The Regional Price Lists for Estimating the Costs of Construction

The forecast of the most probable cost of an intervention in the construction or engineering field developed through a bill of quantities is one of the most critical operations of economic and technical planning [1–4]. Regarding to public works, the recent legislation (Legislative Decree n. 50/2016) has introduced some changes relating the evaluation of costs; the paragraph 7 of article n. 23—which defines the three levels and contents of the design—establishes that the definitive project, in addition to the complete identification of the work and the elements necessary for the authorizations and approvals, must contain “the definitive quantification of the expenditure limit and the related time schedule, through the use, where existing, of the price lists prepared by the regions and autonomous provinces territorially competent”. The reference to regional prices for the estimate of the economic amount has the objective of establishing fair prices for the various operators (designers, construction companies etc.), at least within a territorial area representative of the economic and technological characteristics of the building sector. In many territorial areas, this entails the transition from provincial prices list to regional prices list, with evident difficulties especially for those areas characterized by specific productive and economic realities. In 2018 the Lombardy Region does not yet have a regional price list and only the provincial price lists (published by the local Chambers of Commerce) or that published by the Municipality of Milan were utilized. Precisely in relation to the new requests introduced by national legislation relating to the use of regional price lists for the estimation of public works, this contribution aims to analyze what are the differences in unitary prices for some of building works and verify the possibility of determining “concordance” indices to be considered in the elaboration of a regional price list able to take into account the different functions of formation of the costs (and therefore of the building works prices) of the workings between different provincial areas.