CPWD DSR Explained: Delhi Schedule of Rates, Cost Index and How to Use It (2026)

Search for the CPWD DSR and you will find three different years quoted as "the latest edition", PDF mirrors of unknown vintage, and rate tables with no mention of which correction slips they include. For a document that decides how almost every central government construction estimate in India is priced, the confusion around it is remarkable.

This guide settles the facts as they stand in 2026: which DSR editions are actually current, how the rates inside are built up, how the cost index converts Delhi rates for your city, and how estimators, contractors, and billing engineers actually use DSR day to day — in estimates, tenders, running bills, and extra-item claims. It closes with a free Excel estimate format built around DSR item codes and cost-index adjustment.

What is the CPWD DSR?#

DSR stands for Delhi Schedule of Rates, published by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. It is the official schedule of analysed unit rates for construction work items — earthwork, concrete, masonry, finishing, and hundreds of other items — each with a code, a precise description, a unit of measurement, and a rate in rupees.

The rates are analysed from Delhi market prices of materials and Delhi minimum wages — that is why it is the Delhi Schedule of Rates. But its use is national. Central government departments, PSUs, autonomous bodies, and defence organisations price their civil works against it; many state PWDs fall back on it for items missing from their own schedules; banks, valuers, arbitrators, and private builders treat it as the most neutral rate benchmark available in India.

In CPWD's own workflow the DSR is not advisory — it is the pricing backbone of the works cycle:

• Detailed estimates for government works are prepared item-by-item on DSR rates before technical sanction.
• Bills of quantities (BOQs) in tender documents carry DSR item codes, and the tender names the DSR edition and correction slips that lock the rate basis of the contract.
• Running account (RA) bills are checked line-by-line against the contracted DSR rates.
• Extra and substituted items are priced from the DSR's companion analysis document (the DAR, covered below) or by market rate analysis where no schedule item exists.

If you prepare or check BOQs, our guide on how to prepare a BOQ from drawings shows where schedule rates enter the workflow.

Which CPWD DSR is the latest? (2026 status)#

This is the question most people arrive with, so here is the verified position as of August 2026:

Three things worth being direct about:

There is no "DSR 2024" and no civil "DSR 2025". Several websites describe a 2024 edition; it does not exist. The civil revision history runs 2016, 2019, 2021, 2023 — and the 2023 edition, signed off in July 2023, is the one in force. If a vendor or a PDF mirror offers you "DSR 2024", what you are actually getting is DSR 2023, with or without its correction slips.

DSR 2023 is not frozen. CPWD keeps it current through numbered correction slips — new items (polyurea waterproofing, fire-rated doors to IS 3614:2021, polycarbonate roofing, perimeter security fencing, ready-mix and self-curing plaster), rate revisions (RCC diaphragm walls, steel reinforcement), and description corrections. Slips 9 and 10 came in July 2026 and slip 11 — stainless steel reinforcement bars per IS 16651 — on 4 August 2026. The tender that governs your contract will state which slips apply. The official register of slips is on the CPWD circulars page.

The rate basis is April 2023 Delhi. DSR 2023 rates are built on Delhi material prices of April 2023 and minimum wages effective 1 April 2023, with GST on works contracts (18 per cent) built into every item rate. Everything that has moved since — cement after the September 2025 GST cut, steel, wages revised from April 2026 — is handled through the cost index and correction slips, not by re-printing the book.

CPWD's works manual contemplates revision roughly every two years, so a new civil edition is plausible in the near term; until CPWD notifies one, DSR 2023 with up-to-date correction slips is the only defensible basis for an estimate.

DSR vs DAR: the schedule and the working behind it#

The DSR gives you the priced item. The DAR — Delhi Analysis of Rates — shows how that price was built: material coefficients (with wastage already inside them), labour norms, machinery time, sundries, water charges, and the contractor's profit and overheads. DSR 2023 and DAR 2023 are published as a pair, and the DSR itself says it must be read with CPWD Specifications 2019 (Volumes I and II) with up-to-date correction slips — the specifications define the workmanship every rate assumes.

In practice the split of labour is simple:

• Estimators and billing engineers live in the DSR — code, unit, rate.
• Anyone pricing an extra, substituted, or non-scheduled item lives in the DAR, because that is where the accepted build-up method is documented. Our rate analysis guide walks through the same first-principles method with worked PCC, RCC, brickwork, and plaster examples.

