A new Construction Costs library joined Benchmarks: real construction unit costs organised into chapters — building & general trades, whole-building cost per square metre, heavy civil construction, building construction, and repair & remodeling labour rates. Every rate is escalated to the current year on the CAF Cost Index, converted to US dollars and normalised to the US Gulf Coast baseline, so the chapters read on one common basis and you can apply the Location Factor and Cost Index to carry a rate to any country and year. A cross-source calibration view puts the same item — ready-mix concrete, reinforcing steel, concrete blockwork — side by side across the independent sources and shows how closely they agree, so you can see where a benchmark is well-founded and where a scope or escalation difference remains to reconcile. This first release is a working draft; the escalation indices and location factors are provisional and firm up as they are validated. Six United Kingdom chapters followed — railways, mechanical & electrical services, civil engineering & highway works, building works and external works & landscape, some 50,000 rates — and every chapter now carries the Kpex signature: a Metric ⇄ Imperial switch, automatic escalation to the current year (or any year you pick) and a Location selector that carries each rate to any country.
The Module B Cost Curves tool now carries railway lines under Infrastructure: Metro, Light Rail / Tram, Commuter / Regional, Conventional Mainline and High-Speed Rail. Each is a power-law curve of total investment cost against route length (km), so you enter how long the line is and get the estimate with its ±band and plotted point, like any other facility. The cost basis is drawn from public benchmarking (Transit Costs Project, UITP, UIC, World Bank, ITF and national rail agencies), with the standard line-length range per rail type. These curves are a first calibrated draft — the cost-growth exponent is refined automatically as real project data accumulates.
The Oil & Gas Offshore parametric library is no longer a tool on its own — it now lives inside the Module B Cost Curves benchmarking tool alongside every other facility. Under Oil & Gas you will find the offshore facility roll-ups (FPSO, fixed platform, subsea) and, new, the full component library: Steel Jacket, FPSO, and Subsea Deepwater / Non-Deepwater broken down into their parts — topsides, hull, jacket, piles, moorings, flowlines, risers, manifolds and well systems — each as its own cost curve against its natural driver (throughput, weight, length, well count, moorings × water depth). Pick a component, enter your capacity, and get the estimate, the ±30% band, your plotted point and the printable report, exactly as for any other curve. Every curve is on the Performance Forum basis, escalated to today, with the fit quality of each relationship shown so you can judge which driver to trust.
Every Z.3 rental rate is now brought to the present automatically. Each cost component is escalated by its own CAF cost index — equipment and cost of capital by the construction-machinery index, repair labour by the construction-labour index, fuel and lubricants by the diesel or gasoline index that matches the machine, and tyres by the tyre index. Because every family has a different mix, each machine ages by its own blended factor: a fuel-heavy machine whose fuel price fell can even come down, while a capital-heavy one rises. Cost-driver labels are now in English throughout, and the rate session shows the period each rate is escalated to.
The CAF Cost Index historical chart now opens on the most recent year and on a quarterly view by default, so the current picture is one glance away instead of a manual date change.
Z.3 Rental Equipment was rebuilt on CAF's complete equipment cost guide — 21 families and 455 equipment types across more than 8,000 rated models, from air compressors to locomotives, each with its own icon. Open any equipment and its cost drivers appear as dropdowns — capacity, power, size, drive — so the rate follows the exact machine you pick, with the full ownership-and-operating breakdown behind it: depreciation, cost of capital, overhead, repair, fuel, lubricants and tires. Every rate adjusts to the country of the works (CAF Location Factor) and now to any of 35 currencies, converted on daily-synced exchange rates with the exact rate cited on the quote. Investment and usage are shown as fixed methodology assumptions, so a rate stays consistent with how it was built. Gather equipment into a session report — each line now carrying its complete cost-driver specification — and print a defensible rate sheet.
The ISBL Battery Limit — Equipment Library now presents the same component cards as the Module A cost-curve catalog, so the two libraries look and behave alike. Its equipment viewer gained a working size slider for dimension-driven equipment — vessels, tanks, columns, spheres and stacks now sweep their real size range (for example a storage sphere from 20 to 60 ft diameter) and price correctly at each size, instead of the slider sitting stuck on the smallest point. And when you add an item to an estimating session you can now choose its scope: the full Battery Limit (equipment plus its ISBL take-off) or Equipment only — the bare equipment cost before ISBL — with the choice carried through the session view, the printed report and the Excel export.
Z.3 Rental Equipment was rebuilt as a browsable catalog: expand an equipment family to see its equipment cards, then open one for a work session that builds the hourly, daily, weekly and monthly rate from the machine's investment cost — with the full ownership and operating breakdown, capacity/spec options that change the price, and a methodology panel that documents how every rate is derived. Rates escalate to the current month on the CAF Construction Machinery & Equipment index, and selected equipment can be gathered into a session report and printed.
