Electrical contractor bid win rate: what is actually healthy

Win rate is the number every contractor quotes and almost nobody defines the same way. Counted by jobs or by dollars? Every price you gave out, or only the bids you formally submitted? Before you decide yours is too low, decide what you are counting — and be honest about what a very high win rate usually means.

Measure it two ways: jobs and dollars

Hit rate by count is jobs won divided by bids submitted over a period. Hit rate by dollars is value won divided by value bid. They diverge fast: a shop that wins a pile of small service calls and loses every tender has a healthy count rate and a dismal dollar rate. Track one only and you will misread your own business.

Then pick a denominator you can defend. A number given over the phone from the truck is not a bid. Count complete, submitted, priced proposals with a closing date, and keep ballparks in a separate column.

The minimum log that makes the number real:

• Date submitted, closing date, and the GC or owner.
• Procurement type: open tender, invited bid, negotiated, repeat client.
• Your number, and the number of other bidders if you can find out.
• Outcome: won, lost, no award, withdrawn, or no-bid — and the date you found out.
• Reason lost, in your own words, even when it is a guess.
• Estimating hours spent on that bid.

That last field is the one everybody skips and the one that changes decisions. Without it you cannot work out how many bids it takes to win one, or what they cost you.

What published ranges exist, and what they do not prove

Be careful here, because this is a topic where invented statistics circulate freely. There is no Statistics Canada series for electrical subcontractor bid hit rates and no industry survey that settles it. ConstructConnect's 2026 piece on bid-hit ratios says so plainly — it states that there is no single published benchmark proving what top-performing firms maintain, then offers directional ranges by how the work is bought: roughly 10–20% on hard-bid public work, 15–25% on private competitive work, 30–50% on negotiated or selective work, and 50% or more on repeat-client work.

Those are general-contractor-side figures and they are explicitly directional, not measured. Use them for the shape, not the digits. The shape is the useful part: the same shop, bidding the same quality of estimate, will post three completely different win rates depending on whether it is one of fourteen names on an open tender or the only electrical contractor the client calls.

So the first honest question is not "is 18% good?" It is "what mix of work produced that 18%, and is it the mix I want?"

A very high win rate is usually a pricing problem

Contractors ask how to raise their hit rate. Almost nobody asks what to do about a hit rate that is too high, and it is the more common problem in small shops. If you are winning most of the open competitive work you bid, there are only a handful of explanations, in rough order of likelihood:

• You are low by a margin, not by a nose. Being consistently the cheapest number in a field of six is not a sales skill.
• You are carrying scope the others excluded. Fire alarm terminations, temporary power, core drilling, seismic restraint, trenching. See scope gaps and exclusions.
• Your labour units are optimistic and your factors for height, occupied buildings, or after-hours work are missing. Labour factoring is where most low bids are born.
• You are not recovering overhead. Markup applied to a cost that never included your truck, your insurance, or your own unpaid estimating evenings is not markup. See overhead recovery in a small shop and the difference between markup and margin.

The cheapest diagnostic in the trade: pull your last ten completed jobs, put estimated labour hours beside actual labour hours, and look at the sign of the difference. If nine out of ten went over, your win rate is not a strength — it is a discount you did not know you were offering.

A very low win rate is usually a targeting problem

Losing almost everything rarely means your pricing is wrong by 40%. More often it means one of four things. You are bidding work that was never yours to win — a general contractor with a preferred electrical sub who needs a third number for the tender file. You are an unknown name arriving cold, which is a bid list problem, not an estimating problem. You are missing addenda and pricing a scope nobody else priced, which addenda management fixes for free. Or your overhead is spread over too little volume, so every number you produce carries a bigger load than your competitors' numbers do. Only the last one is a pricing problem, and it is solved by volume or by cutting overhead, not by cutting margin.

Two numbers that matter more than win rate

Win rate is a ratio, and ratios hide size. Two numbers tell you more:

Gross margin won per estimating hour. Add up the estimated gross margin on everything you won in a quarter, divide by every hour you spent estimating — wins, losses and no-bids included. That is the actual return on your estimating time, and it is the number that tells you whether a 12% hit rate on large tenders beats a 45% hit rate on small work.

Realised margin versus estimated margin. If won jobs land below the margin you bid, raising your win rate makes things worse, faster.

Illustrative figures, not a survey result. The point is the ordering, not the dollars: the shop with the lower bid count and fewer hours can be the better business, and win rate alone never shows it.

Raising the rate without dropping the price

In order of how much they move the number for a small shop:

• Bid less, bid better. A go/no-go filter is the single biggest lever. Work through whether you should bid that job before you open the drawings, not after you have spent four hours in them.
• Be complete and be clear. A bid with a clean inclusions and exclusions list is easier for a GC estimator to carry than a cheaper one they have to interpret.
• Be reachable at close. Bid day is won by the sub who answers the phone at 2:40 p.m. Run a bid day checklist.
• Follow up properly. Not to beg — to find out where you landed and to stay on the list. See following up on a submitted bid.
• Cut the hours per bid. Not to bid more, but to afford to be choosier. A drafted takeoff from the PDF gets the counting out of the way so the hour goes into the judgment calls — that is the whole idea behind PDF takeoff.

None of that changes your price. All of it changes the odds.

Frequently asked

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