How much does BCIS cost, and what do you get for it?
What a BCIS subscription runs to, what sits behind the paywall, and what the free sources cover instead.
There is no public BCIS price list. The band above reflects commonly reported small-practice pricing and moves with product, seat count and RICS membership — treat it as a starting point for a conversation, not a quote. What follows is what sits behind that paywall, and what you can get for nothing.
How much does a BCIS subscription actually cost?
RICS does not publish a price list for BCIS. It quotes on application, and the number you are given depends on three things: which product you take (BCIS Online, versus the standalone index series), how many named users need access, and whether you are a RICS member. Reported small-practice pricing has generally sat somewhere between £600 and £2,000+ a year, with multi-seat and enterprise arrangements running well above that.
Two practical notes. Per-seat pricing means the cost scales with the number of people who need it, not with how much you use it — for a firm where one person does all the cost work, that is favourable. And RICS will sell single reports for a specific project in some cases, which is worth asking about if the need is occasional rather than continuous.
What are you actually paying for?
The cost sits in the collection, not the publishing. BCIS builds elemental rates from real tender returns and final accounts contributed by surveying practices, then normalises them by building type, element and region. Maintaining that panel is expensive, and it is the part no free source reproduces — the ONS measures output prices across the industry as a whole; it does not collect elemental build-ups.
That distinction is the whole decision. Where your need is indexing — moving a historic figure to today's money — free data does the job. Where your need is elemental — what should the substructure cost per m² on a building type you have not priced before — there is no free substitute.
What can you get free instead?
Quite a lot, and it is live on this page right now. The figures below come from the ONS Construction Output Price Indices and the Department for Business and Trade's monthly materials series, both free under the Open Government Licence:
Free, authoritative, and citable in a client conversation. The full free-source comparison sets out how to stitch these together, and the Cost Tracker applies the adjustment for you.
What does the paywall actually cover?
| What you need | BCIS | Free sources |
|---|---|---|
| Inflation indexing / adjusting a historic price | Tender Price Index, quarterly | ONS Construction Output Price Indices, quarterly |
| Material price movement | Materials indices, quarterly | DBT monthly materials series — actually more timely |
| Regional adjustment | Published regional factors | Costmodelling factors; T&T / Gleeds commentary |
| Elemental cost plans at NRM2 detail | Median rates by element and building type | Nothing equivalent |
| Non-residential building types | Broad coverage | Thin — free sources are residential-biased |
| Provenance in a dispute | Established in UK adjudication and PI work | ONS is authoritative but not the expected reference |
Highlighted rows are the ones where paying genuinely buys you something. Three of six — which is the honest shape of the decision.
When does the subscription pay for itself?
Do the arithmetic in hours rather than in principle. At a typical small-practice charge-out rate, a £1,200 subscription is somewhere around one to two days of chargeable time a year. If assembling elemental rates by hand — digging through past projects, cross-checking published benchmarks, sanity-checking a build-up on an unfamiliar building type — costs you more than two days across a year, the subscription is already cheaper than doing without it.
For a practice doing steady residential extension and refurbishment work, it usually does not reach that threshold. For one pricing commercial or institutional work with any regularity, it usually does, and quickly. The companion piece works through the decision rule in detail .
How to get a real number
Ask RICS directly, and be specific about three things: the product (BCIS Online or just the indices), the number of named users, and your RICS membership status. Ask explicitly whether a single-project report is available — for occasional needs that is often the right purchase and it is not always volunteered. Any figure quoted online, including the band on this page, is a guide to what to expect in that conversation rather than a substitute for having it.