Somebody has already worked the rates out. The problem is not finding them: it is using them well.
A price book is a list of construction work items, each with a code, a description, a unit of measurement and a unit rate built up from labour, materials and plant. Public bodies, professional institutions and commercial publishers issue them, and they save every estimator from building every rate from scratch. Used properly, a price book is not a shortcut: it is a common reference the client, the designer and the contractor can all argue from.
Rates age. For tendering you need the edition in force at the date the documents are prepared; an out-of-date edition means rates that can be challenged. Earlier editions stay useful for estimates, comparisons and private work, which is why it pays to keep both to hand.
Most price books are published as PDFs thousands of pages long, or in whatever format the issuing body settled on that year. Finding an item in there, retyping description and rate, and not getting the edition wrong: that is where the hours go. A price book is useful when it is data, not when it is a document to leaf through.
In Italy every region and autonomous province publishes its own official price list, the prezzario regionale: thousands of items with code, description, unit of measurement, rate and labour content. On public works it is the reference for building the priced bill of quantities, and D.Lgs. 36/2023 provides for it to be updated every year. Alongside them there are special lists, such as the Cratere list used for reconstruction after earthquakes.
In ComputoLab the price lists of every Italian region and autonomous province — plus special lists such as Cratere — arrive already cleaned up, categorised and with the labour content: over a million items searchable instantly, across several lists at once. Both the edition in force and the one before it are searchable in every version, the free one included. And you can always import a list of your own from CSV, XLSX or PDF, including a publisher's list you hold a licence for.
The dedicated pages: Lombardia, Lazio, Campania, Piemonte, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Toscana and all the others.
Read also: How to prepare a bill of quantities · Labour content
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