Uttar Pradesh PWD Schedule of Rates 2025-26: There Is No State-Wide Book
UP PWD does not publish one Schedule of Rates. It publishes one per Superintending Engineer circle — 33 of them, with different effective dates, district-specific rates, and mid-year revisions. How to find the one that governs your tender.
Every other state gives you one file to find. Uttar Pradesh gives you thirty-three.
Search for the UP PWD Schedule of Rates and you will land on a page that looks broken: a long list of Hindi circle names, each with a "View" link, and no state-wide book anywhere on it. That is not a broken page. It is the actual structure, and it is the first thing to understand before pricing a UP tender.
The rates are published per circle, not per state
The Public Works Department, Government of Uttar Pradesh, publishes its Schedule of Rates through the office of each Superintending Engineer (अधीक्षण अभियंता), one book per circle (वृत्त). The department's Schedule of Rates page lists 33 circles: Agra, Aligarh, Allahabad/Prayagraj, Ayodhya, Azamgarh, Badaun–Pilibhit, Bahraich, Ballia, Banda, Bareilly, Basti, Bulandshahr, Deoria, Etawah, Gonda, Gorakhpur, Hamirpur, Jaunpur–Ghazipur, Jhansi, Kannauj, Kanpur, Lucknow, Mainpuri, Meerut, Mirzapur, Moradabad, Pratapgarh, Rampur, Saharanpur, Sitapur, Sultanpur–Amethi, Unnao and Varanasi.
There is no consolidated UP SOR. If a tender cites "the Schedule of Rates", the operative document is the one issued by the circle the work falls in.
This is a sharper version of what Uttarakhand does when it distributes rates district by district, and the opposite of the single state-wide book that Maharashtra publishes as its SSR. In UP the unit of publication is the engineering circle, which is an administrative boundary rather than a revenue one — so you cannot infer it from the district name alone.
The current edition is 2025-26, and effective dates differ by circle
The books carry Schedule of Rates 2025-26 on the cover. What they do not share is a start date.
| Circle | Instrument | Effective from |
|---|---|---|
| Lucknow | Cover page of the 2025-26 book; Office Memorandum 3248/2M-L-circle/2025 dated 30.04.2025 | 01.05.2025 |
| Bareilly | Office Memorandum 4576/23UPA-3/2025-26 dated 15.04.2025 | 15.04.2025 |
Two weeks apart, in the same edition year. For a tender priced near the changeover, the circle's own memorandum date is what settles which set of rates applied.
There is no 2026-27 edition on the department's page. A large share of the search demand for this schedule asks for "up sor 2026" or "up pwd sor 2026", and the honest answer is that the circles have not published a book under that name. The edition named in the tender governs regardless.
A circle SOR is a compilation, not an original document
The Agra circle's covering memorandum — no. 2649/2M-A-circle/2025, dated 15.05.2025 — is unusually explicit about what goes into one of these books, and it is worth reading because it explains why the rates are not simply a local invention.
Agra's previous schedule had been issued in August 2023. For 2025-26, the Engineer-in-Chief (Development) and Head of Department directed that the schedule be brought in line with:
- MoRT&H and MORD prevailing specifications, for state highways, major district roads, urban roads, other important district roads, rural roads and bridge works — the same specification family that governs the MoRT&H standard bidding document
- CPWD's latest specifications, for building works, per Chief Engineer (Building) memoranda 272-Camp/2023 dated 10.10.2023 and 294-Camp/2023 dated 26.10.2023
Into that, the Agra book folds the Lucknow circle's rate schedule (memo 3248/2M-L-circle/2025), a separate rate list for items required for VVIP programmes (memo 3600, dated 12.06.2024), Chapter 26 covering Traffic Signs Work for road safety (memo 4587, dated 14.08.2020), and the Labour Commissioner's minimum wage notification for Uttar Pradesh (memo 2111-18/Enforcement(MW)/15 dated 27.03.2025).
So a UP circle rate is a central specification, priced with a locally-fixed quarry and material rate, on a statutory minimum wage. Three different authorities, and only the middle one is the circle's own. This is the same layering that rate analysis in any Indian schedule rests on, made visible.
Rates vary by district inside a circle
A circle is not a rate zone. The Bareilly circle's revised material table prints two effective-rate columns — one for Bareilly, one for Shahjahanpur — for the same item and the same PWD specification number. Brick ballast, stone grit, river sand and coarse sand all carry district-specific figures.
