Telangana Schedule of Rates 2025-26: One Common SoR, Four Departments
Telangana publishes a single Common Schedule of Rates covering irrigation, roads, buildings and public health. Which edition is current, why it starts in June, and what the Standard Data book does.
Most Indian states publish a Schedule of Rates per department. The PWD has one, the irrigation department has another, public health engineering has a third, and reconciling them is somebody's job. Telangana does not work that way.
Telangana publishes one book for all of it — and it is issued not by a department but by a Board of Chief Engineers, which is the detail that explains everything else about how the schedule behaves.
What the current edition is
The current edition is the Common Schedule of Rates 2025-26.
There is no 2026-27 edition. This is worth stating plainly, because the search traffic for "SOR 2026-27 Telangana" suggests a lot of people are looking for a book that has not been published. Until the Board issues a successor, 2025-26 is the schedule to price against, and a tender floated in 2026-27 will ordinarily still cite it.
The pattern is not unusual. Andhra Pradesh moved to a 2026-27 Common Schedule of Rates while Telangana — which inherited the same schedule-making tradition at bifurcation — stayed on 2025-26. Two states running the same institutional machinery can sit a full edition apart.
One book, four parts
The structural fact that distinguishes Telangana is the single common volume. The master index of the 2022-23 edition lays it out:
| Part | Coverage | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| Part-I | Irrigation & CAD Works | 1–20 |
| Part-II | Road & Bridge Works | 21–33 |
| Part-III | Building Works | 34–373 |
| Part-IV | Public Health Works | 374–467 |
| Annexure | Latest G.O.s — Seigniorage Charges | 468 |
Read the page counts, because they are not what the department hosting the book would lead you to expect. The schedule is served through the Irrigation & CAD department's portal, and Irrigation & CAD is 20 pages of 467. Building Works is 340 pages — roughly three-quarters of the entire book.
The practical consequence: if you are pricing building work in Telangana and you have been told to look at an irrigation department portal, you are in the right place. That is not a mistake in the tender document.
The second consequence is subtler. Because one book serves four departments, an item common to more than one work type carries one rate across all of them. In states with departmental schedules, the same excavation can price differently depending on which department floated the tender. In Telangana it does not, and cross-departmental comparisons that would be meaningless elsewhere are meaningful here.
Why the edition starts in June
The 2022-23 edition's title page reads "Effective from 1st June 2022". Later editions have kept to a June effective date rather than 1 April.
This creates a gap every year that catches estimators who assume the schedule turns over with the financial year. For roughly the first two months of a financial year, the operative schedule is the previous edition. A tender floated in April 2026 does not automatically price against a 2026-27 book — and in Telangana's case there is no 2026-27 book at all.
As always, and more important than any of the above: the edition cited in the tender document governs. If the notice names an edition, that edition is the one you price against, whatever the portal currently shows.
The Standard Data book is half the instrument
The title of every edition reads "Common Schedule of Rates as per T.S Standard Data". That phrase is doing real work.
The Standard Data book holds the analysis: the labour, material and machinery constants that go into each item of work — how many mason-hours, how much cement, how many machine-hours per unit. The Schedule of Rates is what you get when current input prices are applied to those constants.
So the two answer different questions. The SoR tells you the rate. The Standard Data tells you how the rate was constructed, which is what you need the moment a tender contains a non-schedule item and you have to derive a rate by analogy. This is the same relationship that MoRTH's Standard Data Book has with the rates built from it, and the same logic underneath rate analysis generally.
Estimators who only download the SoR find themselves stuck at the first non-schedule item. Download both.
Seigniorage charges are in the annexure
The 2022-23 edition carries an annexure of latest G.O.s covering seigniorage charges — the royalty payable to the state on minor minerals extracted or consumed, such as sand, gravel, stone and earth.
This is a real cost line, it is set by government order rather than by the schedule itself, and it changes independently of the rate book. Its position at the very back of a 468-page volume is roughly proportional to how often it gets missed. If your estimate covers earthwork, aggregate or stone masonry in Telangana, check the annexure against the current G.O. before you rely on the rate.
How Telangana compares
Telangana sits at one end of a spectrum in how Indian states organise rates:
- One common book, all departments — Telangana. Also Andhra Pradesh, which shares the pre-bifurcation lineage.
- One state book, geography layered on top — the CPWD approach, where a single DSR is adjusted by a cost index for each station.
- Split by work type across volumes — Karnataka, where the division is by kind of work rather than by department or district.
- A separate book per district — Uttarakhand, where thirteen district schedules coexist and carriage costs drive the differences.
Knowing which model a state uses tells you what question to ask first. In Uttarakhand it is "which district?". In Telangana it is "which part?" — and the answer is usually Part-III.
If a tender's bill of quantities does not map cleanly onto schedule items, that is a different problem, and the distinction between a schedule of rates and a bill of quantities is where to start.
For every other state's publishing department, current edition, and official link, see the Schedule of Rates by state directory.
Pricing against the right part and year
The work that consumes an estimator's day is not locating the PDF. It is mapping a tender's BOQ onto the right part of the right edition, deriving rates for the items the schedule does not carry, and catching the cost lines — seigniorage among them — that sit outside the rate table entirely. Arched's estimation engine reads the tender, identifies the applicable schedule, and flags those exposures before submission.
Editions and links change, and Telangana government portals may only open from within India. Confirm the current edition and its effective date on the official source before bidding.