A bid tab is one of the most information-dense documents in construction. We walk through every column and flag the red lines owners miss.
A bid tabulation is what you get when you open bids. It lists every contractor's price for every scope item, side by side, so you can compare them. It sounds simple. In practice, it is a document full of landmines that most owners have never been taught to read.
The structure of a bid tab
A well-prepared bid tab has rows for each scope item and columns for each bidder. The first column is the engineer's estimate — your baseline. Each subsequent column is a contractor's price. At the bottom, you get totals. Simple. But the complexity is in the notes column, the exclusions, and the alternates.
Exclusions are where bids are won and lost
Every bidder submits a list of exclusions — things they're not including in their price. A bid of $9.2m with ten pages of exclusions may actually cost more than a $10.1m bid with a one-page exclusion list. We level every bid by adjusting for inclusions and exclusions before recommending award.
What the spread tells you
If the spread between high and low bids is less than 5%, the market is competitive and your estimate was accurate. If it's 20–30%, something is wrong: either the documents are unclear, one contractor misread them, or your estimate was off. A spread over 30% requires investigation before award.
When not to award to the low bidder
The low bid is not always the right bid. We review every bidder's qualification package, recent project list, current workload, and bonding capacity before recommending award. A contractor who can't finish the job is worth less than a slightly higher bid from one who can.