A free construction cost plan template for Excel

Jamie Rowe

Published on 1 November 2026

In short: this is a free Excel cost plan. It starts from the same NRM2 bill as our free bill of quantities template, then adds what turns a measured bill into a price: a cost rate, a mark-up, and the sell rate and sell total that come out of them. One default mark-up prices the whole job, any line can have its own, and the summary shows your margin as well as your mark-up, because they are not the same number.

Download the template (Excel, 40KB)

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What's in it

Three tabs:

Cost plan. The bill, set out by NRM element: preliminaries first, then all 48 elements in groups 0 to 8, each with its own band, room for four lines and a subtotal. Each line has a quantity, a unit and a cost rate, and works out its cost, its sell rate and its sell total. It's blank, ready for your numbers.
Summary. A default mark-up, an optional contingency, and the result: your direct cost, your price, and the margin you're left with.
How to use. The notes in this post, inside the file, so they travel with it.

The first four columns are in the same order as the bill Kestrel® exports, so the lines of a bill copy straight across.

Mark-up and margin are not the same number

This catches people out, and it costs real money when it does. Mark-up is your profit as a share of what the work costs you. Margin is your profit as a share of what you charge.

A job that costs you £100, marked up by 20%, sells for £120. The £20 profit is 20% of the cost, but only 16.7% of the price. If you wanted to keep 20% of every pound you charge, the mark-up has to be 25%.

The template builds each rate up from mark-up, because that's how a rate is built, and the Summary tab shows both figures, so you can see which one you've actually priced at.

Filling it in

Overtype the title at the top of the Cost plan tab with your project name.
Give each line an item code, a description, a quantity, a unit and a cost rate. That's the rate it costs you, not the one you charge.
Set the default mark-up on the Summary tab. Every line takes it.
Where a line needs a different mark-up, type it in that line's Mark-up % column. It uses its own figure, and the rest keep the default.

It also does a few things a blank spreadsheet won't:

Cost, sell rate and sell are formulas, so you type in the quantity, the cost rate and, where it differs, the mark-up. Nothing else.
Every subtotal shows its blended mark-up, so an element you've priced thin stands out from the rest.
Lines you add inside an element are picked up by its subtotal.
It prints one page wide, with the column headings repeated on every page.

Where the numbers come from

A template gets the arithmetic right every time. The quantities and the rates are still yours to supply, and a plan is only as good as both.

The quantities are typed. They're measured on the drawing, then keyed in, and a misread length looks exactly like a correct one. The formulas carry it faithfully all the way to your price.

The rates are your judgement. The cost column is where subcontractor quotes and your own labour and material rates go. A mark-up is applied on top of what you've entered, so a wrong cost rate comes out the other end with your profit added.

Where Kestrel fits

We built Kestrel® to take the typing out of the quantities. You measure lengths, areas and counts on the PDF, each measurement stays on the drawing it came from, and the export is a bill with the quantities already in. It runs on Windows, with a 14-day free trial, and no card is needed to start it.