How Many Bids Does It Take to Win One? Public Bid Win Rates by Trade

One in five public bids in our records drew exactly one bidder. Some jobs can be won by showing up correctly, with a price the buyer can accept and the proof to back it up. You still need the buyer to approve the award.

That finding comes from PorchRocket’s Bid Control data (October 2026): 20.1% of 725 parsed bid tabulations recorded one bidder. A bid tabulation, usually called a bid tab, is the buyer’s record of submitted bids. The sample spans multiple states, with roughly 61% of tabs from Texas. It measures competition on each job, not individual contractors’ win rates.

Bid Control by PorchRocket puts those past results beside opportunities you can pursue. I would use that history before spending an evening on a takeoff. The question worth answering is how much effort your next sensible attempt deserves, and what you will learn if someone else gets the award.

How many public bids should you expect to submit before winning?

With 3 equally competitive bidders pursuing one award, the simple mathematical model is one win per three attempts over time, with no deadline for your first win.

That is a starting model, not a measured contractor win rate. In our 725-tab sample, the median bidder count was three. Median means the middle observation after sorting the counts; it does not mean every job attracted three companies, or that each company had the same chance.

The distinction matters on your first bid. A crew with a short haul to the site may have lower costs than yours, while an incumbent may understand the irrigation repairs hidden inside the mowing scope. A bidder can also submit a number that will lose money if accepted. None of those companies is a numbered ball in a drawing.

Here is the arithmetic people mean when they say fewer bidders improves the starting odds:

Total bidders, including you	Equal-chance model for one award	Average attempts per win in that model
2	1 ÷ 2 = 50%	2
3	1 ÷ 3 = 33.3%	3
4	1 ÷ 4 = 25%	4
6	1 ÷ 6 = 16.7%	6

The model assumes one award and independent attempts by equally competitive, eligible bidders. A roster contract is different. If the buyer selects several vendors and later divides task orders among them, being listed as a winner will not tell you how much work you will receive or what you should spend pursuing that roster. The model also assumes the agency makes an award.

Even under the three-bidder model, losing three attempts in a row has a probability of (2/3) × (2/3) × (2/3), or about 29.6%. Three losses would be frustrating. I would check the reasons for each loss before changing the next estimate.

A trade’s median bidder count cannot give you its measured success rate. We would need contractor-level submission histories to calculate that. Start with the competition signal, then replace the model with your own results as decisions arrive.

What does a bid hit ratio mean in public work versus private work?

A bid hit ratio counts attempts per award; a 5:1 ratio means five bids for one win, while public and private attempts can represent very different selling situations.

A private plumbing quote might follow a referral from a property manager who already wants your crew. Another private quote might go to six general contractors bidding the same building. Neither belongs in the same comparison as a sealed city bid with one published scope and a fixed closing time.

Count the customer decision you are pursuing. One building is one opportunity. If your electrical shop sends its quote to four GCs competing for that building, record all four recipients under the project so the bidding log does not grow every time the same price sheet leaves your office. If you also bid a separate city lighting replacement as prime contractor, that is another opportunity.

Public work needs another split: low-bid invitations versus scored proposals. An invitation for bids, often shortened to IFB or ITB, usually makes price the central comparison after requirements are met. A request for proposals, or RFP, scores the factors in its packet. Read those factors before treating a loss as a pricing problem.

For a specific state example, Florida Statutes section 287.057 distinguishes state commodity and contractual-services invitations to bid from RFPs. Its ITB provisions call for the lowest responsive bid from a responsible, responsive vendor. Its RFP provisions consider price and other stated criteria. This is a state purchasing rule, not a rule for every Florida municipal construction job.

Give public prime bids their own column from day one. Track subcontract quotes separately from negotiated private work too. The guide to public buying methods explains the packet titles.

A private customer who picks you after a conversation has made a different decision from a public buyer comparing signed submissions. One combined percentage hides which kind of work deserves more estimating time.

How do you calculate bid win rate without fooling yourself?

