How to bid electrical work as a subcontractor

Start with what you are actually bidding

Electrical is the trade where the drawings show more scope than the package contains. The E sheets carry power, lighting, fire alarm devices, data outlets, card readers and camera symbols, and on most commercial jobs several of those belong to somebody else's contract. Settle the boundary before you price a foot of pipe.

Division 26 is the core of what you are bidding:

• 26 05 19 Low-Voltage Electrical Power Conductors and Cables and 26 05 33 Raceways and Boxes for Electrical Systems. Wire, conduit, boxes, supports. Most of your labour hours sit here.
• 26 24 00 Switchboards and Panelboards. Service equipment, switchgear, panelboards, circuit breakers, dry-type transformers.
• 26 27 26 Wiring Devices and 26 29 13 Enclosed Controllers. Receptacles, switches, disconnects, starters.
• 26 50 00 Lighting. Lighting fixtures, drivers, lamps, lighting controls.

Then the packages that are drawn on your sheets and are frequently not in your contract:

• 28 31 00 Fire Detection and Alarm. Often bid as a separate performance-spec package to an alarm vendor, with Division 26 carrying conduit and back boxes only. See fire alarm.
• Division 27 Communications. Structured cabling, racks, patch panels. Usually the owner's vendor, again with rough-in by you.
• Division 28 access control and video surveillance, same pattern, plus AV wherever the architect put it.

Rough-in only versus furnish and install on those three is the largest single price swing in an electrical bid, and the sheet almost never says which one it is. The answer lives in the specification, and sometimes only in the low voltage general notes. Read the words, then state your reading in the proposal.

The last boundary is equipment furnished by others and connected by you: mechanical units, kitchen equipment, owner-furnished equipment, casework appliances. Somebody has to run the feeder, set the disconnect and make the final connection, and that somebody is you whether or not it is drawn.

Read the drawings for your sheets, not the whole set

Commercial electrical quantities do not live on the floor plans. They live in the schedules and the one-line.

• The one-line, or riser, diagram is the spine of the bid. Service size, transformer, main gear, every feeder with its conductor and conduit size, every distribution point. Price the gear and the feeders off the one-line, not off the power plan.
• Panel schedules give you the circuit count. Breaker sizes and poles, connected load, spares, and the homeruns you owe. A power plan tells you where a device sits. The panel schedule tells you how many circuits actually have to get back to a panel.
• The lighting fixture schedule beats the lighting plan. Type marks, mounting, voltage, driver, and whether the fixture is specified or carried as an allowance. Count off the plan, price off the schedule.
• The mechanical equipment schedules on the M sheets are yours to read. Minimum circuit ampacity, maximum overcurrent protection, voltage and phase size your feeder. Whether the unit ships with a factory disconnect or a starter is answered in the mechanical specification, not on the E sheets.
• The reflected ceiling plan on the A sheets governs fixture layout. If it disagrees with the lighting plan, ask the question in writing rather than picking one.
• Food service, casework and equipment sheets carry loads that never reach the E sheets.
• Civil and site plans carry site lighting, pole bases, duct bank routing and the point of service.

Get the quantities right

Electrical is bid in a mix of units, and the mix is the point:

• Each for devices, fixtures, boxes, disconnects, starters and gear.
• Linear feet for raceway and for conductors, counted separately, because pipe and the wire pulled through it are different material and different labour.
• Lump items against vendor quotes for gear, transformers, generators and the fixture package.
• Labour hours applied per installed unit from a labour unit table, then adjusted for the job.

The obvious takeoff is the device count, and the device count is the smallest part of the number. What it misses:

Homerun length. A receptacle sits six inches off the wall on the plan and ninety feet from its panel along the real route: up the wall, through the joist space, around the duct main, down into the panel. Every circuit on the panel schedule owes a homerun, and homeruns are normally more footage than the device-to-device branch runs. Take them off by route, with vertical rise counted, or your wire and pipe are low across the whole job.

Conduit fill and derating. Combining homeruns into one raceway looks cheaper until the adjustment factor for more than three current-carrying conductors forces the conductor up a size, which drives the conduit up a size on every affected run, and the fill tables cap you at 40 percent where more than two conductors share a raceway. Decide the routing strategy during the takeoff, because it moves material and labour together.

Copper. Wire is priced off the copper market. Quote it, note the date, and put a validity period on the proposal.

Labour conditions. Labour units assume normal conditions. High ceilings, lift work, occupied space, off-hours and existing construction are multipliers you derive from your own completed jobs rather than from the table.

