What does it cost a UK fabricator to quote a portal frame?

Pick a Friday afternoon. Pick the estimator. Ask them how many quotes have gone out this week, how many are still on the desk, and how many will be on the desk on Monday morning. The number is almost always more than they wanted, less than they sent, and a lot less than the marketing arm thinks they are quoting.

The reason is rarely laziness. The reason is that quoting a portal frame in 2026 takes the same hours it took in 2006, and the hours are expensive. Most UK fabrication shops have never sat down and worked out what those hours actually cost the business per quote. Here is the maths.

The time cost — what an estimator's hour is worth

A UK steel-fabrication estimator earns somewhere between £38,000 and £52,000 a year, depending on experience, region and whether they also draw. Add employer's NI, pension contribution, holiday and sick allowance, training, software licences, desk and office overhead, and the loaded cost is typically £30 to £45 per hour.

A traditional portal-frame quote — spec gathering, rate look-up, spreadsheet calculation, PDF assembly, GA mark-up, email out — takes between two and four hours for a straightforward building, and longer if there is anything unusual about the spec. So the time cost per quote, before you account for the rest of the day disappearing to it, is typically £60 to £180.

That is the floor. The ceiling is higher.

The opportunity cost — the quotes you did not send

Every hour the estimator spends on one quote is an hour they are not spending on the next one. A shop quoting four hours per portal frame can send three to five quotes per estimator per week. A shop quoting one hour can send fifteen to twenty.

More quotes do not automatically mean more wins, but they do mean two real things. First, you are in front of more buyers, which compounds. Second, you are first in the inbox on jobs where the buyer has phoned three fabricators and the first quote of the three sets the price reference for the others.

UK fabricators we have spoken to estimate the price of being slow at one to three lost jobs a quarter. A mid-sized portal frame is often a £80,000 to £180,000 job at a 12-18% margin, which means the cost of being a day slow on quotes is anywhere from £10,000 to £30,000 a quarter in margin you never saw.

Most shops do not record this number anywhere. It is the most expensive line item nobody books to a ledger.

The error cost — the quotes you sent wrong

Spreadsheet errors are not rare; they are systemic. A 2008 University of Hawaii study put the rate of formula errors in serious business spreadsheets at around 88% — not catastrophic errors, but at least one off-by-something somewhere. A more recent EuSpRIG paper put it at 1 in 100 cells on average.

On an estimating spreadsheet that has been edited by three people across six years of jobs, the errors lurk in places you do not check. Typical examples we have seen:

• A purlin schedule with a tonnage formula that double-counts side rails on the gable bays
• A connection allowance hard-coded as £120 a node from 2018, never updated despite primary steel rising 28%
• A formula that pulls roof area but forgets the eaves overhang because the building geometry changed but the area cell did not
• A VAT cell flipped from formula to a typed value during a hurried month-end, then never restored

Each of these costs a quote. Either you under-quote and eat the margin (cost: thousands per occurrence), or you over-quote and lose the job (cost: the whole job's margin). Roughly one in twenty quotes carries an error big enough to matter. That is 5% of every estimator's output, going to waste before any of it reaches the customer.

The total per-quote cost

Add it up.

• Time cost: £60 – £180 per quote
• Opportunity cost: £30 – £100 per quote (averaged across the lost jobs)
• Error cost: £20 – £80 per quote (averaged across the bad ones)

The realistic blended cost of producing a portal-frame quote on the traditional Excel-and-templates workflow is therefore somewhere between £110 and £360, and most fabricators land around £150 a quote.

Multiply that by the number of quotes you send a year. A small shop sending 80 quotes annually is spending £12,000 a year on quote production. A mid-sized shop sending 300 is at £45,000.

What software changes

Estimating software does not eliminate any of these costs. What it does is collapse them.

The time cost drops when the rate library is set once and inherited by every estimate after, when the GA drawing is generated rather than redrawn, and when the PDF assembles itself rather than being copy-pasted. A quote that used to take three hours takes between four and twenty minutes. The estimator does not work harder; they work on more quotes in the same hours.

The opportunity cost drops because faster quotes means the shop gets to the inbox first on more enquiries. Buyers have a conversion bias toward the first quote that lands. Being first is a structural advantage you cannot buy with marketing.

The error cost drops because the spreadsheet is not the source of truth. The rate library is. Errors that would have been locked into a formula are caught the moment a rate changes centrally, which is exactly when you would want to find them.

The maths against the subscription

SteelEstim8 is £160 a month. That is £1,920 a year, VAT-inclusive. Against the £12,000 to £45,000 a year a typical shop spends producing quotes on the old workflow, the software pays back the first eleven quotes of the year. Everything after that is improvement to margin and capacity that the spreadsheet does not give you.

That is before MezzEstim8 for mezzanine work, LoadEstim8 for portal-frame member sizing to BS EN 1993-1-1 + UK NA, or RailEstim8 for handrail and balustrade quoting — each of which is its own cost compression on a different line of work, and each of which ships under the same family.

The honest test

The fastest way to know whether this maths applies to your shop is to do the maths on your shop. Pick a portal frame you quoted in the last fortnight. Time how long it actually took, end to end. Cost the hours. Subtract the typical cost of running an alternative on the same job. The difference is what the change is worth, on this one job, before any of the second-order effects.

Then re-quote it inside SteelEstim8 in under four minutes and compare the number, the PDF, and the GA drawing against what you sent. If the engine matches the experienced estimator's number on a job you both already know the answer to, the maths is settled.

SteelEstim8 is £160/month, monthly card payment, cancel any time. Or apply for a free place on the pilot programme. Sign up here, or see the full walkthrough first.