Guangzhou Releases June 2026 Bill-of-Quantities Indicators, Picking Up the Pace of Prefabricated Construction Pricing

For people working on prefabricated buildings, the price of a component has never been just a number in the contract—it connects on one end to design selection and on the other to construction cost and bidding. Recently, the Guangzhou Construction Engineering Cost Management Station released the June 2026 Common Bill-of-Quantities (BOQ) Indicators for Construction Engineering (Trial), which explicitly incorporate common prefabricated-building items such as composite beams, composite floor slabs, composite shear wall panels, composite shear wall concrete and reinforcing steel. Although this move is understated, it deserves the industry’s serious attention.

What Problem Do the BOQ Indicators Solve?

For a long time, pricing of precast concrete structures has been one of the industry’s pain points. Traditional cast-in-situ systems have mature consumption quota standards and BOQ rules to follow, whereas precast components involve multiple stages—factory production, transportation, stacking, hoisting and joint connection—with substantial process and regional differences. Cost practitioners often lack authoritative references when preparing BOQs, pricing and settling accounts. As a result, the same component may be priced on different bases across projects, and disputes easily arise between bid prices and audit settlements.

Regular release of common BOQ indicators by the cost management station effectively provides the market with a periodic, referenceable official benchmark. It is not a mandatory consumption quota standard but a summary of the current period’s actual market transaction and management data, for reference by all parties when preparing investment estimates, tender control prices, bid prices and settlement reviews. Indicators released monthly on a rolling basis can also more sensitively reflect the impact of bulk-material price fluctuations (steel, cement, etc.) on component costs.

Why Composite Components?

The focus of this batch of indicators is very clear: composite beams, composite floor slabs, composite shear wall panels, together with the corresponding cast-in-situ topping concrete and reinforcing steel. This combination is not accidental.

Composite components are among the most widely applied systems in current prefabricated concrete residential and public buildings. They combine the quality and efficiency of factory prefabrication with the integrity of cast-in-situ joints, and are also an important scoring item in prefabrication-rate evaluation. As a smart-construction pilot city, Guangzhou has seen continued growth in the number of prefabricated-building projects in recent years; composite components enjoy large market volumes and many suppliers, and the need for price transparency is most pressing. Including these common items in the BOQ indicators effectively captures the principal contradiction in local prefabricated-construction pricing.

Notably, the indicators cover not only the precast components themselves but also associated content such as cast-in-situ topping concrete and reinforcing steel. This reflects an important orientation: pricing for prefabricated buildings cannot look only at “how much one slab costs,” but must cover the complete scope of work from component production to assembly. Only a full-scope reference benchmark can truly support project-level cost estimation.

What It Means for Practitioners

For cost consultants and tendering personnel, the most direct value is having an official frame of reference. When preparing tender control prices or reviewing bid prices, BOQ indicators can be used to quickly verify the reasonableness of unit prices and reduce disputes; during bid pricing they also enable a more accurate grasp of the market competition range.

For design and detailed-design teams, the indicators also carry reference value. Scheme comparison for prefabricated projects usually requires balancing prefabrication rate, structural rationality and construction cost. When component price information becomes more transparent, cost factors can be incorporated into decisions earlier at the design stage—for example, thickness selection for composite floor slabs and the ratio between precast and cast-in-situ volumes can be judged in a more quantitative way against the indicators. This is another step of the “integrated design-and-quantity-takeoff” trend landing at the data level.

Trend: The Pricing System for Prefabricated Construction Is Taking Shape Faster

Looking nationwide, the improvement of pricing bases for prefabricated buildings is accelerating. The Consumption Quota Standard for Prefabricated Building Engineering released by MOHURD has laid the national-level framework; provinces and cities have successively supplemented local consumption quota standards, information prices and BOQ indicators; Hunan and other regions are also advancing revisions to the calculation standards for housing construction cost indicators and indices. Guangzhou’s monthly release of common BOQ indicators is a normalized practice within this process.

It can be expected that, as the penetration rate of prefabricated buildings continues to rise, the coverage of BOQ indicators will further expand from main-structure components toward envelope, interior fit-out and prefabricated M&E directions. For the industry, the more transparent the price information, the more objectively the market can assess the cost-effectiveness of prefabricated buildings—this in itself is powerful support for industrialization.

Readers who need the original text of these indicators may download and consult them from the official websites of the Guangzhou Construction Engineering Cost Management Station or the Guangzhou Smart Construction and Industrialized Building Association.

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