Divide confirmed awards by decided bids, then multiply by 100; keep pending bids outside that calculation and retain rejected submissions so paperwork losses stay visible.

Use the same period and counting rule every time. I prefer grouping bids by submission month and updating their outcomes later, which stops a slow award decision from making this month’s new bids look like losses.

For illustration, say a six-person paving crew in Temple submits 12 bids. Two are pending. One solicitation is canceled without award. Of the nine decided competitions, the crew wins two and loses seven, including one rejected packet. Its decided-bid win rate is 2 ÷ 9 × 100 = 22.2%. Its bids-per-win ratio is 9 ÷ 2 = 4.5:1.

All 12 submissions still consumed time. Keep the canceled bid in your cost ledger, and keep the pending work there too. Excluding them from a decided-bid percentage does not erase the hours. State the denominator beside the result: “2 awards from 9 decided bids; 2 pending; 1 canceled.”

The same example explains why tracking only accepted bids can flatter the office. Remove the rejected packet and the rate becomes 2 ÷ 8 = 25%. That second figure can help isolate pricing performance, but 22.2% remains the overall decided-bid result.

Your log needs enough detail to answer what to change:

Field	Entry or rule
Buyer and bid number	Keep each agency’s opportunities together
Trade and scope	Separate mill and overlay from sidewalk repairs
Buying method	IFB, scored RFP, informal quote or another stated method
Submission date and result	Pending, awarded, lost, rejected or canceled
Competition	Total bidders; accepted bidders if the record identifies them
Your price and selected price	Compare matching scope and award basis
Office effort	Search, estimating, paperwork and follow-up hours
Reason and next change	Record evidence, not “buyer liked someone else”

Filter the log by agency and trade before drawing conclusions. Two losses on complex pump-station work say little about your chance on routine backflow testing. Also show the counts: one award out of two is too little history to call a durable 50% hit rate. Review the underlying packets while your sample is small.

What is a good construction bid win rate in 2026?

A good hit rate pays for your bidding effort while leaving margin on the work; this study establishes no 2026 national win-rate benchmark for small municipal contractors.

Leslie Guajardo’s January 2010 ENR article on bid-hit ratios reported public-works ranges of 6:1 to 10:1 for GCs and 7:1 to 11:1 for subcontractors, attributing them to industry reports. Those bands are historical commentary, not a newly measured 2026 benchmark.

ENR does not supply the underlying records or sample sizes. Those historical bands cannot establish a 2026 target for your shop or be tested against our bidder counts.

A competition dataset counts bidders on solicitations. A contractor win-rate dataset counts awards across that contractor’s attempts, and because large competitions contribute more losing attempts than small ones, a typical solicitation and a typical contractor attempt need not face the same competition. Our median cannot resolve that difference by itself.

For your shop, judge the result beside preparation cost and job performance. Winning cheap work that ties up your best crew can make the percentage look good while hurting the business. Losing unsuitable work before you submit should not hurt the percentage at all; record a no-bid decision separately.

I would review a new public-bid effort after each result and make a broader decision after the first quarter. Look for a narrower price gap on matching scope. Check for rejected submissions. Compare the hours too. Those are things you can change before you have enough awards for a stable ratio.

Competition by trade: bidder counts and typical awards

Grounds and landscaping and plumbing and fire protection had median counts of 2 bidders; the other five publishable trade groups below had medians of 3.

The table combines competition records with separate award-size records from our October 2026 snapshot. “Typical award” means median recorded contract amount. It can include multi-year contract caps, not just a single year’s work. Bidder counts and award amounts come from different samples; read their sizes separately.