How to read a DSR item#

DSR items follow a sub-head plus item plus variant numbering. Take a standard earthwork line:

• 2 is the sub-head — Earth Work.
• 2.8 is the item — excavation in foundation trenches or drains not exceeding 1.5 m in width, including dressing of sides, ramming of bottoms, and disposal of excavated earth within a lead of 50 m and lift up to 1.5 m.
• 2.8.1 is the variant — the same work in all kinds of soil.

The sub-heads run from 0 (basic material rates) and 1 (carriage of materials) through earthwork, mortars, concrete, RCC, masonry, stone, wood, steel, flooring, roofing, and finishing, up to sub-head 26 — "New Technologies and Materials", where CPWD parks newly introduced systems before they mature into the main chapters.

Three details in the description matter commercially, and missing them is how items get under-priced:

1. The rate includes what the description says it includes. Item 2.8 already covers disposal within 50 m lead and 1.5 m lift. Carrying earth further is not "extra work at site" — it is a separate carriage item under sub-head 1, paid per additional lead slab. Additional lift has its own "extra over" items.
2. The unit is exact. Rates per cum, per sqm, per 10 sqm, per kg, per each — mixing a per-10-sqm plaster rate into a per-sqm BOQ line is a ten-times error that still turns up in real tenders.
3. GST is inside the 2023 rates. DSR 2023 item rates are inclusive of GST on works contracts at 18 per cent. Correction-slip rates, and the basic material rates in sub-head 0 and the DAR, are ex-GST. Never mix the two bases in one estimate.

What sits inside a DSR rate (the DAR build-up)#

Every DSR rate is the output of the same DAR structure. For a convenient analysis quantity — 1 cum of concrete, 10 sqm of plaster — the build-up runs:

1. Materials at basic (ex-GST) Delhi rates, with wastage already inside the consumption coefficients. Do not add your own wastage on top of a schedule rate; it is double counting.
2. Labour at Delhi minimum wages, using CPWD labour output norms.
3. Machinery, tools and plant, sundries and scaffolding where the item needs them.
4. Water charges at 1 per cent of the material-plus-labour cost.
5. Contractor's profit and overheads (CP&OH) at 15 per cent. This has been the CPWD norm since a December 2007 office memorandum raised it from 10 per cent — 7.5 per cent profit plus 7.5 per cent overheads, with the old separate tools-and-plant allowance subsumed into overheads. Sources still quoting "10 per cent plus 5 per cent" or similar splits are out of date.
6. GST treatment. Works-contract GST at 18 per cent is then reflected into the published DSR rate. In August 2024 CPWD revised the method of applying GST in the analysis through an office memorandum that introduced a modification factor (0.973) on existing DSR 2023 rates — the kind of adjustment that matters when you are justifying rates in a tender, and a good example of why the circulars page deserves a bookmark.

Understanding this structure is what lets you defend a rate in front of an engineer-in-charge — or challenge one. When a client asks why your quoted rate for a non-DSR waterproofing system is higher than "the DSR rate for waterproofing", the answer is usually in the analysis: different membrane, different coverage, different wastage, same method.

The cost index: using Delhi rates in Jaipur, Kochi, or Guwahati#

DSR rates are Delhi rates. CPWD bridges the gap to other places and dates with its cost index system, and this is the part practitioners most often get wrong.

CPWD publishes a building cost index for Delhi twice a year — on 1 April and 1 October — and station-wise indices for cities where it works, all expressed against a plinth area rates (PAR) base of 100. The indices are published on the CPWD cost index page.

The trap: the notified indices are on a PAR base, not a DSR base. Each DSR edition has its own base cost index against the PAR of its time — for DSR 2023 the base index is 107 (with reference to Delhi PAR 2021, taken as 100 on 1 April 2021). So converting an estimate is a two-step comparison, not a straight multiplication:

Adjustment percentage = (current station cost index − DSR base cost index) ÷ DSR base cost index × 100

Illustrative example. Suppose your station's current cost index works out to 118 on the PAR 2021 base. Against DSR 2023's base of 107, your DSR-priced estimate is enhanced by (118 − 107) ÷ 107 = 10.3 per cent (rounded). An abstract of Rs 2.00 crore at raw DSR 2023 rates becomes about Rs 2.21 crore at your station's price level. The same machinery works in reverse when an index sits below the DSR base.

Two related indices are worth knowing so you do not confuse them:

• PAR bases get reset periodically — the current Delhi building cost index series runs on a PAR 2025 base (Delhi stood at 101 on 1 April 2026). When bases reset, always check which base a quoted index refers to before comparing it with a DSR base index.
• The 10CC indices are a different series — they feed the price-escalation clause in CPWD contracts, updated far more frequently than the twice-yearly building cost index. If your contract has an escalation clause, our price escalation guide covers how those calculations run.

