How much does it cost to prepare a RAP?

Two different numbers get called the cost of a RAP. Preparing the plan is a consultancy fee — typically a low six-figure sum in US dollars for a substantial project, driven mostly by how many parcels have to be enumerated. Paying the compensation the plan calculates is a separate budget, usually an order of magnitude larger, and it belongs to the project rather than to the consultant.

What drives the preparation fee

• Number of affected parcels and households. Enumeration is the largest line, and it scales with parcels, not with corridor length. A fragmented smallholder landscape can cost several times what the same distance costs across large holdings.
• Terrain and access. Field days are the unit of cost, and difficult access multiplies them.
• Number of settlements to consult. Each requires its own sessions, and reaching women, tenants and absentees means more than one visit each.[2]
• Depth of the socioeconomic baseline. A baseline capable of supporting livelihood monitoring costs more than an asset census and is the thing that makes restoration assessable later.[1]
• Physical versus economic displacement. Physical displacement pulls in site selection, housing design and host community work — a different scope entirely.

What the plan then commits the project to spend

The compensation and implementation budget is where the real money is, and it is routinely under-estimated at feasibility because it is drawn before anyone has counted anything. The lines most often missing:

• Transitional support between displacement and the replacement asset becoming productive.
• Livelihood restoration beyond training — working capital, land purchase support, years of staffing.
• Grievance mechanism operating costs through implementation.
• Monitoring and the completion audit, which fall after construction ends.
• The implementing unit's own staffing and transport.
• Contingency sized against observed variance rather than a nominal percentage.[3]

The false economy

Cutting the preparation fee reliably increases the total. A thin enumeration produces omitted households who reappear as grievances during construction; a thin baseline makes livelihood restoration unmeasurable, which turns into a completion audit finding; a compressed consultation produces disputes that stop possession.

The comparison worth making is not consultant A against consultant B on fee. It is the fee against a fortnight of a stopped construction contract, which is what an unresolved corridor section costs.[4]

Getting a comparable quote

Specify the survey instrument, the enumerator-to-household ratio, minimum field days per key expert, the number of consultation rounds, and the data deliverable including its audit trail. Without those, bids differ by scope rather than by price, and the cheapest one has usually solved the problem by doing less enumeration.