In 2026, UK BMS installations price at £150–£350 per hardware point for mid-range platforms such as Trend and Distech, with a typical 200-point office package landing between £40,000 and £80,000. Retrofit work adds 20–40%. The points schedule — not the m² rate — is the only reliable basis for a controls cost plan.
If you're a quantity surveyor putting together a cost plan for a commercial project, the controls package is probably the line you're least comfortable with. Structure, envelope, even the mechanical plant — there's benchmark data everywhere. Then you get to "BMS" and you're staring at a single provisional sum somebody carried over from the last job, with no idea whether it's generous or a car crash waiting for Stage 4. And when the tender returns come back 40% apart, nobody in the room can tell you why. At Alpha Controls we price BMS packages every week — as the specialist contractor on the other side of your tender comparison. This guide is the view from our side of the table: what actually drives the number, where returns diverge, and how to interrogate a controls quote so the cheapest price and the best price stop being different things.
For a mid-range platform — Trend, Distech, Schneider — expect £150–£350 per hardware point installed, programmed and commissioned. A straightforward 200-point office fit-out typically lands between £40,000 and £80,000 depending on complexity, protocol requirements and how much existing infrastructure survives. Retrofit runs 20–40% above new-build rates because of survey time, legacy removal and working around occupied floors. High-dependency environments — data centres, labs, healthcare — push past £500 per point once redundancy, enhanced commissioning and compliance documentation are in scope.
Treat the m² rate as a Stage 2 sanity check only. Two office buildings of identical area can carry wildly different point counts — one running packaged rooftop plant with thirty points, the other running four-pipe fan coils on every floor with six hundred. Cost-per-point against a defined points schedule is the unit that survives contact with tender returns; cost-per-m² is not.
A point is a single input or output the system monitors or controls: each temperature, humidity, CO2 or pressure sensor; each valve or damper actuator; each meter; each run, status or alarm signal. The points schedule is the line-by-line list of all of them, and it is the bill of quantities for the controls package. A BMS quote without one isn't a quote — send it back.
Where comparisons fall apart is in what each tenderer has silently counted. The common distortions, from tender returns we see against our own: charging the sensor and its point as two items when the rate basis already includes the device; inflating "soft points" — values that exist only in software, like calculated averages and setpoints, which cost a fraction of a wired point; and adding integration gateways "by default" whether or not the specification calls for them. If one return prices 180 points and another prices 220 for the same building, someone has read the specification differently — or one contractor is making assumptions the other isn't. Normalise the count before you compare a single rate.
RICS NRM2 (2nd edition, 2021) gives you the framework for consistent description and measurement of building works, but a BMS package is schedule-driven: the honest measurement unit is the points schedule plus the named deliverables around it — controllers, control panels, head-end and graphics, network infrastructure, integration to third-party plant, and commissioning. BSRIA BG 6 (Design Framework for Building Services) is the document that settles who produces the points schedule and at which design stage, and it's worth enforcing: the single biggest cause of divergent controls tenders is a schedule that never existed at tender issue, leaving every bidder to invent their own.
CIBSE Guide H — the UK reference for building control systems — is explicit that a BMS specification should define the points schedule, system architecture and commissioning requirements as the minimum basis for any quotation. If your tender pack doesn't meet that bar, the returns you receive aren't comparable, whatever the spreadsheet says. For the pre-tender stages: carry the controls allowance per-point against an assumed density, state the assumed count in the cost plan, and flag it as a quantified assumption rather than burying it in a lump sum nobody can challenge.
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Both platforms sit in the same £150–£350 band; the drivers below move you within it. On Trend, the current IQ4 controller range is commissioned through a toolset most UK field engineers know, which keeps labour rates competitive — Trend's installer pool is the deepest of any manufacturer in the UK, which matters to your client's maintenance budget for the next fifteen years, not just the capital price. The cost item QSs miss on Trend jobs is the supervisor: a graphical head-end such as IQVISION is a separate licensed item with engineering time to build the graphics, and on multi-building estates it's a five-figure line on its own.