Trade	Bid tabs, n	Median bidders	Exactly 1 bidder	3 or fewer bidders	Typical award	Award records, n
Paving and concrete work	174	3	18.4%	63.2%	$474,502	156
General construction	172	3	19.8%	54.1%	$186,120	187
Electrical	101	3	24.8%	59.4%	$120,018	136
Grounds and landscaping	72	2	31.9%	68.1%	$150,201	134
HVAC	58	3	20.7%	55.2%	$186,268	114
Roofing	46	3	23.9%	65.2%	$168,591	48
Plumbing and fire protection	33	2	30.3%	66.7%	$269,731	62

Source: PorchRocket Bid Control analysis of public bid notices, bid tabulations, award minutes and bid packets, October 2026. The competition base is records with a positive bidder count backed by parsed bid tabs. Award-size calculations include recorded awards from $1,000 through $200 million.

The October 2026 snapshot includes historical records, not just bids opened that month. Trade tags overlap: a school renovation can appear under general construction and electrical. Do not add the rows to invent a count of unique jobs.

Every published trade row has at least 30 observations. Compare the smaller samples with nearby agencies’ tabs before planning around them. Cleaning, painting and IT have too few competition records to publish.

There is also a known parsing limitation: a spot check found one tab counted as eight bidders where the document showed seven because of a duplicate row. Verify individual tabs before making a go/no-go decision. The figures are a view of collected records, not a random national survey.

For a paving owner, the $474,502 median helps screen job scale against crew capacity and bonding. A grounds contractor can use the two-bidder median to investigate nearby recurring scopes, then check the prior tab for that specific job.

The broader public bid and award report covers the wider dataset. Use each page’s stated snapshot when citing figures.

Texas versus Florida: what the state samples show

Texas and Florida both had median counts of 3 bidders, while single-bidder shares differed across samples that covered different agencies and mixes of work.

Recorded state sample	Bid tabs	Agencies	Median bidders	Exactly 1 bidder	3 or fewer bidders	Largest agency’s share of tabs
Texas	441	71	3	14.3%	62.8%	26%
Florida	90	17	3	30.0%	63.3%	22%

Texas accounts for roughly 61% of the full 725-tab competition sample. That weight helps explain why a combined figure should not be sold as a nationwide average. Florida’s row has fewer observations and fewer agencies, so one buyer’s purchasing habits can move it more.

I would not tell a Texas HVAC owner to chase Florida jobs because the Florida single-bidder share is higher. A two-truck shop in Pasco County has a different service area from a crew in Temple. Distance costs money. A higher single-bidder share in another state means little if getting there adds overnight travel, requires licensing you do not hold, or leaves your existing customers without anyone to answer a service call.

For a local estimate of competition, collect tabs from agencies within your service area for the scope and size band you can perform. Separate equipment purchases from installation contracts. A district buying packaged RTUs for someone else to install does not tell you much about competition for your installation package. Check who supplies the crane. Check the controls scope.

The agency concentration also changes how you read repeated results. If one city posts many small purchases, it can dominate a sample even though nearby counties buy differently. Give your own log an agency column so you can see that effect instead of averaging it away.

For owners starting in Texas, the Texas public bid listings provide a place to begin that local search. Choose a manageable service radius first. A slightly shorter bidder list does not repay an extra truck trip every day unless the job’s pricing supports it.

Does being the only bidder mean you win?

One bidder removes competing submissions from the immediate price comparison, but the agency still decides whether your offer meets its requirements and deserves an award.

In the equal-chance model, one eligible bidder for one award gets the award if the buyer proceeds. The buyer can question your price or cancel the purchase. Responsiveness alone does not force their hand.

Florida Statutes section 287.057(6) allows negotiation when fewer than two responsive submissions arrive for a covered state commodity or contractual-services purchase. The agency must document why negotiation serves the state better than soliciting again. Even without a competing response, you can face questions about your price. Read the buyer’s governing process before assuming a sole response settles it.

Also distinguish a single-bidder competition from a sole-source purchase. In a single-bidder competition, the buyer sought competition and received one response. A sole-source purchase follows a different justification for buying without the usual competition. Finding last year’s lone mowing bidder does not mean the city has reserved future work for that company.

There is a forecasting trap here. If last year’s tab lists one bidder and you enter the rebid alongside that company, there are now two. Historical counts describe the past field. They cannot count this year’s submissions before closing.

