Your quotes are far apart. Is the cheap one cheap, or thin?

Section 50 of the UK’s Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes anything you relied on in the quote a contract term. Before you read the gap as a difference in the work, strip out what is not: VAT registration, the rate applied, the labour and materials split. What remains is scope: a thinner quote promises less for its lower number.

Three reasons two quotes differ that have nothing to do with scope

Before you count commitments, take out the three differences that need no knowledge of building at all. Each is answered by a written question to the builder, and one of them, the rate, you then check against a fact about your own house: in the UK whether it has stood empty, in the Netherlands how old it is.

Registration is the first. HMRC sets the line by turnover: you must register when “your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000 (the VAT threshold)”, and below it registration is a choice, described as “voluntary registration” (GOV.UK). A sole trader and a twelve-person firm can therefore price the same work correctly and one total carries a tax the other does not. That gap is a tax difference, and it tells you nothing about either builder’s work.

Then the rate itself. Renovation is not always standard-rated. HMRC’s VAT Notice 708 opens the reduced rate with “You may be able to charge VAT at the reduced rate of 5% if you’re renovating or altering either:” and then lists the qualifying cases. It then states the condition plainly: “You can only reduce rate the renovation or alteration if, in the 2 years immediately before renovation works start, the qualifying residential premises has not been lived in” (VAT Notice 708). An empty house near that two-year line is where two builders can disagree about the rate itself rather than about the work, and where one of them has it wrong.

The third is where the quote draws the line between labour and materials. In the Netherlands that line changes the tax, not only the layout.

In the Netherlands the tax authority requires the split

Where a Dutch job mixes work falling under both rates, the contractor has to divide it, so a quote showing one undifferentiated BTW figure has not shown you that split. The Belastingdienst instruction is to divide the work: “Verricht u zowel werkzaamheden die onder het 21%-tarief vallen als werkzaamheden die onder het 9%-tarief vallen? Dan splitst u het werk in een deel 21% en een deel 9%” (Belastingdienst). The split is the contractor’s to make, so asking for it costs you nothing and requires you to know no prices.

For insulation the line falls between the work and the stuff. Where the work is done to save energy, labour applying insulation material to floors, walls and roofs in houses older than two years sits at the 9% rate: “Dan vallen de arbeidskosten voor het aanbrengen van het isolatiemateriaal aan vloeren, muren en daken bij woningen ouder dan 2 jaar onder het 9%-tarief.” The materials do not move with it, whoever made them: “De (isolatie)materialen vallen onder het 21%-tarief, ook als u die materialen in uw eigen bedrijf maakt” (Belastingdienst, same page). Two quotes for one insulation job can land on different totals purely because they drew that line in different places.

The Dutch two-year condition is yours to check rather than theirs to assert. It governs insulating, painting, plastering and wallpapering alike, since “Het 9%-tarief voor het isoleren, schilderen, stukadoren en behangen van woningen geldt alleen als die woning ouder is dan 2 jaar” (Belastingdienst). Where the age of the house is in doubt, the same page points to the register that settles it: “kunt u de Basisregistraties Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG) raadplegen via het Kadaster”.

Section 50 is why a written scope is worth more than a lower number

A line in the quote you relied on is a term of the contract, and a part of the job nobody wrote down is not in the document. Every contract to supply a service is treated as including “as a term of the contract anything that is said or written to the consumer, by or on behalf of the trader, about the trader or the service” where “it is taken into account by the consumer when deciding to enter into the contract” (CRA 2015, s.50). Unless you can show the unwritten part was promised some other way, there is nothing to point at when the work reaches it.

Check one thing before you compare at all. Is one of your quotes headed estimate? An estimate and a quote are different instruments, and what an estimate commits a contractor to is set out in the glossary. If one of them is, you are not holding documents of the same kind, and the lowest of them may not be an offer anyone has to stand behind.