The Lucknow circle memorandum is similarly scoped to Lucknow and Rae Bareli districts, and for quarry rates it defers outward again: the quarry rates notified by the Superintending Engineers of the Hamirpur and Prayagraj circles are the ones that apply.
Getting the circle right and the district wrong is a silent error. The estimate will look entirely defensible and still fail to reconcile.
The rates exclude GST
The Lucknow circle memorandum states plainly that the rates were fixed excluding GST, and that GST on those rates is payable separately as per rules. This is not universal across Indian schedules, so it is worth checking rather than assuming — but in UP, for this circle and edition, the schedule figure is a pre-tax figure.
Steel and cement point back to the CPWD DSR
For several materials the circle schedules decline to set a rate at all. In the Bareilly circle's revised Chapter-1 (Material) table, these entries read "As per CPWD DSR":
- Cement (Portland) OPC-43 grade
- White Lime
- Steel Reinforcement (as per IS 1786-2008)
- M.S. Flats and Angles Iron
- M.S. Steel Tubes are priced locally, per kg
Which means a UP estimate cannot be closed out of the UP book alone. For those lines you need the CPWD DSR, and where a build-up rather than a finished rate is required, the CPWD analysis of rates is the corresponding document.
Cement is the clearest illustration of the layering: alongside the CPWD DSR reference, the Bareilly table fixes local per-bag rates for OPC-43 and PPC for small works consuming up to 1,000 bags, citing the SE Lucknow circle letter of 30.04.2025. Same material, two pricing routes, decided by consumption volume.
The April book is not the last word
Circles amend their schedules during the year, by memorandum, with immediate effect.
The Bareilly circle did exactly this: Office Memorandum 10500/23UPA-3/2025-26, dated 13.10.2025, revised Chapter-1 (Material) of the 2025-26 schedule — the rates originally issued on 15.04.2025 — and recorded that the revision would be effective immediately.
The department's page carries a revision circular for every one of the 33 circles, listed beside the main books and labelled as revised steel and cement rates. They are dated between October and November 2025, well after the April–May editions. Pricing off the main book alone, without checking whether the circle has since amended Chapter 1, will produce material rates that are several months stale.
What the files are actually like
Three practical facts about the PDFs, all of which cost real time if you discover them late:
They are scans. Every circle book we opened is a scanned image with no extractable text layer. Nothing can be searched, copied, or parsed. Rates are read off the page by eye and typed in — which is why UP is one of the states we cannot offer as a searchable rate table, unlike states that publish machine-readable schedules.
They vary enormously in size and completeness. The Unnao circle file is 5 pages and about 1 MB. Deoria's is roughly 63 MB. Agra's is 40 pages, Lucknow's 29. A 5-page circle book is not a full schedule of rates.
Several links are broken. Of the 33 circles listed, only 31 link to a schedule at all — Ayodhya and Gorakhpur carry a revision circular and no main book. Of those 31 links, three returned HTTP 404 when checked in August 2026: Aligarh, Badaun–Pilibhit and Sitapur. Twenty-eight resolved. The Sitapur link is the informative failure: it points at nao_SOR25-26.pdf, a truncated filename sharing the Unnao file's upload timestamp, so the circle appears to have been given a mis-named copy of its neighbour's book rather than its own.
If your circle is one of the five, the route is the circle office directly. There is no mirror of these files anywhere official.
Pricing a UP tender
The work in Uttar Pradesh is not rate lookup, it is document routing: identify the circle, confirm the district column inside it, check whether a mid-year memorandum has replaced Chapter 1, pull steel and cement from the CPWD DSR, and add GST that the schedule deliberately left out. None of that is in the BOQ the tender hands you, and all of it decides whether your rate is defensible line by line.
Where a base rate has to be carried forward in time rather than across geography, the CPWD cost index is the instrument for it — UP's circle schedules have no built-in escalation mechanism of their own.
Arched's estimation engine reads the tender, identifies which schedule and edition each line is priced from, and carries the circle- and district-specific rates through — so the routing above happens before submission rather than during a post-award reconciliation.
Editions, links and effective dates change without notice, and several of the links above were already broken when we checked. Confirm the current schedule with the circle office before bidding.