National Schedule of Rates.

Schedule of Rates for Building and Associated Services.

The first National Schedule of Rates was launched by the Society of Chief Quantity Surveyors and the Building Employers Confederation in 1982, in response to the Government’s legislation on competition in the public sector.

Together with the appropriate contract conditions, The National Schedules allow customers to issue a series of works orders, confident that the charges for the work will be based on a pre-determined and agreed basis of measurement and pricing. Without The National Schedules, the customer has to produce their own schedule or obtain a series of competitive quotations before placing an order. Alternatively, orders may be issued with or without the production of an estimate and, subsequently, the client would be charged a lump sum, or on a day work basis without knowing the likely out-turn cost. The National Schedules therefore save time and money

Within the utilities sector composite rates have been compiled of repetitive projects establishing small project activity based construction cost. boundaries have been set for risk such as excavation depth etc.

These schedules comprise, in total, of approximately 15,000 items of work. In the case of the Building, Mechanical, Electrical, Road Works and Painting & Decorating Schedules each rate is broken down into its material, plant and labour constituents, which are individually updated annually. Items are presented in layman’s terms for use by non-technical staff.

Each schedule is issued with guidance notes, preliminaries and preamble clauses and is directly related to the Joint Contracts Tribunal’s Standard Form of Measured Term Contract (1998). The alphanumeric coding structure allows users to insert additional items if they so desire and thus making them extremely flexible.

Used by Public Utilities, NHS trust, Local authorities. Post office and Marks and Spencer.

List of Users and link to NSR Home page.