What a bill of quantities actually costs in Australia — QS cost plan vs BOQ vs automated pack

Figures

EstiFlow delivered pricing — measured

Amounts actually received for a delivered estimating pack, taken from the payment field on completed job records.

Distribution of amounts received

21 of the 49 carried a discount code, so those amounts sit below the list price for that job. The table reports money received, not list price.

By project type

The last three rows are one job each. They record what was charged on that job and nothing more.

One paid add-on exists in the record. A contract-grade scope-of-works document, sold 15 times, at amounts recorded between A$0.00 and A$99.00.

What that money bought

Deliverables sealed against the 106 completed job records, counted by how many jobs shipped each one.

74 of the 106 jobs shipped a full twelve-file pack. Every file is content-hashed against the job record.

Market comparison — industry-range estimate, not measured

The comparison is not like-for-like, and the reason is in the next section.

What moves the number

These three services are not substitutes for each other, and price differences mostly reflect that.

• A cost plan is an elemental estimate. It answers what the project should cost, at a level of resolution suited to feasibility and budget setting. It does not enumerate every item.
• A bill of quantities is a measured, itemised schedule of the work, structured so that builders can price it line by line and so that variations can be traced against it. It answers what has to be built, item by item, in what quantity.
• An automated estimating pack produces the itemised schedule and a costed report from the drawings supplied, without a person measuring by hand.

A reader comparing prices across these three is comparing three different documents. The one that matters for your purpose is the one to price.

Certification is the largest single reason for the price gap, and it is the point at which the comparison stops being fair. EstiFlow is not a registered quantity surveying practice, and its output is not a certified quantity surveying report. It is a cost estimate, a bill of quantities and an estimating pack. Where a bank, an insurer, a court, a superannuation fund or a statutory process requires a report signed by a registered quantity surveyor, an automated pack does not satisfy that requirement at any price. If you need certification, the automated price is irrelevant to you, because the automated product is not the product you need.

Where a percentage-of-construction-cost basis is used, the fee scales with the project and the automated price does not. On the projects in the companion articles, a 0.3% fee on a A$943,639 median single dwelling would be about A$2,800, and on a A$15M commercial project about A$45,000. (That residential median is a net figure, before builder's margin and GST, as the companion article sets out. Nothing here turns on the exact basis — the point is the order of magnitude.) The automated pack priced at a median of A$499 across the same population does not move with project value in the same way. That is the structural difference driving the order-of-magnitude gap, more than any difference in effort on a given job.

Project complexity moves the automated price, but modestly. The measured spread runs from A$199 for a secondary dwelling to A$1,599 for a large townhouse development, an eight-fold range. Over the same delivered population, construction cost ranged from A$204,627 to A$15,332,674, a seventy-five-fold range. The service price is far less elastic than the thing it estimates.

Discounting is common in the measured data and it moves the median. 21 of 49 jobs carried a discount code. Every job at A$399, A$424 and A$449 carried one. Any reader treating the median of A$499 as a list price is reading it wrong — it is the midpoint of money received, after discounts, across a mix of project types.

Turnaround is a real variable that no price table shows. A hand-measured bill of quantities takes days to weeks of a surveyor's time. That time is most of the cost. It is also most of the reason the numbers differ.

What's excluded

From the EstiFlow measured figures:

• 57 of the 106 completed job records carry a recorded price of zero and are excluded from the pricing table entirely. These are internal, benchmark, sample and unbilled work. Including them would drag the median toward zero and would describe nothing real.
• All six commercial and non-residential projects carry a recorded price of zero and contribute nothing to this table. There is no measured commercial service price in this dataset. Any commercial pricing figure attributed to EstiFlow delivered data is not supported by the record.
• The add-on document is reported separately and is not folded into the per-pack figures.
• Refunds, chargebacks and partial credits are not netted out of the amounts shown.
• GST treatment is not separated in the price field. The amounts are as recorded on the job.

From the service in general — what an estimating pack does not include:

• Statutory and authority fees are listed, never priced into a total. In the construction estimates behind these packs, statutory items are enumerated as line items and excluded from the money. For a NSW project the set enumerated is the NSW Home Building Compensation Fund contribution where applicable, the Long Service Levy where applicable, and council contributions where conditioned. For VIC it is Victorian Building Authority and building permit context, plus local council contributions where conditioned. For QLD it is QBCC Home Warranty where applicable, the QLeave levy where applicable, and local infrastructure charges where conditioned. For WA, SA and TAS the packs enumerate building permit and local government requirements where applicable. They are listed so the reader knows they are payable, and excluded from totals because the amounts are set by the authority and by the conditions of consent.
• Site attendance. No inspection, no measure-up on site, no progress verification.
• Certification, sign-off or a signed opinion. See the note above.
• Negotiation with builders, tender management or contract administration.
• Anything not shown in the documents supplied. The pack estimates what the drawings and supporting documents describe. Work that is intended but undrawn is not in it.

About this dataset

EstiFlow is not a registered quantity surveying practice, and its documents are not certified quantity surveying reports. They are cost estimates, bills of quantities and estimating packs produced from the architectural drawings and supporting documents supplied for each project.

The measured pricing figures cover 49 delivered jobs completed between 30 April 2026 and 24 August 2026. They describe what was charged during that window on that mix of work. They are not a price list and they are not a forecast.

The market comparison figures are industry-range estimates and are labelled as such in the table. They are the least reliable numbers on this page and are included only so that the measured figures have a scale to sit against.

Figures dated 2026-09-01.