I would investigate a prior one-bidder job, especially when the scope matches your normal crew and equipment, but I would then read the contract terms just as hard as the price sheet. An awkward response-time requirement or an expensive insurance condition can explain why everyone else stayed away.

Why a new public bidder can start below the simple odds

A new contractor can lose before price comparison through an unmet requirement, then lose eligible bids through unfamiliar scope costs or weak evidence of relevant experience.

The bidder-count model treats those differences as though they do not exist. Your first packet makes you deal with them. You might have installed the same equipment for private owners for years and still lack the particular reference format the agency requests.

Two terms separate the problems. A responsive bid meets the material submission requirements. A responsible bidder has the ability and qualifications to perform. The packet’s terms and governing rules decide how those tests apply. A missing required bid bond and a shortage of bonding capacity are different failures, even though both can stop an award.

The federal definition is concise: FAR 14.301 requires compliance in all material respects with the invitation for bids. That is a federal rule, offered here to explain the term. Your city or school packet supplies the requirements for that local solicitation.

Scored proposals create another learning curve. A janitorial owner may write “we provide quality cleaning” where the scoring sheet asks for staffing coverage. Name the proposed shift and who covers an absence. Then show the past contract with similar square footage. If the packet asks for that evidence, price alone will not supply it.

For a mathematical illustration, assume an 80% chance of passing the requirements review and a one-in-three chance of selection after passing. Then 0.80 × 1/3 = 26.7%. These are assumed probabilities: even a competitive estimate has less chance of winning when the packet risks rejection.

Improvement has a mechanism. Save the rejected form with its correction. Compare your price with the selected bid. Preserve the evidence the buyer asked for. References from delivered jobs can strengthen later submissions. Those changes can raise your chances; repeating the same weak packet does not.

I would start with work close to what you already perform. A modest public maintenance scope is a better first lesson for a service shop than a large replacement project with unfamiliar commissioning obligations.

How do you find jobs likely to attract fewer bidders?

Start with prior tabs for matching work at nearby agencies, then check whether the reason for limited competition is an advantage your company already has.

A grounds crew with routes near a water district’s sites may absorb travel that another contractor has to add. An electrical shop with the required testing equipment may fit a small maintenance scope better than a larger firm that must rent it. Those are reasons to bid. A low count by itself is only a clue.

I would screen opportunities in this order before authorizing a full estimate:

1. Read the scope and ask whether your existing crew can do it without learning a new trade on the buyer’s time.
2. Check mandatory qualifications, site attendance and bonding before spending hours measuring work.
3. Look up the last comparable award and the number of submitted bids.
4. Read the schedule and contract terms for the reason competitors might pass.
5. Confirm you can prepare the response before the question deadline and closing time.

Give an unfamiliar single-bidder result a second look. A school roof might have a tight summer window. A grounds contract might include storm cleanup on short notice. A plumbing job might require overnight response across a wide service area. The apparent opening can come with a cost you should refuse.

A plan holders list is not a bidder count. Suppliers and subcontractors can download the documents. A company can attend a walk and decide not to bid. Use the list to understand interest, then use submitted bid tabs to measure past competition.

Bid Board puts nearby opportunities beside past winners, with bid papers available for review. Start there. Before committing to an estimate, you can check whether the prior winner performed the same scope and whether this year’s documents add a requirement that changes the job for your crew. It cannot reveal sealed bids that have not opened.

Skipping is allowed. If three close competitors already have lower delivery costs and the contract adds a response requirement your shop cannot support, I would leave that packet alone. Spend the saved afternoon on a buyer and scope where your operation fits.

Price from past winners without copying their mistakes

Compare your costed scope with recent matching awards, using bid tabs to account for differences in the work before changing your number.

The winning total is evidence of what the buyer accepted. It is not a cost estimate for your crew. A $168,591 roofing median cannot price a particular TPO re-roof. You still need the deck condition and access restrictions. If classrooms remain occupied while your crew works overhead, the estimate has to carry the protection and scheduling the packet requires, even if last year’s awarded job had no such restriction.

