 31 March 2027, reverting to 5% from 1 April 2027 (Notice 708/6)
CIS at 0%, 20% or 30% applied to the labour element only — materials, consumables, fuel and plant the subcontractor paid for are excluded (CIS 340)

The VAT and CIS sheet showing the four VAT treatments and the CIS deduction calculator.

Where it sits

It is not Spon’s.
It is not meant to be.

Spon's has 20,000 prices and is the industry standard. Ratebook has 176. What Ratebook does is add your job up, work out your tax, and check its own answer — for the price of a bag of plaster.

Swipe the table sideways →

	Ratebook 2026	Spon's 2026	EstimatorXpress	Free US template
Price	£29 once	£161 print, £275 for 5 electronic licences	From £899 + VAT per year	Free
Renewal	None	New edition annually	Annual, plus £29.99/mo support	None
Number of rates	176	20,000	Thousands	Whatever you type in
Adds your job up for you	Yes	No — it is a book of prices	Yes	Partly
UK VAT treatments	Four, with HMRC conditions	Reference only	Yes	None
CIS deduction calculator	Yes, labour element only	Reference only	Yes	None
Regional multipliers	27, applied automatically	Yes, applied by hand	Yes	None
Checks your price against benchmarks	Yes, live verdict	No	No	No
Paste-ready exclusion clauses	18	No	Within templates	No
You can edit every rate	Yes, it is a spreadsheet	No	Within the software	Yes
Learning curve	About four minutes	None, but you do the maths	Days	Rebuild it first

Prices checked 24 August 2026. Spon's Architects' and Builders' Price Book 2026 is the 151st edition, compiled by AECOM, containing 20,000 prices — Routledge; £275.00 for the five-licence electronic format at BSRIA, best print price £161.11 at PriceSpy UK. EstimatorXpress Essential is £899 + VAT annually or £1,599 + VAT perpetual, with Support & Updates at £29.99 per month — EstimatorXpress and HBXL. Ratebook is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any of them.

Straight answer

Who this is for, and who it is not.

✓ Buy it if

You price extensions, renovations, kitchens, bathrooms, lofts or garage conversions
Your jobs sit roughly between £5,000 and £250,000
You currently price on the back of a notepad or in a spreadsheet you built yourself
You have ever won a job and then wondered why it made no money
You do school or commercial responsive and planned works and need defensible rates
You want to own the file, not rent access to it

✕ Do not buy it if

You need NRM2-compliant bills of quantities
You run new-build housing schemes or anything over about £1m
You already run EstimatorXpress or Causeway properly and it works for you
You want live, feed-updated material prices — these are Q3 2026 published rates
You expect it to price without you checking a single rate against your own suppliers
You want tax advice — it cites HMRC guidance, it does not replace your accountant

Or don’t price it at all

Send me the job. I’ll price it for you.

Some builders would rather not spend Sunday night in a spreadsheet. Fair enough. Send the drawings, the scope and a few photos, and I will price the job myself using the same workbook and hand you back a finished estimate you can build your quotation from.

One underpriced extension costs three to five thousand pounds. This costs a fraction of that, and it costs you no evenings.

£75 · 48 HOURS

Check my numbers

You have already priced it. I go through it against Q3 2026 rates and the £/m² benchmark, then tell you plainly where you are light, what you have left out, and whether the margin survives. You get a marked-up sheet and a short written verdict.

£195 · 3 WORKING DAYS

Full estimate

Jobs up to about £75,000. Extensions, renovations, loft and garage conversions, kitchens, bathrooms. Priced element by element — labour, materials, waste, preliminaries, overhead and profit — with the VAT and CIS position set out and a ready-to-paste exclusions list.

£395 · 5 WORKING DAYS

Large or commercial

Jobs over £75,000, school and commercial planned works, multi-element refurbs and tender submissions that need a defensible schedule of rates behind the total. Priced the way I price my own school work.

How it works

Fill in the job brief on your phone — about three minutes. It asks the things that actually change the price: brick or render and which render, PVC or aluminium, roof build-up, what is included and what you are leaving out. Press the button at the end and it turns your answers into one WhatsApp message ready to send, then attach your drawings and photos to the same chat.

I confirm the tier, the price and the turnaround before you pay anything. You pay up front, then you get the estimate back as an Excel file plus a one-page summary. If I cannot price it properly from what you have sent, I will tell you rather than guess.

Fill in the job brief →

Or just message me on WhatsApp and tell me what the job is.

0151 332 7007 · sj_developments@outlook.com

What it is, and what it is not

It is an estimate for you to price from, not a quotation to your client. The number you give them is yours.
Priced from the information you send. No site visit and no measured survey unless we agree one separately.
Not an NRM2 bill of quantities, and not design, structural or building-regulations advice.
Rates are published Q3 2026 UK cost data plus my own site experience. Check them against your own suppliers and subcontractors before you commit.
Liability is limited to the fee you paid. If the estimate is wrong on its own terms I will rework it or refund it.

