Why Builders' Quotes Vary So Much in Dorset

Two builders visit the same house in Poole. Same kitchen, same plans, same brief. One quote comes back at £52,000, the other at £67,000. We hear a version of this story most months, and the question that follows is always the same: how can the gap be that big?

The short answer is that the two bits of paper aren't describing the same job. A quote is only as good as what's inside it, and what's inside varies enormously from one builder to the next. Some numbers are the finished article. Others are a rough guess wearing a smart font. This post explains what should be in a quote, where the low numbers usually come from, and how we price work at Complete Builds across Dorset and Hampshire.

What a proper quote actually includes

A serious quote for building work isn't one number on a page. When we quote for new builds and extensions, the document runs to several pages, because it has to cover:

• An itemised breakdown of labour and materials for each stage, so you can see what the groundworks cost against the roof, the glazing and the electrics.

• Preliminaries. That's the unglamorous stuff like scaffolding, skips, site welfare and waste disposal, which are real costs on every job.

• Provisional sums, clearly flagged as such, for anything that can't be priced until it's opened up.

• The VAT position, a payment schedule tied to completed stages, and who handles building control sign-off.

If a quote you're reading doesn't cover those, the number at the bottom isn't wrong exactly. It's just not finished.

Where the low numbers come from

In our experience a suspiciously low quote is rarely dishonest. More often it's built on guesswork. The builder hasn't surveyed the drains, so the quote assumes the simplest possible groundworks. Nobody has lifted a floorboard, so the wiring is assumed to be fine. On a modern house those assumptions might hold. On a 1930s semi in Wimborne or a Victorian terrace in Boscombe they usually don't, and every wrong assumption comes back later as an extra.

We've been the second builder on plenty of jobs around Bournemouth and Christchurch where the original price crept up 20 or 30 per cent through extras, and the final bill ended up higher than the honest figure the owner turned down at the start. That pattern is exactly why we won't put a number on paper before we've surveyed the property. It costs us a morning. It saves you the whole miserable cycle.

The costs that get left off

The gap between two quotes often lives in the preliminaries. These are the figures we see missed most, priced at what we'd actually charge in 2026:

• Scaffolding for a single-storey extension runs £950 to £1,450 locally, and more if the scaffold stays up beyond the standard hire period.

• Skips come in at around £500 a time for an 8-yard builders skip in Dorset, and a typical extension fills three or four before it's done.

• Skilled trades in our region charge £260 to £340 a day. A quote that only works if the labour is far cheaper than that is telling you something about who'll be on site.

None of these are optional. If they're not in the quote, they're coming later as a surprise.

How we price a job at Complete Builds

Every quote we issue starts with a site survey. We measure up, look at access, check the drains and the electrics, and on older properties we're upfront that the unknowns carry risk, so we flag them as provisional sums rather than burying them in the total. Materials get priced at current supplier rates, not last year's. Prices have moved around a fair bit this year, and a quote built on old numbers is a quote that can't be honoured.

For a sense of scale, a single-storey extension in Dorset and Hampshire currently comes out at £2,600 to £3,400 per square metre depending on spec, so a 20 square metre kitchen extension typically lands between £52,000 and £68,000 before VAT. Where the job includes a rewire or a new consumer unit, our own electricians price that in from the start rather than leaving it as someone else's problem halfway through the build.

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Get a number you can plan around

A proper quote takes us longer to produce than a guess would. It's also the only kind worth signing. If you're planning an extension, a renovation or structural work anywhere in Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire or London, book a free site survey with Complete Builds and we'll give you a figure with everything in it.