Construction Cost Estimating Services
A cost estimate is a takeoff with money attached, and the money is where estimates go wrong. We quantify your drawings by CSI division, price them against localized labor and material rates, carry general conditions and markup, and hand you an editable workbook with every assumption written down.
Get a Free QuoteWhat a Construction Cost Estimate Includes
Quantity takeoff by division. Every measured quantity, organized against CSI MasterFormat so it maps to your specification section by section.
Localized labor. Crew composition and productivity rates applied to your market, not a national average.
Material pricing with a stated basis. Current pricing, with the date it was priced recorded on the estimate.
Equipment. Owned and rented, with mobilization where the scope calls for it.
Subcontractor allowances. Where a scope is better carried as an allowance than a detailed takeoff, we say so and show the basis.
General conditions and general requirements. Supervision, temporary facilities and utilities, safety, cleanup, small tools, insurance and bonds — routinely 5–12% of the job and the most underestimated section of any bid.
Overhead and profit. Applied at rates you set, shown as separate lines.
Contingency and escalation. Priced explicitly where the schedule justifies it, never folded silently into unit rates.
Waste factors. Shown per trade as visible line items.
An assumptions and exclusions schedule. Every judgment call, and everything deliberately left out.
Estimate Types We Produce
Order-of-magnitude. Programming and feasibility stage, from a building program or a napkin sketch. Wide range, fast turnaround, used to decide whether a project proceeds at all.
Conceptual / schematic. Schematic design, when massing and systems are established but details are not. Used to test a budget before design development commits to it.
Design development. Systems selected, quantities largely measurable. Detailed takeoff with allowances where the design is still open.
Definitive / bid-ready. Construction documents. Full takeoff, priced line by line, with general conditions and markup carried. What you actually bid from.
Who Uses Our Cost Estimating Services
General contractors
Bidding multi-trade work who need a complete number — not a takeoff with a percentage added on top.
Subcontractors
Pricing their own division, who need depth in one trade and exclusions that keep a GC from quietly absorbing scope they never priced.
Developers
Testing whether a project pencils before committing to design development.
Owners validating a number
Checking a contractor's price, or a budget, before committing to it — priced by someone with nothing riding on the answer.
What You Receive
- A summary by CSI division, with subtotals you can present
- Detail sheets per division with quantities, unit rates and extensions
- Labor, material and equipment split on every line
- General conditions priced as its own schedule
- Markup and contingency as separate, adjustable lines
- A marked-up drawing set
- An assumptions and exclusions schedule
How the Estimate Is Structured
What you get back is a working file, not a figure. Every sheet below is in it, and every number on them traces back to something you can check.
Summary sheet. One page, one line per CSI division, with subtotals rolling up to a bid total. This is the sheet you present and the sheet a reviewer reads first, so it carries no formulas a reader cannot trace and no hidden rows. Change a markup rate here and every division recalculates beneath it.
Division detail sheets. One sheet per division, each line carrying its quantity, unit of measure, unit rate and extension, with labor, material and equipment as separate columns rather than a blended figure. Every quantity ties back to a marked-up location on the drawings, which is what makes a line challengeable instead of merely believable.
Unit rate build-up. Behind each rate sits its composition: crew makeup, hourly cost, productivity, material cost with its pricing date, and equipment cost per unit of output. A rate with no build-up is an opinion. A rate with one can be argued with, corrected, and reused on your next project.
General conditions schedule. Priced as its own schedule against the project duration rather than taken as a percentage of construction cost. Supervision, project management, temporary power and water, fencing and enclosures, safety, dumpsters and cleanup, small tools and consumables, insurance and bonds each get a line and a duration.
Markup, contingency and escalation. Separate, adjustable lines at the bottom rather than baked into unit rates. You can see exactly what base each is applied to, change one number, and watch the total move — which is what makes the workbook usable on bid day instead of only on delivery day.
Assumptions and exclusions schedule. Every judgment call we made, every quantity carried as an allowance and why, and everything deliberately left out. This is the sheet that protects you in a scope dispute, so it is written to be read by someone who was not in the conversation.
Marked-up drawing set. The drawings with our measurements on them, color-coded by division. It is the audit trail: if a quantity looks wrong, you can find the exact area it came from rather than taking the number on trust or rebuilding the takeoff yourself.