For a sense of how much location moves money in practice, see our city-wise construction cost guide — the spread between cities is exactly what the cost index formalises.

Using DSR in an estimate, step by step#

The estimate workflow on DSR rates is mechanical once the mapping is done honestly:

1. Take off quantities from drawings, item by item, in DSR units. (Our building estimation and costing guide covers takeoff method in depth.)
2. Map each work item to a DSR code — the precise variant, not the nearest-looking description. Where the specification differs from the DSR description (different grade, different finish), note it now; that difference is tomorrow's extra-item dispute.
3. Apply the DSR rate for the edition and correction slips your organisation or tender specifies.
4. Apply the cost index adjustment for your station and date, as above.
5. Build the abstract of cost — sub-head wise totals, then contingencies and other charges per your department's norms.
6. List non-scheduled items separately with their rate analyses attached (next section).

Our free DSR-based estimate format (Excel) is built exactly for this flow — columns for DSR code, description, unit, quantity, DSR rate, cost-index percentage, adjusted rate, and amount, so the index adjustment is a formula rather than an afterthought. Download it from the templates library.

Tenders: premium, rebate, and justified rates#

Because government BOQs are priced at DSR-based estimated cost, bidding resolves into a percentage relationship with the schedule:

• A bid above the estimated cost is a premium over DSR; a bid below is a rebate.
• Premiums appear when the schedule lags the market — the familiar cycle in years when steel, sand, or aggregates run ahead of the last rate revision. Field engineers routinely report metro-area sand and aggregate running well above DSR assumptions while some small-town inputs sit below; treat any specific percentage you hear as a local observation, not a rule.
• On the acceptance side, CPWD's works manual requires the tender-accepting authority to assess reasonableness against justified rates — the estimate reworked at current market prices — with a tolerance band before a formal justification statement is needed. In arbitration and court, the DSR-based justified estimate is repeatedly treated as the objective reference for what work should cost.

For a contractor, the practical discipline is to price your own analysis first — from the DAR method with your actual material quotes and labour productivity — and only then look at the DSR-derived estimate to decide your premium or rebate. Bidding a rebate you cannot justify against your own analysis is how contracts go underwater by the third RA bill. Comparing supplier quotations properly before that decision is its own discipline — see our comparative statement guide.

Non-scheduled (NS) items: when the DSR has no answer#

No schedule covers everything. When a specified item has no DSR code — a proprietary facade system, a specific waterproofing chemistry, a new-technology product not yet in sub-head 26 — the workflow is:

1. Confirm it is genuinely non-scheduled. Check the current edition plus correction slips first; CPWD has been adding items steadily (recent slips added ready-mix plaster and stainless-steel rebar), and its committees keep circulating draft analyses for comment — HDPE piping and modular fencing among recent ones — so yesterday's NS item may be today's schedule item.
2. Build a market rate analysis in the DAR structure: materials on at least three quotations, labour at applicable minimum wages, machinery, 1 per cent water charges, 15 per cent CP&OH, GST per the current method.
3. Get it approved before execution, not at billing. NS items surfacing for the first time in an RA bill are the single most reliable way to stall payment.

Keep the quotations, delivery challans, and the approved analysis together — the same evidence discipline that makes rate analysis defensible makes NS items payable.

CPWD DSR and the state schedules#

The DSR is the national reference, not the national mandate. Every state prices its own works from its own schedule, under a family of names:

The precedence rule that keeps estimates defensible: state-funded works follow the state schedule named in the tender; the edition named in the tender governs even if a newer one exists; and where the state schedule has no item, most departments explicitly fall back on CPWD DSR with local lead, lift, and wage adjustments. Central works anywhere in India run on CPWD DSR with the station cost index.

If you work across states, resist the temptation to reuse one state's rate for another state's estimate — the schedules differ not just in price level but in what the item descriptions include.

Where to download the CPWD DSR (legitimately)#

• Official and free: CPWD publishes its rate books on the CPWD publications page — DSR and DAR volumes as PDFs. Correction slips are on the circulars register, and cost indices on the cost-index page linked above. Government portals are sometimes slow or fussy about browsers; keep trying rather than trusting a random mirror.
• Print: law and technical booksellers sell bound DSR 2023 volumes, including reprints consolidated with correction slips to a stated date — check that date before buying.
• Mirrors and aggregator PDFs: fine for reading, dangerous for pricing. An unlabelled PDF gives you no way to know which correction slips it includes. For anything contractual, verify rates against the official edition plus the slips your tender names.