Start with the steps for finding who won a public contract. Save the bid tab and award decision together. An apparent low bidder at opening may not be the selected contractor. A tab may show alternates or unit prices that are not the final contract amount.

Be prompt about collecting results. Fairfax County says its bid tabs appear at contract award and remain on that page for about 30 days. The county also describes them as public records. Set a follow-up reminder after the expected award date instead of assuming the same download will stay on the page forever.

For an illustrative comparison, take a city paving scope with a selected price of $286,740 and your submitted price of $301,965. The difference is $15,225. Divide that by $286,740 and your number was about 5.31% above the selected price. That calculation says where you stood; it does not tell you to cut 5.31% next time.

Check the tons and milling depth. Read the traffic-control requirements. Compare disposal assumptions and subcontract quotes. If the selected award excludes an alternate you included, fix the comparison before diagnosing your margin. If your haul route costs more, the gap may be a sound reason to target a closer job.

On an RFP, ask for the available evaluation record as well as price. A lower-priced proposal can lose points on staffing or experience. Your next change should follow the scoring evidence, not the sting of losing.

The public bid pricing guide goes deeper into building the number. My rule here is narrower: use past winners to challenge your assumptions, then make the final call on a number your business can perform at. A higher hit rate bought by stripping out required costs is an expensive achievement.

Avoid paperwork losses before chasing a better price

Protect your hit rate by checking every required submission item against the current packet, including signatures and addenda, before you spend time adjusting a competitive estimate.

A lower number cannot repair a packet the buyer cannot consider. Treat the final check as a separate task from estimating. The person who spent all day changing unit prices is not in the best position to notice an unsigned certification at midnight.

Charlotte’s March 9, 2026 council minutes, Item 40, record four bids for CATS parking deck repairs. Freyssinet, Inc. submitted the lowest at $589,348.50, but the city rejected it because the bid bond was missing. Council approved $889,700 for Strickland Waterproofing Company, Inc.

Make a return-items list while reading the packet. Give each item a page reference and an owner. Attach evidence that it is ready. “Insurance done” is vague. “Broker confirmed requested limits; current certificate saved; required endorsements identified” tells the next person what has been checked.

Final check	What you should be able to point to
Authorized signature	Signed page in the required form, including wet signature if demanded
Addenda	Acknowledgment of every issued change and updated pricing where needed
Bid security	Correct bond or permitted substitute, with required supporting documents
Required experience	Requested references and job descriptions in the buyer’s format
Price schedule	Every required line filled, units checked and extensions reconciled
Delivery	Correct portal submission receipt or receipt at the specified physical location

Use the public bid package checklist to build the working list, then trim or add items to match the solicitation. Never submit a generic checklist in place of a buyer’s required form.

Schedule the review while you can still fix something. For a Thursday closing, I would aim to have outside items such as the bond and insurance confirmation ready earlier in the week. Then leave time for the submission check. Try the portal early. If it rejects the file size or requires a separate acknowledgment after upload, you need enough time to fix the problem and receive confirmation before the buyer’s clock reaches the deadline.

If the buyer rejects the packet, record the exact reason. The guide to non-responsive bids explains how these failures differ from losing on price. Leave that attempt in your history. You paid for it in hours, and the same error can recur until someone changes the process.

What does each public bid win cost in office time?

Preparation cost per win equals average hours per bid multiplied by bids per win and your hourly cost, plus pursuit expenses outside those hours.

Track both parts of the calculation. Job selection affects attempts per award; reusing company documents affects hours per attempt. You can work on either cost without cutting your field price.

For this planning illustration, assume 18 office hours for an initial packet and 11 for a comparable repeat packet, at an owner’s chosen labor-cost allowance of $57 per hour. These are budget inputs, not measured savings or wage data. Count the owner’s hours even if no extra payroll check gets written.