How Labor Is Priced
Labor is the half of an estimate that cannot be checked against a supplier quote, which is exactly why the basis for it should be visible.
Crew composition, not an average hourly rate. Work is installed by crews, not by individuals. A concrete placement crew, a two-person drywall crew and a four-electrician rough-in crew each have their own mix of journeymen, apprentices and foremen, and the blended cost of that mix is what drives the labor line. Pricing everything at one hourly figure misprices every trade at once.
Productivity against published labor units. Installation rates come from the recognized reference for each trade — NECA's Manual of Labor Units in electrical, MCAA for mechanical piping, SMACNA for sheet metal — rather than from a single blanket figure. Those references publish conditions columns for normal, difficult and very difficult work, and which column we applied is stated rather than buried.
Local wage basis. Wage rates are applied for your market. Where the project is subject to prevailing wage under the Davis-Bacon Act or a state equivalent, the applicable determination is used and identified, because prevailing wage work and open-shop work are not the same estimate with a different rate.
Burden carried explicitly. Payroll taxes, workers' compensation by classification code, general liability, union fringes or their open-shop equivalent, and any per-diem or travel the project location forces. Burden is a large multiplier on a bare wage and it varies by trade and by state, so it is shown rather than assumed into the rate.
Schedule effects on labor. Overtime, shift work, stacked trades, restricted access and winter conditions all reduce productivity against the published unit. Where the schedule or the site forces any of them, the adjustment is a visible line with a stated reason — not a quietly inflated rate that nobody can audit or remove.
Divisions We Price
Organized against CSI MasterFormat, so the estimate maps to your specification section by section. Each division links to how that scope is quantified.
What Moves a Cost Estimate
How complete the drawings are. Design completeness governs how much of an estimate is measured and how much is an allowance. A construction-document set supports a line-by-line number; a schematic set supports a budget with named allowances. Neither is wrong, but presenting the second as the first is how budgets get committed to figures they cannot hold.
General conditions and project duration. General conditions scale with time, not with construction cost, which is why a percentage is such an unreliable way to carry them. Extend a schedule by two months and supervision, temporary utilities, fencing, dumpsters and insurance all extend with it while the construction quantities do not change at all.
Market conditions and escalation. Material pricing moves, and the gap between when an estimate is priced and when the work is bought is real exposure. Every estimate records its pricing date, and where a schedule puts procurement far enough out to matter, escalation is carried as its own line so you can see it and argue with it.
Labor availability and wage basis. Prevailing wage, union agreements, and how tight the local trade market is can move the labor half of an estimate substantially without changing a single quantity. Which basis was used is stated on the estimate, because it is the assumption most likely to differ from what you expected.
Site constraints and access. Urban infill with no laydown area, a phased build on an operating site, restricted delivery hours, limited crane access or work above an occupied floor all reduce productivity against published units. These come from the site and the logistics plan rather than from the drawings, so they have to be asked about rather than read.
Procurement route and scope boundaries. Whether a scope is self-performed, subcontracted, or carried as an owner-furnished item changes both the cost and who holds the risk. The gaps between packages — who provides the anchor bolts, who carries the firestopping, who patches after MEP rough-in — are where money is lost, and they are settled in the exclusions schedule.
Contingency, and being honest about what it covers. Contingency covers what is genuinely unknown at the stage the estimate was produced, and it should shrink as design completes. Used instead to paper over scope that was never measured, it hides the problem until buyout. We state what each contingency line is for.
What We Need From You
A complete set is ideal and rarely what exists. Send what you have — we will tell you at quote stage what can be priced firm and what has to be an allowance.
- The full drawing set — architectural, structural, civil and MEP, at whatever stage it has reached
- The specification, or at minimum the sections that govern materials, tolerances and testing
- Schedules — door, window, finish, equipment, fixture, panel and mechanical
- The project schedule or intended duration, since general conditions are priced against time
- Location and any prevailing-wage determination that applies
- Your own labor rates, burden and markup, if you want yours used instead of a published basis
- Site constraints — access, laydown, phasing, working hours, occupied-building conditions
- The bid or ITB documents, where you need scope-gap analysis against a specific invitation
- Any geotechnical report, survey or existing-conditions documentation that affects the work
Why Cost Estimates Come In Wrong
General conditions taken as a percentage. It is the most common shortcut in construction estimating and the least defensible, because general conditions track duration rather than construction value. A long, low-value job and a short, high-value job with the same contract sum need very different general conditions, and a single percentage gets both wrong in opposite directions.
