CPWD DSR — what the Delhi Schedule of Rates is, and how contractors use it
DSR stands for Delhi Schedule of Rates. It is CPWD's published list of rates for items of construction work — one line per item, from earthwork to a coat of paint — and it is the document a CPWD estimate is built from.
It matters to a contractor for a blunt reason: on a great many government works you are not pricing the job from your own rates at all. You are quoting a percentage above or below an estimate someone else prepared from the DSR. If you do not know what is inside that estimate, you do not know what you have agreed to build.
What is actually in it
The DSR is organised by trade, and each item has a code, a description, a unit and a rate. The description is the part to read slowly: it fixes what the rate includes. An item may cover the material, its carriage, the labour, the scaffolding and the finish — or it may exclude one of those, which then has to be paid for under a different item, or not at all.
CPWD publishes it in two volumes for civil works, and a separate schedule for electrical and mechanical work — the DSR (E&M). It also publishes:
- Analysis of Rates for Delhi (the DAR) — how each DSR rate was built up, broken into material, labour and machinery with their quantities. This is the volume that tells you why a rate is what it is.
- Plinth Area Rates — cost per square metre for a whole building type, used for rough budgeting rather than for tendering.
- General Conditions of Contract and the CPWD Works Manual — the contract terms and the procedure that go with the rates.
As listed on CPWD's own publications page in September 2026, the civil DSR appears in Volume I and Volume II editions up to 2018, with the E&M schedule up to 2022, alongside a long tail of older editions. Editions are superseded and a newer one may be out by the time you read this, so take the edition from the tender document and check CPWD's publications page for what is current — never price from a PDF of unknown vintage found through a search.
Why the edition in the tender is the only one that counts
Rates move. An estimate prepared on DSR 2018 and a bid priced from an older edition are two different sums of money, and the difference is yours to absorb.
Two things to check on every notice before you price:
- Which schedule and which year the estimate is based on. It is normally stated in the NIT or the estimate.
- Whether a cost index or escalation has been applied. A schedule written for Delhi is routinely used outside Delhi with a cost index for the station, and the index — not the base rate — is often where the money is.
Percentage-rate tenders: what you are really quoting
Government works are commonly tendered one of two ways.
- Item rate. You quote your own rate against each item in the bill of quantities. Your rates are your own; the risk of getting one wrong is also your own.
- Percentage rate. The department has already priced every item from the schedule and arrived at an estimated cost. You quote a single figure: a percentage above, at, or below that estimate.
A percentage-rate tender looks simpler, and it is where small contractors most often lose money. Quoting "8% below" applies to every item alike — including the items where the schedule's rate is already thinner than what the work costs you today, and the items whose quantity is understated. The percentage is a judgement about the whole estimate, not about your efficiency.
Before you name a percentage:
- Price the three or four largest items by value from your own rates and compare them with the schedule. Those items decide the job.
- Read those items' descriptions for what the rate is deemed to include — carriage, dewatering, disposal, curing.
- Check the quantities against the drawings where you can. An understated quantity in a percentage-rate contract is not a variation you can price later.
The worked arithmetic for a small works bid, including where overheads and EMD land, is in pricing a small works tender.
Where the DSR does not apply
The DSR is CPWD's. State PWDs publish their own schedules — most states have a State Schedule of Rates, revised on their own cycle, and a municipal body or a PSU may use something else again. Railways, MES and the power utilities each have their own practice.
So "DSR" in a tender from a state department may well mean that state's schedule, not CPWD's. The document says which; assume nothing from the abbreviation alone.
Where to get it
CPWD's publications page carries the schedules, the Analysis of Rates, the specifications, the General Conditions of Contract and the Works Manual. They are free to download.
Paid "DSR software" and rate-analysis packages exist and some are genuinely useful for estimating at volume, but nothing in the schedule itself is behind a payment. If you are buying, you are buying convenience, not access.
CPWD's own tenders — around 110,000 records, the largest single source on this site — can be browsed at CPWD tenders.