Every so often a trainee QS pulls up an old specification, spots a work section lettered “D20” or “F30”, and asks why none of the current project documents are coded that way. The honest answer is that they’re looking at SMM7 – a measurement standard that was retired over a decade ago but still turns up often enough in legacy drawings, old precedent documents and the occasional habit of a consultant who learned the trade before 2013. Knowing the difference between SMM7 and the New Rules of Measurement (NRM) that replaced it isn’t just a history lesson: it affects how you read old documents, how you explain a discrepancy to a client, and how confidently you can say which rules actually govern the bill of quantities in front of you.
What SMM7 actually was
The Standard Method of Measurement has a longer history than most people assume. The first edition was published in 1922, and it went through six further revisions before SMM7 – the seventh edition – arrived in 1988, published by RICS and revised again in 1998. For the best part of three decades, SMM7 was the default rulebook for measuring building work in a bill of quantities: it set out, work section by work section, exactly what had to be measured, how it had to be described, and what was deemed to be included in the rate without being stated separately.
Its structure is the giveaway when you’re looking at an old document: work sections run alphabetically, A through Y – demolition under C, masonry under F, structural steelwork under G, and so on. If you see a BOQ item coded with a letter rather than a number, you’re almost certainly looking at something measured under SMM7, not NRM.
Enter the New Rules of Measurement
RICS replaced SMM7 with the New Rules of Measurement, published across three volumes rather than one single document. NRM1 covers order of cost estimating and cost planning for capital building works – the early-stage budgeting most QSs will recognise from our piece on preliminary estimating. NRM2 covers detailed measurement for building works and is the direct successor to SMM7 for bill of quantities preparation. NRM3, the least commonly referenced of the three, covers order of cost estimating and cost planning for building maintenance works, tying capital costs into whole-life considerations.
NRM2 was first published in April 2012 and became operative on 1 January 2013, with RICS guidance stating that SMM7 should not be adopted on new projects after July 2013. All three volumes were most recently reissued in October 2022 as RICS practice information, carried over unchanged in substance from the October 2021 guidance notes – so if you’re working to the current standard today, that’s the edition you want.
What actually changed
The most visible change is the coding. NRM dropped SMM7’s lettered sections in favour of a numbered structure running from section 1 to 41, complete with its own appendices. That alone makes old and new documents instantly distinguishable, but the more significant changes sit underneath the numbering:
- Explicit rules for non-measurable work. NRM2 sets out how to deal with items that can’t sensibly be measured in the traditional sense – something SMM7 left largely to convention and local practice.
- Coverage of contractor-designed portions. As design-and-build and contractor-led design have become more common, NRM2 gives measurement rules for work where the contractor, not the consultant team, is responsible for the design – an area SMM7 didn’t really anticipate.
- A place for risk. NRM1 in particular gives structured guidance on identifying and pricing risk within a cost plan, rather than treating it as a vague contingency line.
- A deliberate link between cost plan and bill. Because NRM1 and NRM2 share a common framework, a cost plan built under NRM1 maps onto a bill of quantities built under NRM2 far more cleanly than an SMM7 bill ever mapped onto whatever cost-planning method preceded it – which was the whole point of replacing a single document with a connected suite.
Where SMM7 still turns up
Despite being formally retired, SMM7 hasn’t vanished from practice entirely. It’s still the natural reference point when you’re measuring variations against an original bill that was itself prepared under SMM7 – you measure a change the same way the base document was measured, regardless of what the current standard happens to be. It also persists in template specifications, old precedent contract documents, and training material that hasn’t been refreshed, and some older standard forms of contract still contain boilerplate references to it that nobody has got around to updating. None of that makes it current; it just means a working QS needs to recognise it on sight and know not to apply it to new measurement.
It’s also worth being clear about scope: both SMM7 and NRM cover building works only. Civil engineering work – roads, bridges, earthworks, marine structures – has long been measured under its own separate standard, the Civil Engineering Standard Method of Measurement (CESMM), published by the Institution of Civil Engineers. If you’re moving between a building project and an infrastructure one, don’t assume NRM follows you across; check which method of measurement the contract actually specifies.
What this means for you
For any new bill of quantities, NRM2 is the standard to work to, with NRM1 governing the cost plan that sits above it – there’s no scenario in current UK practice where starting a fresh BOQ under SMM7 makes sense. The practical skill worth building isn’t memorising NRM’s 41 sections from scratch; it’s being able to recognise SMM7 coding the moment it appears in an inherited document, understand why it’s there, and know whether you’re measuring new work (NRM2, numbered sections) or valuing a variation against an old SMM7 bill (match the original method, letter for letter). Get that distinction right and the standard itself stops being a source of confusion and becomes exactly what it’s meant to be: a shared, unambiguous language between everyone pricing and measuring the same project.