A takeoff presented as an estimate. Quantities with a dollar figure applied are not an estimate. Without labor productivity, crew composition, burden, equipment, general conditions and markup, the number is missing the categories that most often decide whether a bid was profitable — and those categories are exactly the ones a client cannot see are absent.
National average rates applied to a local market. Published cost data is a starting point that has to be localized. Wage rates, burden by state, material delivery and productivity all vary by market, and an unlocalized rate can be materially off in either direction — which is worse than being consistently high, because you cannot correct for it.
Allowances that are never labelled as allowances. Every estimate contains scope that could not be measured. The failure is not carrying an allowance, it is presenting one as a measured quantity. When the allowance is not identified, nobody knows which lines are firm, so nobody knows where the risk actually sits.
Escalation ignored on a long procurement. An estimate priced today for material bought in a year is not a current estimate. If the pricing date is not recorded and escalation is not carried, the exposure is invisible — and it surfaces at buyout, when there is no longer anything to do about it.
Markup applied to the wrong base. Overhead and profit applied to different bases produce different totals, and applying markup on top of markup, or omitting it from subcontracted scope entirely, both happen routinely. Keeping markup as separate lines with a visible base is the only way for you to check it.
Cost Data and Standards
Quantities, rates and assemblies are read against the published references that govern this work. Where a project specification conflicts with any general reference, the specification governs:
- CSI MasterFormat — the division structure every estimate is organized against
- AACE International 18R-97 — cost estimate classification by level of project definition
- NECA Manual of Labor Units — electrical labor units with condition columns
- MCAA labor units — mechanical and piping systems
- SMACNA duct construction standards and labor units — sheet metal
- The Davis-Bacon Act and state prevailing-wage determinations, where applicable
- ASTM and ACI material and testing standards, as cited by the project specification
- The project's own specification, which governs wherever it conflicts with a general reference
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between an estimate and a takeoff?
A takeoff is measurement — how much of everything there is. An estimate is a takeoff with pricing, labor productivity, general conditions and markup applied.
What level of estimate do I need at this stage?
It depends on your drawings. Schematics support a conceptual budget. Construction documents support a bid-ready number.
How do you price labor in my region?
Crew composition and productivity rates applied against local wage data for your market, including prevailing wage where the project is subject to it.
What is included in general conditions?
Supervision, project management, temporary facilities and utilities, safety, cleanup, small tools, insurance and bonds — priced as its own schedule rather than a percentage.
Can you validate an estimate someone else produced?
Yes. We produce an independent estimate and a reconciliation showing where the two differ and why.
How current is your cost data?
Every estimate states its pricing basis and the date.
What if the drawings are incomplete?
We tell you at quote stage. Where a scope cannot be measured, it is carried as a stated allowance.
Do you provide a bid-ready proposal, or just the numbers?
Numbers here. Bid estimating covers bid-day support if you need it.
Can you use our own labor rates and markup instead of yours?
Yes, and it usually produces a better estimate. Send your wage rates, burden, equipment rates and markup structure and we will build the estimate on them, so the number is one your team can defend rather than one you have to reconcile against how you actually price work.
Is the workbook editable, or a locked PDF?
Editable. Rates, markups and contingency are live cells with the formulas intact, so you can adjust a rate on bid day and watch the total move. A PDF summary comes with it for presenting, but the working file is yours.
Every Division, Priced the Way the Spec Is Organized
A cost estimate is only as good as the trade knowledge behind each line. These are the trades we quantify and price, grouped the way a specification is.
Project Types We Estimate
Cost drivers change with the building type. Each sector page covers what moves a number on that kind of work.
If You Need Something Narrower
A full priced estimate is not always what the job calls for. These are the adjacent services, including the takeoff-only options that cost less.
We Estimate in All 50 States
Labor rates, wage rules and material costs are priced to the job’s market, not to a national average. Pick a state to see how that works locally.
Send us your plans and get a flat quote
Upload your plans or tell us what you need. We’ll reply with pricing and a delivery date.
Need to add trades, ZIP code, target date or project state? Use the full quote form ↗