What the GC checks when leveling electrical bids

Bid leveling is the GC normalizing every electrical proposal onto one scope so the numbers can be compared. On electrical the checklist is short and it is the same every time:

• Which low-voltage packages you carried. Fire alarm, data, security, AV: in, out, or rough-in only, item by item.
• The fixture package. Furnished by you, furnished by the owner, or an allowance, and if an allowance, what number.
• Equipment connections. Mechanical, kitchen and owner-furnished equipment, including who supplies the disconnect and the starter.
• Temporary power. Who installs the temp service and distribution, who maintains it, who pays the utility bill.
• Utility scope and utility fees. Primary conduit, duct bank, transformer pad, metering.
• Concrete and earthwork. Pole bases, transformer pads, housekeeping pads, trenching, backfill.
• Studies and testing. Short circuit and coordination study, arc flash analysis and labelling, acceptance testing, commissioning support.
• Unit prices for adds, so a change can be priced without a re-bid.

Utility fees are the classic hole. The utility's charges for the service, the transformer, the metering and any contribution in aid of construction are real money, they arrive as the utility's own written estimate rather than as a line on the drawings, and every party at the table assumes another party is carrying them. Request that estimate during the bid period. If it has not arrived, exclude utility company fees and charges by name on the front page. An exclusion the GC read is a conversation. An omission the GC did not read is your cost.

Structure the proposal so it survives leveling

Five parts, in this order:

1. The number, with the Division 26 sections it covers and the drawing revision and addenda you priced.
2. Inclusions as a list of items, not a paragraph. Name the low-voltage packages explicitly even when the answer is no.
3. Exclusions as a list. Utility fees, concrete, cutting and patching, painting, firestopping if it is not yours, alarm programming and monitoring, permits if the GC holds them.
4. Clarifications and assumptions. Fixture allowance value, temporary power arrangement, gear lead time, quote validity for copper and gear, normal working hours, who furnishes starters and disconnects, whether the coordination and arc flash studies are yours.
5. Unit prices. Added receptacle, added data rough-in, added fixture by type, per foot of the common conduit and wire sizes, and hourly rates.

State gear lead time as a number of weeks after approved submittals, because long-lead distribution equipment drives the GC's schedule and they will hold whoever failed to say so. Keep the takeoff that produced the quantities. When the GC calls to level, the sub who can open the takeoff and point at the panel schedule a circuit count came from wins the call.

Bidding residential electrical work

On a commercial job, the one-line and panel schedules control the gear, feeders and circuit count. On a house, there is usually no one-line and often no panel schedule. The rule inverts: start with the floor plan and code minimums.

To bid residential electrical work, turn rooms into devices, devices and fixed loads into circuits, and circuits into routed branch wiring and homeruns. A price per device does not do those three jobs for you.

• Build the count room by room. Count receptacles, switches, lighting outlets, appliances and other fixed loads from the floor plan. Check the count against the code minimums instead of assuming every required outlet is drawn.
• Derive the circuits. Without a panel schedule, build the circuit count from the required loads and code requirements. Carry the breakers, branch wiring and panel capacity those circuits require, not just the devices at their ends.
• Measure every homerun by its real route. The commercial homerun problem does not disappear in a house. A garage or basement panel can mean long runs through framing, with vertical travel and obstacles hidden by the plan view.
• Fix the service scope before the branch work. The single largest swing item is the service size and whether the existing service stays or is upgraded. Set the panel, meter, service equipment and utility boundary before pricing the rooms.
• Separate fixture supply from fixture installation. A commercial fixture schedule may fix type, mounting, voltage and driver. Residential fixtures are often selected later, so state what the allowance buys and what installation conditions your labour assumes.
• Price the condition of the building. Open framing is not occupied remodel work. Existing construction, restricted access and off-hours work need the same labour adjustments the commercial bid uses for abnormal conditions.

A residential electrical device count establishes the visible endpoints. The bid comes from the service behind them, the circuits they require, the routes back to the panel, the fixture responsibility and the labour condition.

What separates a commercial electrical bid from a residential one

The rest of this guide is about commercial electrical work: Division 26 scope, one-lines, schedules, vendor quotes and GC bid leveling. The comparison below shows which parts carry over to a house and which documents replace them.

The estimating discipline is the same on both sides: identify the controlling document, measure the real route, adjust labour for the condition and write down every scope boundary the number depends on.

Where this fits

Electrical bids are lost on the boundary, not on the price per device. Write the boundary down, price what is inside it, and keep the evidence behind every quantity. If you are running the takeoff itself, Ruh reads the drawing set, measures the scope, and prices the measured quantities against your own price book, with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from, which is what you need when a GC asks why your conduit footage is higher than the bidder beside you.