The Class 5 cost-curve library was extended to cover the full range of facilities in Module C — manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, steel and aluminium, pulp and paper, food, steam and chilled water, waste-to-energy, LNG, onshore and offshore oil & gas, buildings and infrastructure, and more — so a screening estimate can start from a curve for almost any project. Each curve is now anchored to the same validated cost models that drive the Module C facility estimators, so a Class 5 curve estimate and the detailed Module C estimate for the same facility land on the same number. Redundant duplicate curves were retired so each product shows a single authoritative curve, and the minerals family gained bentonite, mica and phosphate-mining curves. Every curve is now labelled by its level — Facility or Functional Unit — making the library's structure explicit: equipment components build a functional unit (a process unit or product), and functional units assemble into a facility (the level of a Module C model). Curves calibrated outside the US Gulf Coast (North Sea offshore, the German heat-pump plant) now carry their origin country, so choosing a project country moves the estimate from the model's true origin to your location — applying the inverse factor where needed — instead of assuming a US-Gulf origin.
The AACE class belongs to an estimate, not to a project — one project can carry several estimates at different classes as its definition matures. Project pages, portfolio cards and reports no longer stamp the project with a single class, and the dashboard and portfolio charts now group estimates by class, giving a truer picture of where the work actually stands.
The CAF Cost Index went global. Four regions joined the original Americas index — Europe (Euro Area), Asia-Pacific anchored on Australia, Japan, and the Middle East & Africa — each built from that region’s own official statistics on the same method and family tree, so escalation reflects where a project’s equipment actually comes from. The index also gained a quarterly view, a printable snapshot of the latest values across every index, and a compare-any-two-periods mode that reads the escalation factor between them.
A new public register collects the world’s most significant industrial, energy and infrastructure projects in one place, organised by country and region and aligned to Kpex’s Module C families — each with its scope, owner, announced capacity and published CAPEX and date. It is the foundation for CAF’s global CAPEX-per-capacity benchmarking, monitored month to month so future estimates can be checked against real, recent projects. It now also records each project’s capacity in its cost driver, so the projects of one technology fit a CAPEX cost curve — the first, battery gigafactories, spanning real plants from 13 to 100 GWh/yr.
Clicking a country on the Location Factor map now opens a full country page: the five factors (A–E) with how each is calculated, the procurement, labour and engineering inputs versus the US Gulf Coast, a country profile with flag, principal-cities map and key facts, and the country’s major projects of the last decade. An “Adjust factors” button opens the interactive breakdown in place, and countries with currency instability carry a clear caution note.
Estimates can now be read in your own currency: pick it at the top and totals, breakdowns, line items, the printed report and Excel all convert at the day’s European Central Bank rate, with the rate and date recorded (the base stays in US dollars for benchmarking). Module C — Facilities was upgraded to a detailed, element-level model with per-account P10 / P50 / P90 and multi-driver configuration; you can build your own Work Breakdown Structure to any depth, share an estimate for real-time co-editing, and add real ISBL bulk materials across all ten disciplines to equipment priced from a purchase order or Excel. A new graphical Field Estimator composes a Class 4–5 estimate visually and exports a branded PDF or Excel.
The Module A catalog now shows prices current to the latest Cost Index month with a metric ⇄ imperial switch in every estimator, draws equipment icons from one validated master set, and honours the material of construction so alloys are no longer priced as carbon steel. The Offshore Oil & Gas estimator gained the full platform taxonomy — fixed, floating and subsea — and a new district-heating Large Heat Pump model joined Module C’s renewables.
New marketplace tooling arrived: a Vendor Pipeline for manufacturer and partner outreach, a reference-vendor catalogue priced from the validated curves, and an AI-assisted ISBL Component Author that reads a P&ID to propose a material take-off. Account management became dependable (reactivate, restore, edit), long pages now open collapsed as a clean index, and the Knowledge Library gained a consistent dossier design with Save-as-PDF and an internal “Audits” chapter.
Cost curves began escalating on the live CAF Cost Index — estimates reflect this month’s index rather than a figure published a quarter ago — and every curve now declares its cost scope, so it is never mistaken for a project total. Benchmark calibration was refreshed, and new methodology dossiers were added to the Knowledge Library.
Ten infrastructure and process models moved to multi-driver pricing — voltage, terrain, metallurgy, service, not capacity alone — including a full HV transmission-line model. Every parametric estimator gained a cost summary in its PDF and a one-click Excel export, plus a clearer “continue estimate” flow with unsaved-changes warnings. Module E — ABEX decommissioning went live across all six sectors, and a new Water & Wastewater treatment estimator covers four facility types.
Membership access control was applied across the platform, pricing became database-driven, and a registration flow with email verification was introduced — with estimates and projects private by default.
Module C came online: parametric estimators for Onshore and Offshore Oil & Gas, Refineries and LNG, extended across Chemicals, Power, Renewable Energy (11 technologies), Buildings (20 types), Mining, Nuclear and Infrastructure — each with P10 / P50 / P90 percentile selection and an adopted Total Installed Cost.
Kpex launched on its foundations: benchmark capacity–cost Cost Curves with full data provenance, the CAF Cost Index computed monthly from BLS and FRED, multi-currency support with historical ECB rates frozen per estimate, and the ISBL / MTO take-off tool, Location Factor Index, Cost Adjustment Index and Assessment Tools suite.