What the bid schedule doesn't pay for

Anyone bidding unit-price jobs knows it. The specs call for work the schedule has no line for. Carry it in your rates or carry the risk. Finding each one means reading every requirement against every pay item, and then an addendum lands.

One case on our Try page: a city's unit-price contract. Yesper read the plans and specs against the bid schedule and found 16 items with change order potential, $668,800 in all. Petroleum-impacted soil had no pay item for disposal. And the addendum had quietly deleted the clause that made work without a pay item subsidiary.

You decide what to carry, ask or qualify before bid day. The missing pay item turns up in your questions instead of in a claim after award. Same for the rest of the Try page: a quote against the bid schedule, a pre-bid cross-check, the change orders missing from a job's log.

Try it yourself →