Irish Earthworks Drone Survey ROI Calculator

How we calculate

The calculator uses Irish-market rates for both traditional GNSS grid surveys and drone surveys. All figures are indicative; real contracts vary with access, ground cover, and deliverable scope. The numbers below are conservative and are the figures we actually use when quoting earthworks-scale surveys.

Traditional GNSS grid survey

Cost – 2-person crew at your entered hourly rate, 8 hours per day, times your entered days per survey. Default Irish market rate is €85/hr for a survey crew with GNSS and total station.

Days – You set this, but the auto-suggest assumes roughly 10m grid spacing at typical Irish site productivity (3 ha per day for detailed topographic grid).

Drone survey

Cost – tiered pricing matching our live quote rates:

• ≤ 5 ha – €850 flat (mobilisation + flight + processing + PDF)
• 5–20 ha – €850 + €75 per additional hectare
• 20–50 ha – economies of scale at €50 per hectare above 20
• > 50 ha – €35 per hectare above 50

Time on site – 0.5 day (≤ 20 ha), 1 day (20–50 ha), 1.5 days (> 50 ha), including pre-flight, flight, GCP layout, and packup. Post-processing + delivery is 48 hours standard regardless of size.

Accuracy – ±5cm absolute with RTK + GCP, delivered in Irish Transverse Mercator and OSGM15 heights.

Rework exposure reduction

Survey-driven rework on earthworks contracts is typically 3–8% of contract value and comes from one source: volume calculations done against a sparse survey that undercounts or overcounts real cut/fill. A traditional GNSS grid at 10m spacing samples ~1% of the actual surface. A drone survey captures the full surface at 2cm GSD and produces a volume at ±3% accuracy rather than the ±10–15% typical of grid-interpolated volumes.

The calculator takes your entered rework risk % (share of contract value you estimate is exposed), computes the current euro exposure, and multiplies by 0.7 to represent the reduction moving from traditional to drone accuracy. This is deliberately conservative – most quantity surveyors we work with report rework reductions closer to 80–85%.

What the calculator does not include

• Post-storm or post-incident surveys (separate pricing, typically €500–€1,200 per response)
• LiDAR surveys for dense-vegetation sites (roughly 3× photogrammetry pricing; different use case)
• Thermal or multispectral add-ons
• Setup cost for permanent base stations on long-running sites (case-by-case)

Questions on the methodology? Get in touch and we’ll walk you through how the figures would apply to your specific contract.