European Construction Cost Tracker

How to read this - and what it isn’t

• It’s a trend, not a price list. The figures are an index (2021 = 100) tracking the direction and pace of construction costs - not the euro price of a specific material or job. The 5- and 10-year columns show how far costs have moved over the longer run, so a single year’s number has context. For real project ranges, see the guides below.
• Materials are a trend too. The material table is an EU-wide producer-price index ( dataset sts_inppd_m) - the direction of what suppliers charge, not a euro price per unit. No one publishes live retail prices for lumber, tile or paint across 24 countries, so we don’t pretend to.
• Labour is real euros. Hourly labour cost is an actual figure in EUR ( dataset lc_lci_lev), a whole-of-construction average per country - a specialist trade will quote above it, and a labourer below.
• The euro job costs are a model, not a price list. Each figure is a typical material/product spend (treated as broadly pan-European) plus typical on-site hours billed at 1.8× the country’s real Eurostat labour cost - a charge-out ratio that covers a trade’s overhead and margin. It sizes a job to mid-market and lands inside published European ranges, but a real quote turns on scope, finish, VAT and the specific home. Use it to get oriented, then get bids. Construction project management is the exception with no materials - it’s pure coordination time, so its fee is all labour and tracks each country’s rate, roughly the ~10% of build cost a project manager charges to run a full renovation.
• Source & cadence. The country cost index is the Eurostat construction producer-price index ( dataset sts_copi_q), quarterly and one to two quarters behind; materials are monthly, labour annual. We refresh from the same open Eurostat data.
• Coverage. 21 of our 24 countries report to Eurostat. The UK, Scotland and Iceland don’t publish a comparable series - we’re adding national sources for those.