Planning case	Attempts per win assumption	Hours per packet	Hours per win	Labor cost per win at $57/hour
Three-bidder equal-chance model, initial effort	3	18	54	$3,078
Same competition model, repeat packet effort	3	11	33	$1,881
Slower-results stress case	6	18	108	$6,156
Same stress case, repeat packet effort	6	11	66	$3,762
Ten-attempt stress case	10	11	110	$6,270

The three-attempt cases use the simple model associated with the observed median of three bidders. Six and ten are stress-test assumptions, not forecasts or trade benchmarks. The difference between the first two rows is 21 hours, or $1,197, if your own records support the assumed reduction from 18 to 11 hours.

Those rows hold each input steady to show its effect. Your first year will mix slow first packets with faster repeat ones, but large plan sets can consume much more time and a new scope still needs a fresh takeoff. A routine service quote is a poor time budget for a school HVAC replacement.

Include costs the table leaves out. Travel for a site walk, a paid takeoff, outside bid help and recurring bid tools all belong in the pursuit ledger. If you allocate a monthly service cost across submitted bids, do not add it again when totaling cost per win.

For a clean historical calculation, group all pursuit costs for a submission cohort and divide by its confirmed awards once outcomes are known. Include costs for opportunities you investigated and abandoned if you want the full cost of acquiring work. No wins yet? Report the dollars spent beside zero awards. There is no observed cost per win to calculate.

Before increasing volume, compare that spending with what your office can afford to learn and what the work can carry. If paperwork is the bottleneck, compare an in-house estimator with outsourced bid help. Hiring another takeoff person will not solve a missing-signature process by itself.

Is bidding worth it before you have a win?

Yes, if the early attempts fit a budget you can carry and produce evidence that improves the next decision. Put a limit on the learning spend. For the Temple paving crew, that could mean reviewing the first three decided bids before authorizing another unfamiliar scope. If every loss comes from a qualification the company cannot meet, spending more on the same category is hard to defend. If the packets are accepted and prices are close, examine the cost gap before walking away from that buyer. Keep the next attempt within the budget you approved.

The company file makes the next packet cheaper to prepare

A reusable company file reduces repeated document gathering, while agency experience and award history help you spend estimating time on the parts that change.

The first packet is the slow one because you are building the file and responding to the buyer at the same time. Your insurance certificate might be in the owner’s email. The best reference contact might be on an old invoice. Someone still has to find the portal password.

Put those materials in one maintained file. Include your W-9, licenses, insurance documents, bonding contact and current letter, past job descriptions, references, and the approved process for signatures. The IRS explains that Form W-9 supplies your taxpayer identification number to the requester. It is a repeat business-information document, not proof that you meet a project’s trade qualifications.

Record expiry dates and ownership. The office manager can track insurance renewals while the owner confirms which past clients have agreed to serve as references, keeping a short job description with each reference so the next packet can use the job that matches its scope.

This is the part Bid Builder does for you: forms draw from the company file, called the Bid Passport, and the packet follows the buyer’s required steps. You stop starting from an empty folder. Read the new packet anyway. It controls the required documents and signatures.

There are two different kinds of repeat work to preserve. Company facts carry across buyers. Agency knowledge stays with that buyer. You know where it posts changes and already have a portal account. Its price schedule may look familiar. Reuse those facts without assuming the new packet matches the old one. Addendum 2 can change the very form you planned to copy.

After a delivered job, add the scope and reference to the file. Compare estimated crew hours with the job record: if your crew spent longer protecting occupied areas than the takeoff allowed, carry those hours into the next estimate for a similar building.

Bonding can develop with the company’s record, but capacity does not rise automatically after each award. The SBA’s surety bond guidance identifies credit, capacity and character as parts of the surety’s evaluation. Keep your agent informed about both finished work and new backlog. More awards can also mean more commitments to support.

A 12-month bidding plan that your office can sustain

For a small shop entering public work, I would plan up to 18 suitable submissions over 12 months, increasing from one to two per month only when office capacity supports it.

This workload example assumes an owner doing bids alongside private work. Let suitable opportunities and available office hours set the pace. A complex construction bidder may need fewer attempts; a shop handling short service quotes may have room for more.

