How to stop quoting from old material prices

It's not just inflation. It's how uneven it is.

Overall construction material prices rose about 2.6% in the 12 months to March 2026, per the Department for Business & Trade / BCIS material price indices, which sounds manageable. The problem is that number hides huge variation underneath it: fabricated structural steel was up 13.1% and aggregates (sand, gravel, clays) up 12.2% in the 12 months to May 2026, while other materials barely moved or fell. A quote built on “prices are only up a couple of percent this year” can still be badly wrong on the one line that spiked.

Where the gap costs you

It's rarely the whole quote that's wrong. It's usually one or two material lines priced from an invoice that's a few weeks or a few months old. On a job with a £500 materials line, a price that's moved 10-13% since you last checked is £50-65 of margin gone before you've even started the work. Multiply that across a month of jobs and it adds up to real money that never shows up as one big, obvious loss.

Three ways to protect a quote, no software required

• Put a validity period on every quote. 14–30 days is typical. It won't stop a price moving, but it gives you a clean, contractual point to reprice from if it does.
• Check the last invoice before quoting a repeat job. Not the figure you remember, not last quarter's price, but the most recent invoice for that exact part.
• Flag your highest-movement materials. Steel, timber and aggregates have moved the most over the past year, so if a job leans heavily on one of those, it's worth double-checking that line specifically, even if you trust the rest of the quote from memory.

Where automatic price reading closes the gap

All three of those are useful habits, and free. What they don't fix is the underlying problem: the only record of your current price is a stack of PDF invoices in an inbox, and nobody has time to re-check all of them before every quote. CostBase reads those invoices automatically, any supplier, any layout, into a searchable pricebook, so the habit above (“check the last invoice”) takes seconds instead of digging through email.

Source: Construction material price indices, Department for Business & Trade / BCIS. Figures current to March/May 2026 as published. Check gov.uk's building materials statistics for the latest.