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Glossary

Bid leveling

Bid leveling is the process of adjusting competing contractor bids onto a common basis so their prices can be compared directly — adding in what one bidder excluded, stripping out what another included, until every number covers the same work.

Also called: bid levelling, levelling bids, bid analysis.

It is normally done as a matrix: scope lines down the side, bidders across the top, and a mark in each cell for whether that bidder included the line, left it out, or was unclear. The totals at the bottom only mean something once every column covers the same rows.

Leveling is where a bid process either earns its money or fails quietly. A $4,000 bid and a $7,500 bid frequently level to within a few hundred dollars of each other, and occasionally the cheap one levels out to be the most expensive.

The work is mechanical, which is why it is so often skipped. Reading four proposals in four formats and reconciling them by hand takes hours, and the pressure to just pick the low number is real.

Why it matters

An unleveled comparison rewards the bidder who wrote the vaguest proposal. Leveling is the only step that makes "cheapest" and "best value" line up, and it is the step that catches the exclusion that would otherwise become a change order.

Related terms

  • Scope of work — A scope of work is the written, itemised description of exactly what a contractor will do on a job — the tasks, the materials, the quantities and the conditions. It is what a price is a price for.
  • Exclusion — An exclusion is work a contractor has explicitly stated their price does not cover. Exclusions are a legitimate and normal part of a bid — the danger is not that they exist, but that they are easy to miss.
  • Apples-to-apples comparison — An apples-to-apples comparison is one where every bid covers identical work under identical conditions, so the only variable left between them is price. Achieving it requires a single shared scope; without one, the phrase is aspirational.
  • Change order — A change order is a written amendment to a signed contract that adds, removes or alters work, and adjusts the price and schedule accordingly. It is the mechanism by which a job's final cost stops matching the bid you accepted.

Quotrium drafts the scope, sends it to the contractors you pick, and scores every bid against it line by line. See how it works.