How to Bid Electrical Commercial Jobs

Before you price anything

Most bad commercial bids are decided before a single number is written. The estimator priced what was in the documents and missed what was around them.

Read the whole bid package. Scope, specs, drawings, timeline, compliance requirements, insurance requirements. Then read the parts that aren't about electrical, because that's where the schedule constraints hide.

Call the general contractor. Ten minutes on the phone routinely turns up things the package doesn't say: preferred fixtures, phasing, who's responsible for cutting and patching, whether the owner has already bought long-lead items.

Walk the site or ask hard questions about it. The details that change your labor number are almost never in the drawings:

Is the building occupied? Does work have to happen after hours?
Is it a union job?
When can material be delivered, and where does it get staged?
Is there elevator access, or is everything going up a stairwell?
What's the parking situation for your crew?

A four-storey retrofit downtown where the building is occupied, the work is after hours, the labor is union, and deliveries have to be done by 8 a.m. is a completely different labor number from the same scope in an empty building. None of that is in the specification.

Cost it honestly

Material. This is where commercial bids leak, because the bid sits for weeks between pricing and award. Copper, conduit and breakers move on their own schedule.

Price from a catalog that gets updated rather than from a spreadsheet someone last touched a year ago. AccuPrice maintains 1,400+ electrical items with material costs refreshed every month — quarterly is the industry standard, and a quarter is long enough for a supplier to raise prices twice.

If the bid period is long or the job is copper-heavy, say in the proposal how long your pricing holds. Thirty days is normal and it protects you.

Labor. Hours by task, multiplied by a rate that includes the burden — wages, payroll tax, workers' comp, benefits — not just the wage. Then apply a productivity factor for the site conditions you found above. Working occupied, after hours, or in tight access costs real hours.

Equipment. Lifts, trenchers, generators, anything rented. Include mobilisation.

Permits and inspections. Look them up for that jurisdiction rather than carrying a number from the last job.

Overhead. Vehicles, insurance, tools, the office. Carried as a percentage or as a per-hour loading, but carried.

Subcontractors. Get firm quotes with the same scope and the same duration you're bidding.

Profit. Set deliberately, not left as whatever remains.

The mistake that costs the most

A contractor bids a $150,000 office renovation. Labor $40,000, material $35,000, equipment $10,000, permits $5,000, overhead and insurance $7,500, subs $10,000 — $107,500 total cost, $42,500 expected profit.

The material was priced from numbers a few months old. Copper and conduit come in 20% higher, adding $7,000. Permitting delays extend labor by $4,000. That $42,500 is now under $30,000.

Nothing went wrong on site. The job was well run. The bid was built on numbers that had already moved before it was submitted.

Write a proposal that wins on more than price

Structure it plainly. Introduction, scope of work, exclusions, timeline, pricing breakdown, qualifications. Clean formatting matters when someone is reading five bids in an afternoon.

Be specific about exclusions. What you are not doing is as important as what you are. Vague exclusions become arguments later.

Break out the pricing. Labor, material, equipment, permits, overhead. A line-by-line breakdown reads as confidence and makes change orders straightforward.

Offer a real alternative where one exists. If copper is unusually high, price the aluminium option alongside it with the tradeoffs stated. That's useful to the owner and it shows you're paying attention.

Show relevant work, not all your work. Bidding a medical office fit-out? Show the last two medical office fit-outs, what was difficult about them, and how they finished. One relevant project beats a portfolio.

Name your people. Who's the foreman, who's the project manager. Owners are hiring a crew, not a logo.

Submit it properly

More good bids are lost to submission errors than anyone admits.

Check the deadline, the accepted format, and the required attachments — licences, insurance certificates, bid bonds, site visit confirmation. Confirm files are named clearly and actually open. Include a short cover note reaffirming your interest and naming the one or two things that make your bid the right one.

Then follow up once, a week or two later, unless a decision date was published. Once is professional; three times is not.

After the result

If you lost, ask why. Most GCs will tell you, and the answer is usually specific: price, scope gap, or a presentation that was hard to read. That's worth more than guessing.

If you won, track actual costs against your estimate line by line. Where material came in over, find out whether the price moved or the takeoff was short. Where labor ran long, find out whether it was the estimate or the site. That comparison is how an estimating process gets better, and most shops never do it.

Frequently asked questions

How long should commercial bid pricing be held?

Thirty days is standard. State it in the proposal, especially on copper-heavy scopes where material can move meaningfully inside a bid period.

What's the most common commercial bidding mistake?

Pricing material from stale numbers. It's invisible at bid time and only shows up in the final job cost.

How do I account for after-hours or occupied-building work?

As a productivity factor on labor hours, plus any shift premium in the rate. Both, not one or the other.

Does AccuPrice do commercial takeoff?

No. AccuPrice is a maintained price book — it keeps your material and labor costs current and feeds them into your CRM. For large project takeoff you'd use a dedicated estimating suite alongside it.

Price your material from numbers that are current.

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