Who built it

Built by a builder, not a template farm.

Ratebook was built by SJ Developments North West Ltd, a working construction company in Liverpool doing extensions, renovations, kitchens and bathrooms, plus planned and responsive works for local schools. It exists because the tools available were either a book, a £900-a-year subscription, or an American spreadsheet.

This is the launch edition. There are no customer reviews on this page because there are no customers yet — I am not going to invent any. What you can check instead is on the right, and every rate source and tax reference is listed inside the file.

Verifiable details

Company SJ Developments North West Ltd

Company no. 16371408

VAT no. 495867810

Based Liverpool, England

Contact sj_developments@outlook.com

Rate source Published UK cost data, Q3 2026

Questions

Before you buy a £29 spreadsheet.

Where do the rates come from?

Published UK building cost data for Q3 2026, principally Page Building Consultants' UK building costs data, cross-checked against extension cost guidance from the Federation of Master Builders, Checkatrade and Homebuilding & Renovating. Every source is listed with its link on the Sources sheet. They are indicative market rates, not a quotation — check them against your own suppliers.

Will it work in Google Sheets or LibreOffice?

LibreOffice Calc handles it properly. Google Sheets will open and calculate it, but the data-validation dropdowns and the cost-by-section chart are less reliable there. Excel 2016 or later, or Microsoft 365, is what it was built and tested in. There are no macros, so nothing to enable and nothing for your IT policy to block.

Can I put my own rates in?

That is the point. Every rate in the library is overtypable, and every line on the Estimator accepts a manual override that always beats the library figure and is never multiplied by the regional factor. After one real job it stops being my rate library and becomes yours.

Why 176 rates and not thousands?

Because 176 covers the work most small builders actually do, and a library of 20,000 is unusable in a spreadsheet. If you need 20,000, buy Spon's — it is genuinely excellent and this does not replace it. Ratebook is built to get you from a blank page to a defensible number in under an hour.

How does the benchmark check actually work?

It holds published £/m² bands for 14 project types across three specification tiers, adjusts them by your region's multiplier and by a size factor, then compares that band to your own priced £/m² excluding provisional sums. It returns LOW, IN RANGE or HIGH. It is a sanity check on your arithmetic and your assumptions, not a valuation.

Is this tax advice?

No. The VAT and CIS sheet quotes and links HMRC's own guidance — Notice 708, Notice 708/6 and CIS 340 — so you can see which rule a figure comes from. Confirm your position with your accountant or HMRC before you rely on it.

Are there any reviews?

Not yet. This is the launch edition and it has not been sold before, so there is nothing honest to put here. Rather than manufacture testimonials, every sheet in the workbook is screenshotted further up this page and the worked example shows the real output, so you can judge exactly what you are buying before you pay a penny.

Do I get updates?

Yes — corrections and improvements to the 2026 edition are free, delivered through the same download link. If early buyers find a rate that is off, it gets fixed and everyone gets the fix. Tell me what is wrong with it; that feedback is worth more to me than the £29.

Can I cancel or get a refund?

Ratebook is a digital file delivered immediately on payment, so it is non-refundable once the download has been issued. By buying, you consent to that immediate delivery and acknowledge that it ends the 14-day cancellation right which would otherwise apply to a digital purchase under regulation 37 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. That is exactly why every sheet in the workbook is screenshotted further up this page — you can see what you are buying before you pay. If the file will not open, is missing content or is not as described, email sj_developments@outlook.com and it will be corrected and reissued free of charge. Your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are unaffected. Full terms.

The offer

One file. One payment. Yours forever.

No subscription, no seat licence, no annual edition to re-buy. Pay once, download immediately, use it on every job you price from here on.

Single-business licence. Modify it, add your own rates, rebrand it for internal use. You may not resell or redistribute it.

£29 one payment

Ratebook 2026 · Excel · 1.2 MB

9-sheet workbook, 622 live formulas, zero errors
176 UK rates for Q3 2026 with low, average and high
27 regional multipliers and 14 project-type benchmarks
VAT and CIS calculators referenced to HMRC guidance
18 exclusion clauses ready to paste into a quotation
A 20 m² extension already worked through as an example
Free corrections and updates to the 2026 edition

Buy now — £29 →

Secure checkout via Payhip · card, PayPal and Apple Pay · instant download
By buying you consent to immediate delivery, which ends the 14-day cancellation right — so the file is non-refundable once downloaded. Every sheet is shown above before you pay, and a file that will not open or is not as described is reissued free.
Terms, licence and refund policy