Glossary

Floor plan and BOQ glossary for Indian practice

The terms that appear on PlanPro’s drawings and bills, and the two or three distinctions that cost people money when they get them wrong.

Areas

Carpet area: The floor you can actually lay carpet on: the clear area inside each room, measured face to face with wall thickness taken out.Under RERA this is the figure a builder must quote for a flat, which is why it is usually the smallest of the three numbers on a brochure.
Built-up area: Carpet area plus the walls themselves — the footprint the building occupies, measured to the outside face of the external walls.PlanPro measures it off the envelope rather than adding wall thicknesses onto carpet area, so a partition shared by two rooms is not counted twice.
Super built-up area: Built-up area plus a share of the common spaces — lobbies, stairs, lifts, sometimes the clubhouse. A loading factor, typically 1.2–1.35×.It has no fixed definition in code, which is exactly why the same flat can be advertised at very different areas.
Clear size: A room’s internal dimensions, inside face to inside face. The pair of numbers written under a room name on a plan.
FAR / FSI: Floor Area Ratio (or Floor Space Index): the total floor area you are permitted to build, as a multiple of the plot area. FAR 1.75 on a 1,200 ft² plot allows 2,100 ft².
Setback: The open margin required between a building and its plot boundary, set separately for front, rear and each side by the local bye-laws.

BOQ: Bill of quantities: an itemised list of the work a drawing implies — concrete, masonry, plaster, doors — each with a measured quantity a contractor can price.
IS 1200: The Indian Standard for methods of measurement of building works. It fixes how each item is measured, including what gets deducted.A quantity is meaningless without its mode of measurement: if you deduct openings from masonry and your contractor does not, the same wall yields two different numbers.
Mode of measurement: The stated rule a quantity was measured under — what is included, what is deducted, and in what unit. Always printed alongside a BOQ.

IFC 4: Industry Foundation Classes: the open, vendor-neutral BIM format. An IFC 4 file carries walls as walls and doors as doors, not as lines.It is what lets a model open in Revit, ArchiCAD or Tekla without anyone re-drawing it.
DXF: Drawing Exchange Format: AutoCAD’s interchange format for 2D linework. Geometry and layers, no building intelligence.
NBC 2016: The National Building Code of India, 2016 edition — the national model code covering room sizes, light and ventilation, means of escape, and services.It is a model code. Your municipality’s bye-laws are what actually bind you, and they can be stricter.
Axonometric: A parallel projection drawn at a fixed angle, so nothing converges and everything stays measurable. The cutaway view of a house that reads as 3D but scales like a plan.
Vastu: A traditional Indian system of building orientation and placement — entry direction, kitchen and room positions relative to north.Not a building code and not enforceable, but for a great many Indian clients it decides whether a plan is acceptable.

See the numbers on a real plan

Built-up off the envelope, carpet from the rooms, clear sizes under every room name — on drawings you can check against the figures.