If you are comparing builders' quotes, PC and PS items are where the real differences hide. Two quotes can look thousands apart and be identical, or look identical and be thousands apart, depending entirely on how these two lines are set.
What is a PC item
A PC item, or provisional cost item, is an allowance for something you have not chosen yet. Tapware, for example. The builder does not know whether you want the $180 mixer or the $1,400 one, so the contract carries an allowance.
If you pick something dearer, you pay the difference. If you pick something cheaper, you get the difference back.
What is a PS item
A PS item, or provisional sum, is an allowance for work whose full extent is not known yet. It covers labour and materials both.
Site works are the classic example. Until the excavator turns up, nobody knows exactly what is under your block. So the contract carries a provisional sum, and it is adjusted once the work is actually done.
Why they blow budgets
Here is the part nobody explains. A low allowance makes a quote look cheaper without making the job cheaper.
If one builder allows $2,000 for tapware across the whole house and another allows $6,000, the first quote comes in $4,000 lower. Both builders are quoting the same house. But the family who signed the cheaper contract will be writing a variation the moment they walk into a showroom, because $2,000 does not buy tapware for a whole house.
The quote was never cheaper. The allowance was just set lower.
What to ask
- Ask what every PC and PS item is set at, and why that number
- Ask to see the allowances written as a schedule, not buried in the contract
- Ask what happens when an allowance is exceeded, and how you get told
- For site works, ask whether a soil test has been done yet, and whether the provisional sum reflects it
- Ask the builder to walk you through the two or three items most likely to move
If a builder cannot tell you why an allowance is set where it is, that is your answer.
The honest version
Allowances are not a trick. They are a legitimate way to price work that genuinely cannot be pinned down yet. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is that they are easy to use to win a job on a number that was never real.
This is why we price through a staged process rather than a fast quote. By the time you have a fixed scope from us, the allowances in it are ones we can defend, line by line. It is slower, and it costs money before construction starts. That is deliberate, and it is the point.