Also called: general requirements, project overhead.
On small property jobs these are usually folded silently into the total. On larger ones they appear as their own line and can run 5–15% of the job.
They are a frequent hidden difference between bids. One contractor includes daily cleanup, protection of finished floors and a dumpster; another expects the owner to arrange disposal. Neither says so prominently.
Asking every bidder to state general conditions separately is one of the quickest ways to find out why two prices differ.
Why it matters
General conditions are the least glamorous and most commonly mismatched part of a comparison. Discovering after award that debris removal was never in anybody's price is a small problem that arrives at a bad time.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
- Mobilization — Mobilization is the cost and effort of getting a crew, equipment and materials to a site and set up to work — and, at the end, of demobilising and restoring the site.
- 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.
Quotrium drafts the scope, sends it to the contractors you pick, and scores every bid against it line by line. See how it works.