Period	Planned submissions	Work to finish before increasing volume	Review point
Months 1-3	1 a month, 3 total	Build the company file, register with selected buyers, learn one packet at a time	Identify eligibility problems and log every preparation hour
Months 4-6	1 a month, 3 total	Reuse documents, collect decided results, choose a small set of matching agencies	Compare scope, submitted prices and rejection reasons
Months 7-9	Up to 2 a month, 6 total	Add a second attempt only if current work and packet review fit the calendar	Check hours per packet and capacity to perform overlapping wins
Months 10-12	Up to 2 a month, 6 total	Concentrate on scopes that fit, update references and watch rebid dates	Review decided-bid hit rate by agency and trade, plus total pursuit cost

The table is not a quota. A no-bid month can be the right month when available jobs exceed your bonding or require a crew you do not have. Save the reason so you can tell a supply problem from a search problem.

Using the cost illustration’s hours, six initial packets at 18 hours plus 12 repeat packets at 11 hours would consume 108 + 132 = 240 hours across the year. At the illustrative $57 allowance, that is $13,680 of preparation labor. Replace those allowances with recorded hours as results arrive. That budget covers preparation labor only.

Keep two recurring appointments in the office calendar. Screen new work each week. Check active deadlines at the same sitting. Update results and expenses monthly. Leave undecided bids pending and set a date to check again.

At the monthly review, match the next action to the problem in your log. No suitable opportunities calls for a different search area or scope filter. Rejected packets call for a submission fix. Accepted but high-priced bids call for scope and cost comparison. Poor RFP scores call for better evidence against the published criteria. Sending more bids before identifying the problem can repeat the expense.

For a buyer with a posted award, a short records request can close the information gap. This is sample wording to adapt and send through the buyer’s designated channel:

Please provide the final bid tabulation and award decision for [bid number and title]. If an evaluation summary is available for release, please include it. Please also confirm whether our submission was accepted for evaluation and identify any recorded deficiencies. Thank you.

Request records the buyer can release, including any documented reason for rejection. Use the returned bid tab to compare scope and cost; the purchasing agent cannot diagnose your estimate for you.

By month 12, review each agency and scope separately before looking at the total. A higher overall hit rate can come from changing the mix of jobs even if your performance on each kind stays flat, so keep the mix visible to distinguish a better response from a better choice of work.

At the year-end review, compare packet hours and the cost of delivered work with your estimates. Keep promising rebid dates on the calendar. Reduce volume where deadlines keep pulling the owner away from profitable field work.

More bids out with Bid Board and Bid Builder

Bid Board helps you choose work with better evidence, and Bid Builder reduces repeated packet work so you can sustain a bidding schedule your office can handle.

I would choose Bid Board when finding and judging opportunities is the main problem. I would choose Bid Builder when you already know your trade and want to prepare your own submissions with less time spent chasing forms. For that next bid, here is what each plan supplies:

• A board for your trade and area. New opportunities arrive on your phone, with best fits first, so your weekly screening starts with relevant work.
• Past winners and award amounts. Read the history before deciding whether to spend an evening pricing another unfamiliar buyer’s packet.
• Documents and changes together. Due dates, bid papers and addenda stay with the opportunity while you prepare the response.
• A company file that carries forward. Bid Builder uses your Bid Passport information to fill forms, with your licenses and other supporting documents on hand for the next packet.
• Help during preparation. Bid Builder guides each required form, lets you text a bid expert when stuck, and includes opening your first two bid-site accounts.
• An option for more office support. Bid Team plans bids with you and handles paperwork one bid at a time on agreed dates. You make the final call on your number, sign and send.

Bid Control is monthly with no contract. Cancel any time. Choose the plan for the bottleneck you have now. If you want to discuss that bottleneck, talk to Rafael about your next bids on a free 15-minute call; hours are every day, 8 AM to 6 PM Central.

Start with Bid Board to find the next job worth pricing, or Bid Builder to get that packet ready with less repeated paperwork.