What does costed mean?
"Costed" is the past tense and past participle of the verb "cost" in one specific job: estimating how much something will require in money, time, or resources. While ordinary statements of price use the unchanging form — "the ticket cost forty pounds" — English requires the regular -ed ending when someone deliberately works out or assigns a figure: "the campaign was costed at three million." This makes "costed" a favourite of accountants, quantity surveyors, project managers, and anyone preparing budgets, where phrases such as "a fully costed proposal" are routine. It appears most often in formal and professional writing, and is especially common in British usage. The word carries no emotional charge; it signals careful, methodical planning rather than opinion. Its usefulness lies precisely in that distinction between paying a price (cost) and calculating one (costing, costed), a subtlety that trips up even experienced writers.
verb (past tense and past participle of 'cost', in its transitive sense of estimating a price)Past tense and past participle of 'cost' when it means to estimate or calculate the price of something: 'the project was carefully costed'. In this sense — unlike the simple sense 'it cost ten pounds' — the regular form 'costed' is standard.
- (of a person or organization) estimated or calculated the likely cost of something: 'the scheme was costed at over £1 million'.
- Included or accounted for the costs of something in a budget or financial plan.
"The entire renovation was costed by an independent surveyor before work began."
"Each option was fully costed before being presented to the board."
"The tender was rejected because it hadn't been properly costed."
Say 'the holiday costed £2,000' and purists will wince — but say 'the project was costed at £2m' and you're using perfectly good business English. Same word, two different past tenses!
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of costed
"Costed" derives from "cost", which entered Middle English from Old French "coste(r)" (modern French "coûter"), itself from Latin "constare", meaning "to stand firm, to amount to" — formed from "com-" (together) and "stare" (to stand). The same Latin root gives us words like "constant", "institute", and "substance". The specialized regular past tense "costed" arose because English verbs with irregular past forms often develop regular alternatives in derived senses; here the sense of actively estimating a price takes the standard -ed inflection, a development well established in commercial usage by the twentieth century.
Related word forms
How costed is actually used
Formal to neutral register, most common in British English business, accounting, and project-management contexts. The form is restricted to the transitive 'estimate a price' sense; using 'costed' for simply stating what something sold for ('it costed £5') is widely considered nonstandard.
Easily confused with costed
'Cost' is the base verb and also the standard past tense for simply stating a price ('the book cost £10'), whereas 'costed' is used only when someone actively estimates or works out the cost of something.