On Distech, the ECLYPSE controller range embeds a full Niagara supervisor inside the field controller — on smaller projects that removes the separate head-end server and its licence entirely, which is a genuine capital saving worth interrogating in a return. The counterweight is the UK labour pool: Distech's installer base here is smaller, so engineering availability can carry a premium and programme risk on tight fit-out windows. Neither platform is "cheaper" as a headline — the honest answer depends on project size, integration scope and who will maintain it. Our installer-level comparison of Trend vs Distech vs Siemens covers the platform decision itself.
The density is driven almost entirely by the terminal-unit strategy. A four-pipe fan coil building carries roughly 4–6 points per FCU — space or return temperature, supply temperature, heating and cooling valve outputs, fan status or speed — before you've touched the central plant. Sixty fan coils is 240–360 points on the terminals alone. Central plant adds a further block: a typical AHU runs 15–25 points; boiler and chiller plant, pumps, pressurisation and metering add the rest. Packaged plant with integral controls flips this — the BMS may only need high-level integration points to each unit, collapsing the count.
That's why the point count, not the floor area, is the number to fix early. One practical check we'd encourage on any tender comparison: repeated typicals should show economies. Sixty identical fan coils are programmed once and replicated — if the labour content of the return prices FCU number sixty at the same rate as FCU number one, the return hasn't been engineered, it's been multiplied.
Commissioning is 15–25% of BMS contract value on new-build and up to 30% on complex retrofit — and it's the number most often shaved to win a tender. CIBSE Commissioning Code M requires commissioning to be treated as a distinct activity with its own programme, resource allocation and completion criteria, and a QS should hold quotes to that standard for a self-interested reason: commissioning shortfall is invisible at practical completion and expensive at month three, when the defects come back through the door as variations and delay claims.
Make commissioning a visible line in every return, even inside a lump-sum package. If it's buried, you can't challenge it, you can't extend it when the programme slips, and you can't tell whether the low bid is efficient or just absent. The same visibility rule applies to graphics, integration to named third-party plant, and out-of-hours working — the four lines where "30% cheaper" usually turns out to mean 30% less scope, as we set out in our guide to spotting a bad BMS tender.
A recent project of ours shows how the drivers stack. On a 16-floor commercial office upgrade for a professional-services occupier, we replaced fan coil controls floor-by-floor on Trend controllers with LightFi occupancy integration — with weekend-only access, because the floors stayed occupied throughout. The pricing shape a QS should expect from that kind of job: the terminal-unit points dominate the count; the repeated-typical economy is real and should be visible in the rate; and the access constraint is a genuine cost line, not padding — weekend-only working puts a premium on every site hour and stretches the commissioning programme across more visits than a clear-access job would need.
That last point matters at cost-plan stage: two identical buildings, one empty and one occupied, are not the same controls project. If your retrofit is occupied, carry the 20–40% uplift and interrogate returns that don't show it — a contractor who hasn't priced the access constraint has either missed it or plans to claim it back later. Our BMS retrofit cost guide covers the uplift maths for existing buildings in more depth.
A return you can actually assess prices a named points schedule line-by-line; states the controller platform and generation (Trend IQ4, Distech ECLYPSE — not "or equal and approved" with no basis); itemises the head-end, graphics scope and licence basis, and states whether the licence is perpetual or subscription; names the third-party plant it will integrate and the protocol for each; shows commissioning as a distinct line with hours or duration; and lists exclusions explicitly — builders' work, power supplies to panels, network switches, access equipment, fire-alarm interfaces and out-of-hours working are the usual suspects. Our 50 FAQs on BMS quoting and tendering covers the exclusions in more depth.
The controls package is routinely the last services line to move from allowance to measured cost — and the one whose late surprises are hardest to value-engineer, because by Stage 4 the mechanical design that fixes the point count is already frozen. Firm the point count at the same time as the terminal-unit strategy, not after it. If you're carrying a BMS provisional sum on a live cost plan now and you can't state the assumed point count behind it, that's the moment to get a specialist number under it — before the tender returns make the gap everyone's problem.
We price controls packages for QSs, M&E consultants and main contractors across London and the South East, on Trend, Distech and Siemens — and we'll price against your points schedule, or help you build one if it doesn't exist yet. Send the drawings for a quote, or talk to us at cost-plan stage and we'll give you a per-point basis you can defend in a cost report.
Specialist BMS installation, commissioning, and maintenance across London and the South East. SafeContractor Approved, BCIA Member.
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