title: "Why are contractor bids so different" h1: "What actually makes one bid higher than another" description: "Three contractors walk the same job and three numbers come back, and they are not close. Almost always it is not the price that differs but the scope: what each one included, and what it quietly left out."
Three contractors walk the same job. Three numbers come back, and they are not close.
The instinct is to decide that one of them is expensive.
Usually something duller is going on. The numbers differ because the contractors are not pricing the same thing, and there are more ways for that to happen than most people expect.
Here are the real ones, roughly in order of how much money they move.
They are not pricing the same scope
This is the big one, and it accounts for most of the gap on most jobs.
Each bid says what it covers. The trouble is that three bids say it three different ways, and none of them are written to be read side by side. One lists demolition as a line. One folds it into a paragraph. One leaves it out because he assumed you had someone for it.
Nothing is hidden. It is just spread across three documents that were never meant to be compared, and comparing totals is far easier than comparing scope.
Lining them up is its own job, and it is covered in how to compare contractor bids.
They are not pricing the same materials
Two contractors can both write "tile" and mean prices that differ by a factor of four.
The same goes for paint, fixtures, cabinets, windows, and almost anything you choose rather than pour. A bid that names a product and a grade is priced against something real. A bid that names an allowance is priced against a placeholder, and the placeholder is only as good as the number attached to it.
An allowance set low makes a total look better without changing the job. You pay the difference later, at the counter, after you have already signed.
They are not assuming the same amount of labor
A contractor prices what he thinks it will take his crew to do the work.
That estimate moves with things you cannot see on the page. How many people he puts on it. Whether he expects to work around you or in an empty house. Whether access is easy or everything gets carried up a stairwell. Whether he is subcontracting a trade or doing it in house.
Two honest estimates of the same work can be days apart, and days are money.
They are not carrying the same risk
Some of the job is unknown until it is open.
Rot under a floor. Rock in a trench. Wiring that turns out not to be what anyone expected. Contractors handle that uncertainty differently. One carries a contingency in his number. One writes a rate for what happens if it turns up. One says nothing and intends to raise it if it does.
The one who carries it will look more expensive on paper and may not be. The one who says nothing is not being sneaky, but you are the one holding that risk without knowing it.
They do not have the same costs
Two businesses doing identical work can have genuinely different floors.
One carries full insurance and workers compensation. One runs a smaller operation with less overhead. One warranties his workmanship for two years and prices to be able to honor it. One pays employees, one pays subcontractors, and those are different numbers.
None of that shows up in the bid. All of it shows up in the total.
They do not want the job equally
This is the reason people find hardest to believe and it is completely ordinary.
A contractor with a full schedule prices work he does not need at a number that makes it worth rearranging for. A contractor with a gap next month prices to fill it. One wants a larger margin. One simply wants the job.
That is not a trick. It is a business deciding what its time is worth this quarter, and the same contractor will give you a different number in March than he would in October.
And sometimes the low number is a strategy
It happens, and it is worth naming plainly rather than pretending it does not.
A number that wins the job can be made up later, through the work that was never in it. The change orders arrive once you are underway and switching contractors is expensive.
The useful part is that this looks exactly like an honest omission from the outside, and the fix is the same either way. Find what is missing and ask what it would cost. A contractor who is genuinely cheaper will tell you why in one sentence.
What this means when you are holding three numbers
The bottom line is the last thing to look at, not the first.
A bid is higher or lower for a stack of reasons, and only some of them are about price. Scope, specification, labor, risk, cost structure, and appetite all land in the same figure, and the figure does not say which is which.
A cheaper number is not a cheaper contractor until you know it is the same job.
Once the bids are lined up, most of the mystery goes away. What is left is a real decision about who you want doing the work, which is the decision you were trying to make in the first place.
If you want to know what a bid should have contained before you started comparing, that is what should a contractor bid include.