Cement came down from 28% to 18% and polished stone came down with it. Tiles did not move at all. Here is where the saving actually lands in a finishing package, where it does not, and what to check on a quote.
The September 2025 GST rationalisation was reported as a straightforward reduction in the cost of building. For a structure-heavy budget it broadly is. For a finishing package the picture is more mixed, because the single largest material line in finishing work did not change rate at all.
What moved and what did not
- Cement — reduced from 28% to 18%, with effect from 22 September 2025
- Polished marble and granite slabs and tiles — reduced from 28% to 18%
- Ceramic and vitrified tiles — unchanged at 18%
- TMT bars and structural steel — unchanged at 18%
- Raw, unworked marble and granite blocks — 5%
Cement is a structure cost far more than a finishing cost. In a finishing package it turns up in screed, platform casting, plaster and grout rather than as a headline item. The stone reduction is the one that reaches finishing budgets directly, and only on projects specifying marble or granite in lobbies, counters and staircases. A project finished largely in vitrified tile sees very little of it.
Why a ten-point rate cut is not a ten per cent saving
Two things dilute it. First, tax is a share of the material cost, and material is only a share of the finishing cost — labour, supervision and wastage make up the rest. Second, a registered developer claiming input tax credit was never carrying the full rate as a cost in the first place; for them the change is closer to a working-capital effect than a price effect.
The party that feels it most directly is the one who cannot claim credit — most obviously an individual owner renovating a flat, because input tax credit is not available on construction or renovation of immovable property on your own account. There, the reduction on stone is a genuine reduction in the bill.
What to check on a quote
- Whether the quote is inclusive or exclusive of GST, stated explicitly rather than assumed
- Which rate has been applied to each material head, stone in particular
- Whether a works-contract rate has been applied to the labour-and-material package as a whole rather than to materials individually
- Whether a quote carried over from an older schedule has genuinely been reworked, or simply re-dated
The last one is worth checking. Rates copied forward from a pre-2025 schedule sometimes carry the old cement and stone assumptions with them without anyone revisiting the arithmetic.
The part the rate cut did not touch
Material got marginally cheaper. Labour did not. Skilled finishing trades in Mumbai are in short supply, wage costs rose through 2025, and the new labour codes added social-security obligations on top of that. In most finishing quotes written this year the labour line has moved up by more than the material line has moved down.
So the honest summary is that GST 2.0 slightly reduced the material side of a finishing budget, disproportionately in favour of stone-heavy specifications, and did nothing at all about the side that is actually rising.
Rates cited here are as at the time of writing and should be confirmed against the current notification before being relied on in a quotation. If you want a finishing budget broken down by scope rather than quoted as a rate per square foot, that is how we price our work.