Bidding commercial electrical work well is mostly about labor, not material. The count is the easy part. What the drawings never tell you is the part that decides whether the job makes money.
Ask two electrical contractors how they bid and both will describe the takeoff. Count the devices, count the fixtures, count the home runs, price the gear. That part is arithmetic, and software does most of it now.
Material prices are roughly the same for everybody bidding the same job. Labor isn’t. Labor is where the spread between two bids comes from, and it’s the number most estimators treat as a lookup when it’s actually a judgment.
In short
- The takeoff is arithmetic. The labor decision is the bid.
- Published labor units come in three condition columns. Most estimators only ever use the first one.
- Supervision isn’t in the labor unit at all. It has to be estimated separately or it comes out of margin.
- The exclusions page is worth more than a sharper pencil, and it’s where change orders are born.
The takeoff isn’t the bid
A takeoff tells you what is on the drawings. It can’t tell you that the ceiling is at twenty-eight feet, that the work is second shift, that the general contractor has three other trades in the same corridor, or that the existing panel schedules are fiction.
None of those show up in a count. All of them show up in hours.
Two contractors can take off the same drawings, land within two percent on material, and be forty percent apart on labor. The one who was closer to right didn’t have better software. They knew something about the building.
The three columns most estimators never leave
Electrical estimating has a published standard for this, and it has existed for a century. The NECA Manual of Labor Units, currently in its 2025 to 2027 edition, has been in NECA’s words the estimating resource of choice for electrical contractors since 1923.
The labor unit tables don’t give one number per item. They give three, and which one you pick is the single biggest lever an estimator has.
Normal
Applies when conditions “permit the maximum productivity of the electricians on a project.”
Difficult
Applies when one or more conditions “permit less than maximum productivity.”
Very difficult
Applies when conditions “permit substantially less than maximum productivity.”
NECA goes further and tells users they’re “encouraged to consider labor units between the columns, or even lower than or exceeding the columns when appropriate.” The manual isn’t a price list. It’s a framework that assumes the estimator knows the job.
Most estimators bid the first column on every job, because the first column is the default and nobody in the office has to defend it. Then the crew shows up to a twenty-eight foot ceiling on second shift and the hours evaporate against a number that assumed maximum productivity.
The line item that’s not in the labor unit at all
This one catches experienced contractors, and NECA states it plainly.
NECA’s labor units include “normal material handling, drawing study, measurement and layout, material installation, and normal non-productive labor.” They “don’t include any labor for supervision of any type.”
NECA’s reasoning is that supervision scales with the complexity, type and size of each project, so most electrical contractors hold that it’s best estimated as a separate cost item with none of it buried in the installation units.
Which means a bid built straight off labor units, with nothing added, has no foreman in it. On a small job that gets absorbed. On a six-month job with a foreman on site every day, it’s the whole profit, and it disappears quietly because nobody ever wrote it down as a line.
Get invited to more bids
Abstrakt sets appointments with the general contractors, facility managers, and building owners who decide who gets asked to bid, so your estimators are pricing real work instead of hunting plan rooms. The walkthrough, the number, the proposal, and the contract are yours.
What actually moves the labor number
| Condition | What it does to hours | How you find out |
|---|---|---|
| Ceiling height and access | Lifts, scaffold, two people where one would do | Stand in the room. Drawings show height, not congestion |
| Shift and building occupancy | Night work, escorts, areas released a floor at a time | Ask who else is in the building while you work |
| Other trades in the same space | Waiting, re-routing, coming back to finish | Ask the general contractor for the sequence, not the schedule |
| Existing conditions in a retrofit | Panel schedules that are wrong, circuits nobody can trace | Open a panel on the walkthrough. Ask before you do |
| Material storage and distance | Every carry, every trip, on every fixture | Ask where the laydown area is and how far from the work |
| Inspection and utility coordination | Idle crews waiting on somebody else’s calendar | Ask who has been through inspection in this jurisdiction lately |
Every row is a reason to move off the normal column. None of them are visible in a plan set.
Write the exclusions page before you write the number
Exclusions are usually treated as boilerplate pasted at the end. Reverse it. Write them first, while the job is still fresh, because the act of writing them forces you to decide what you’re actually responsible for.
Name what is excluded, and name the assumption behind anything you priced thin. Temporary power. Cutting and patching. Fire alarm programming. Trenching and backfill. Concrete work. Anything above a stated ceiling height. Overtime not identified at bid.
A clear exclusions page does two things at once. It protects the number, and it makes the change order conversation a reference to a document instead of an argument about what was fair.
Being invited beats finding it
All of the above assumes you’re bidding jobs worth bidding. The contractors with the best hit rates aren’t the ones who bid the most work. They’re the ones who get asked.
An invited bidder walks the site, talks to the general contractor before the drawings are final, and sometimes gets to influence the scope. A contractor who found the job in a plan room gets the same package as eleven other companies, no walkthrough, and no way to price anything except the normal column.
That difference is worth more than any estimating software.
Where to start this week
Check whether supervision is a line in your last three bids. If it’s not, you have been donating it. That’s the fastest margin fix available to most contractors.
Pick one job and re-bid it in the difficult column. Compare it to what the job actually cost. Estimators trust column choices once they have seen the gap in their own numbers.
Write the six questions from the table on a card. Ask them on every walkthrough. They take four minutes and they’re the difference between a lookup and an estimate.
Ask the general contractor who else is bidding. Some will tell you. A job with eleven bidders and no site visit is a job you can afford to skip.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you bid a commercial electrical job accurately?
Do the takeoff, then spend the real effort on labor. Choose a labor-unit column that matches the actual installation conditions, add supervision as its own line because published units exclude it, and write an exclusions page that names every assumption. The count is arithmetic. The labor decision is the bid.
What are labor units in electrical estimating?
Published time allowances for installing a given item, most commonly from the NECA Manual of Labor Units, which NECA describes as the estimating resource of choice for electrical contractors since 1923. The tables give three units per item for normal, difficult and very difficult installation conditions, and NECA encourages estimators to work between or beyond those columns where a job warrants it.
Do labor units include supervision?
No. NECA states its labor units include normal material handling, drawing study, measurement and layout, material installation and normal non-productive labor, and that they don’t include any labor for supervision of any type. Supervision is meant to be estimated as a separate cost item, so a bid taken straight off the units has no foreman in it.
Should you do a site visit before bidding?
Always, on a retrofit. Ceiling height, congestion, other trades, laydown distance and the accuracy of existing panel schedules all move hours and none of them appear in a plan set. If a walkthrough isn’t offered, that itself is information about how the job will run.
What should be on an electrical bid exclusions page?
Temporary power, cutting and patching, fire alarm programming, trenching and backfill, concrete, work above a stated ceiling height, and overtime not identified at bid time. Plus the assumption behind anything priced thin. Write it before the number, not after.
Why do competitors come in so much lower?
Usually because they bid the normal labor column on a job that’s not normal, left supervision out, and have no exclusions page. That’s not a cheaper company. It’s the same job priced with fewer hours in it, and the difference turns up later as change orders or as somebody else’s loss.
Keep going
- Commercial electrical lead generation
- Commercial construction leads before the bid
- What to say when you cold call a facility manager
- Outsourced SDR services
- Cold calling services
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial electrical contractors and the rest of the trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.