Two protections sit underneath all this and neither depends on the wording. The trader “must perform the service with reasonable care and skill” in any case (CRA 2015, s.49). And a change to the information covered by the pre-contract rules “is not effective unless expressly agreed between the consumer and the trader” (s.50(4)). The second is narrower than it first reads: it reaches the information those rules require, not every sentence in the document.

Read a quote for its terms and you are looking at a different document from the one you read for its price. Take six lines that turn up on a bathroom quote:

• Replace the bathroom. A term with nothing in it: it binds the builder to nothing you could name in an argument.
• Make good. A term you and the builder can each read differently and both be reasonable, and the quote settles nothing between the two readings.
• Supply and fit a 1700mm pressed-steel bath, brand and model stated. A commitment you can price at a merchant and hold them to.
• Price includes all materials. A commitment that settles who pays when the tile order runs short.
• Removal of all waste from site included. A commitment, and without it the skip can land on the invoice as an extra.
• Any additional works to be agreed in writing before starting. A commitment, the variations line, that governs the surprises the job turns up.

The first two are lines a quote can carry while promising nothing, so they score zero. The other four are countable. Run them against each of your quotes, and the difference in the count is part of the difference in the totals.

Signed in your hallway, the builder owed you a longer list

Where the contract was concluded in your home rather than at the builder’s premises, the builder owed you a set of information before you were bound. The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 define an off-premises contract to include one “concluded in the simultaneous physical presence of the trader and the consumer, in a place which is not the business premises of the trader” (reg 5). Where it applies, the trader “must give the consumer the information listed in Schedule 2 in a clear and comprehensible manner”, and that information “must be given on paper or, if the consumer agrees, on another durable medium and must be legible” (reg 10).

Two items on that list are the ones a thin quote fails. Schedule 2 requires “the main characteristics of the … services”, and “the total price of the … inclusive of taxes, or where the nature of the … is such that the price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the manner in which the price is to be calculated” (Schedule 2). A document that describes the job in one line and states a number with no VAT treatment has given you neither.

Whether any of that reaches your quote is the part to be careful about. What the regulation plainly covers is a contract concluded while the builder is standing in your kitchen. A quote you accept by email some days after the visit is a different sequence, and whether it is an off-premises contract at all is not something the primary sources settle either way. So the fact that matters is when you agreed the job: while they were with you, or by your email afterwards. Signed while they were there, the duty stands on firm ground. Accepted by email a week later, it may not apply.

What section 51 will not do for you

Section 51 supplies a reasonable price only where the contract never fixed one, and a quote with a number on it has fixed a price for the work it describes. You may be thinking that if the number turns out to have been unreasonable, the law hands you a fair one instead. It does, in a case that is not yours. Four things have to hold together: you have not paid, the contract does not expressly fix a price, it does not say how the price is to be fixed, and section 50 supplies no price either. Where they all hold, “the contract is to be treated as including a term that the consumer must pay a reasonable price for the service, and no more”, and “What is a reasonable price is a question of fact” (CRA 2015, s.51). Signing the cheapest quote and arguing afterwards that it was too thin for the money is not the situation section 51 is written for, which is the reason the reading happens before you sign.

Which side of the quote the gap sits on

Splitting each quote into labour and materials tells you where the difference lives, which is a separate question from which quote is right. For a ceiling to read it against, borrow the per-trade figures behind the mandate calculator: materials as a share of labour, sized so a budget covers most jobs. Plumbing 80%, tiling 80%, electrical 50%, painting 35%, roofing 100%, except in the Netherlands, where roofing takes 75%, since Dutch roofs are tile-dominated and carry a lower material share than slate. They are per-trade, so a mixed job like a bathroom gives you a ceiling per line and none for the total.

Read them as ceilings, because that is what they were built as. They are not the ratio a correct quote should show. Reading a quote with them at all stretches them past what they were built for: the research behind those figures sized a mandate so that it would cover most jobs, and it never set out to say what a well-priced quote looks like. A materials line well above the ceiling for that trade is worth a question.

