Commercial
What is meterage?
Meterage is the measure a scaffolding job is priced on — in most UK practice, the area of the scaffold face, being the length along the elevation multiplied by the height of the scaffold.
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<img src="https://scaffoldoptix.co.uk/glossary/meterage/diagram.svg" alt="meterage — scaffold diagram from ScaffoldOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://scaffoldoptix.co.uk/glossary/meterage">What is meterage?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://scaffoldoptix.co.uk">ScaffoldOptix</a>
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</figure>Meterage is a commercial measure rather than a technical one. It does not appear in TG20 and it is not a safety concept; it is how the trade turns a structure into a number a rate can be applied to.
Face area is the common basis: a run 20 metres long and 8 metres high is 160 square metres. Height is the height of the scaffold, not the height of the building — a scaffold carried above the eaves to give a handrail at roof level is measured to the top of the scaffold.
Some firms price on linear metres per lift instead, multiplying the run length by the number of lifts. The two methods produce different numbers from the same scaffold, which is why a quote should state which one it used rather than leaving the client to assume.
What meterage does not capture is where the money goes: returns, boarded lifts below the working platform, loading bays, hop-ups, difficult ground, and above all adaptations during the hire. Those are priced separately or absorbed into the rate, and firms differ on which.
What goes wrong on site
- Returns measured at face value on one quote and to a minimum on the next, so the rate has to carry a variable that should have been measured.
- Quotes that state a meterage without stating the basis, which makes any later challenge a matter of whose memory is better.
- Pricing the face and forgetting the boarded lifts beneath it — a scaffold boarded at every lift is a different job from one boarded at the top.