How private builders and contractors use the DSR#

Nothing restricts the DSR to government work, and private-sector use is wider than most people assume:

• Budget sanity checks. A developer's internal estimate at DSR-plus-index is a fast, neutral second opinion on a consultant's cost plan.
• Contractor negotiation. "DSR plus X per cent" is a common shorthand in private works contracts precisely because both sides can open the same book. It works — provided the contract also states the edition, the correction slips, and who bears the gap when the market moves.
• Subcontract pricing. Labour-rate items in the schedule give a defensible starting point for labour-only subcontracts.
• Valuation, banks, and disputes. Valuers and arbitrators reach for DSR-based costing because its analyses are published and reproducible — which is exactly the property you want when a dispute lands.

The caveat cuts the same way as for tenders: the DSR is a Delhi-price, specification-defined benchmark. A private project with premium specifications priced "at DSR rates" is mispriced by definition — the right use is DSR as the transparent baseline, with the deltas priced openly.

Where SiteSetu fits#

The failure mode with schedule-based estimating is rarely the arithmetic — it is the drift between the estimate, the BOQ, the purchase orders, and the bills as the project moves. SiteSetu keeps that chain on one spine: BOQ items with their rates, indents and purchase orders raised against them, GRNs and consumption logged at site, and RA-bill quantities reconciled against what was actually measured — so when an engineer asks you to justify a rate or a deviation six months in, the record already exists. If you are starting from drawings, our BOQ from drawing tool gets you to a priced BOQ without the spreadsheet scaffolding.

FAQs#

What is the latest CPWD DSR in 2026?#

For civil works, DSR 2023 (Volumes I and II), kept current through correction slips — slip 11 was issued on 4 August 2026. For electrical and mechanical works, DSR (E&M) 2025, released on 1 May 2025. There is no DSR 2024: the civil edition sequence runs 2016, 2019, 2021, 2023.

Is the CPWD DSR available as a free PDF?#

Yes — CPWD publishes DSR and DAR volumes on its own publications page, and correction slips and cost indices on its circulars and cost-index pages, all free. Third-party mirrors are convenient but rarely state which correction slips they include, so verify against the official source before using mirrored rates in anything contractual.

What is the difference between DSR and DAR?#

The DSR is the priced schedule — item code, description, unit, rate. The DAR (Delhi Analysis of Rates) is the working behind each rate: material coefficients, labour norms, machinery, 1 per cent water charges, and 15 per cent contractor's profit and overheads. You estimate from the DSR; you price extra, substituted, and non-scheduled items from the DAR method.

Do DSR rates include GST?#

DSR 2023 item rates include GST on works contracts at 18 per cent. But the basic material rates in sub-head 0, the rates inside DAR analyses, and the rates notified in correction slips are ex-GST. CPWD also revised its GST application method in August 2024 with a modification factor on existing rates — check the circulars register when precision matters.

How do I use CPWD DSR rates for my city?#

Through the cost index: compare your station's current cost index with the base index of the DSR edition (107 for DSR 2023, on the PAR 2021 base) and adjust the estimate by the percentage difference. Indices are notified station-wise, and the Delhi building cost index is updated on 1 April and 1 October each year. Remember the notified indices are on a plinth-area-rates base — convert against the DSR base index, never multiply raw.

How often is the DSR updated?#

The works manual contemplates revision roughly every two years; in practice the civil DSR has run 2016, 2019, 2021, 2023, with correction slips in between, and the E&M DSR 2016, 2022, 2025. The cost index updates twice a year, and the 10CC escalation indices more frequently still — so "the DSR is old" is never a complete sentence; the question is always edition plus slips plus index.

DSR rate vs market rate — which should a contractor bid on?#

Build your own rate analysis first — your material quotes, your labour productivity, the DAR method — and treat the DSR-based estimate as the reference you bid a premium or rebate against. The DSR reflects April 2023 Delhi prices adjusted by index; your cost reflects your site today. The gap between the two, item by item, is your bidding decision made visible.

Does the CPWD DSR apply outside Delhi?#

Yes, with the cost index applied — that is precisely what the index system is for. Central government works across India are estimated on DSR-plus-index. State-funded works follow the state's own schedule (SOR, SSR, BSR, CSR, HSR), with CPWD DSR as the standard fallback for items the state schedule does not cover.

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This guide describes the CPWD DSR system as publicly documented, for general information. Editions, correction slips, cost indices, and manual provisions change; the tender or contract governing your work, and the current documents on cpwd.gov.in, always prevail. Take project-specific professional advice where a rate decision affects contractual rights.