Worked example: Callum in Bristol

Callum holds three quotes for the same bathroom. The lowest runs to a page and a half, the highest to nine pages, the middle between them. He reads them for terms before he reads them for totals.

The lowest shows no VAT anywhere on it. That can mean a builder who is not registered, a total that already includes the tax without showing it, or a registered one who left the line off, and they do not cost him the same. Reading an absent VAT line as proof of a small firm is a guess, and it is the kind that turns a tax difference into an imagined saving. So he asks.

Then he runs the four countable lines against each quote. The nine-page quote carries all four; the page-and-a-half carries one, the line that says materials are included; the middle carries three and is missing the variations line. Two of the three split labour from materials line by line, so on those he can run the ceiling test: on the plumbing and tiling lines, where the ceiling is 80%, no materials figure on either quote runs above that share of the labour beside it. The page-and-a-half gives no figure for materials at all, so there is nothing for the ceilings to read. Under section 50 the lines he takes into account in deciding which to sign become terms of that contract; where a commitment is absent from the cheap quote, he would have to establish it was promised some other way, which is harder than pointing at a line.

So the question in front of him is which he wants: the low number with the waste, the bath grade and the variations procedure left open, or the high number with those three settled. Before he answers, he takes the most detailed quote, strips it back to a specification (scope, materials by brand and grade, method, exclusions), and sends that same specification to the other two to re-price, so the three numbers finally describe the same job.

Then the answers come back, and there are more than two of them. A number that moves says the gap was scope. One that holds says the gap was price, and he has the cheap quote and the terms both. Silence, or a yes on the phone that never reaches paper, is the third answer: he would be left arguing about what was said, and on the middle quote he already knows the argument would be about variations, because that is the line it does not carry. One part of the gap will not close at all, because the difference between a VAT-registered builder and an unregistered one is a tax difference, and no re-pricing removes it.

What to send back

Write one email and send the same one to every builder who quoted.

1. Ask whether the price includes VAT, and if so at which rate and on what basis. Where a builder is not registered, ask them to say so on the quote, so an absent VAT line means something definite.
2. Ask for the price split into labour and materials on separate lines. In the Netherlands, if the house is more than two years old and the job includes painting, plastering, wallpapering, or insulating done to save energy, ask which parts are at 9% and which at 21%; where both rates are in play the contractor has to split them anyway.
3. List what you cannot find in the quote (waste, making good, scaffolding, the grade of the main fittings) and ask for each item to be priced in or named as excluded.
4. Ask for one line that covers what happens when they find something that was not in the quote: told to you, priced, agreed before the work starts. That line is a variations clause.
5. Give a reply date and a later decision date. Because you already hold the quotes, the reply date can be short: re-pricing a specification you have written is a smaller job than producing the first quote was.

A builder who answers in full has told you what their number covers. Where one leaves an item open, put it back into your own instruction as a named exclusion and price it yourself, so the gap sits on paper before the work starts, while it is still a number you can decide about. One more answer only arrives later: everything confirmed in writing, then normal scope reclassified as an extra once the wall is open. Point 4 is what you hold against that, and it has to be in place before the job starts to be worth anything.

Related guides

• How to compare contractor quotes: the planning version, where the criteria go into the brief before any quote arrives.
• How to read a contractor quote: what a complete quote contains, and the red flags in one that is not.
• How much to pay a contractor up front, and when to pay the rest: what happens after you choose, including the 30% advance ceiling tied to materials.

Glossary terms used in this guide

• Glossary: Quote: the contractor’s offer, binding on them once you accept.
• Glossary: Estimate: the prediction a quote is confused with, and what Finnish, Swedish and Dutch statute has to say about how far one may be exceeded.
• Glossary: Fixed price: one agreed sum for the whole job, whether the work runs long or short.
• Glossary: Mandate: the budget ceiling you set before a contractor starts work; its per-trade ratios are the ceilings borrowed above.