How to bid electrical jobs: a step-by-step guide for residential and commercial work

To bid an electrical job, work out what the job will cost you, add overhead and profit, and put the price in writing with the scope it covers.

The short answer

The nine steps:

1. Decide whether the job is worth bidding.
2. Read the specs and drawings, and walk the site.
3. Do the takeoff: count every device, fixture and panel, and measure the wire and conduit.
4. Turn the quantities into labour hours.
5. Price labour and material at cost, then add overhead and profit.
6. Check the total against your own cost per square foot, per opening or per hour.
7. Add the permit and the tax.
8. Write the bid the customer reads.
9. Submit on time, follow up and keep score.

An estimate and a bid are not the same thing. The estimate is what the job costs you. The bid is the price and the terms you offer, and it is the part the customer signs.

This guide covers residential and commercial work in Canada and the US. Where a rule is local, such as permits or sales tax, it says so.

1. Decide whether the job is worth bidding

Every bid costs hours you do not get back if you lose. If a bid takes six hours and you win one in four, each job you win carries 24 hours of estimating. Those are example numbers. Put your own in.

How often you win depends mostly on how the work is bought. ConstructConnect's 2026 ranges for commercial general contractors run from about 10% to 20% on hard-bid public work to 30% to 50% on negotiated work. The article calls those ranges directional, and nobody publishes a benchmark for electrical subcontractors. Our post on electrical contractor bid win rate shows how to measure yours.

Before you open the drawings, answer four questions:

• Is it your kind of work? A shop that wires houses will be slow on a hospital, and slow shows up in the price.
• Who else is bidding? An open tender with ten bidders is a different bet than an invitation from a contractor you have worked for.
• Can you staff it when it runs? A job you win and cannot crew costs more than a job you lose.
• Will you get paid? Know the customer, or check them before you spend a day on their drawings.

Work to bid on comes from three places. Repeat customers and referrals come first, and they are the work you win most often. General contractors send invitations to the trades they know. Public tenders are posted on government procurement sites: US federal work runs through SAM.gov, and provinces, states and cities run their own.

2. Read the documents and walk the site

Read the specifications before the drawings, because the spec decides what the symbols on the drawings cost. On a commercial job, look for four things first:

• The instructions to bidders. Closing date and time, the bid form, whether bid security or bonding is required, and how questions are asked.
• The electrical divisions. Most North American specs put electrical in Division 26, communications in Division 27 and fire alarm and security in Division 28.
• The addenda. Each one changes the job. List every addendum you priced in your bid.
• The gaps between trades. Who supplies the light fixtures, who does the fire alarm, and who pays for trenching, coring, patching and temporary power.

If something is unclear, ask in writing before the question deadline. A guess you priced is your risk. A question the designer answered is everyone's information.

A house or a small renovation has no spec, so the site visit does that job. Check the service size and the space left in the panel. Check whether walls are open or finished, how you reach the attic and crawlspace, and how old the existing wiring is. Write down what you saw, because those notes become the assumptions in your bid.

Our step-by-step guide to estimating electrical work goes deeper on reviewing specs and drawings.

3. Do the takeoff

A takeoff is the list of everything you will install, with a quantity beside each item. Count the devices, fixtures, panels and breakers. Measure the conduit and cable. Then add the small material that never appears as a symbol: boxes, fittings, connectors and supports.

Group the list by system, such as lighting, power, distribution, low-voltage systems and wire. It prices more easily that way, and a missing system is easier to spot than a missing line.

There are three ways to do it:

• Paper and a highlighter. It works on a small job. Mark every symbol as you count it and every sheet as you finish it.
• A spreadsheet. Our free electrical bid template is an .xlsx workbook with a takeoff sheet, labour and markup formulas and a bid summary. You still count and type every quantity.
• Takeoff software. Electrical takeoff software drafts quantities from the PDF drawings for you to review. Treat any draft as a first pass, and check it against the drawings before you price it.

Whichever way you count, a missed sheet costs more than a wrong unit price. Tick off the drawing list before you move on.

4. Turn the quantities into labour hours

Material prices come from a supplier quote. Labour is the part you have to judge, and the method is one line:

quantity × labour unit × job factors = hours

A labour unit (labor unit in the US) is the number of hours it takes to install one item under stated conditions. The best-known published set is the NECA Manual of Labor Units, which NECA says contractors have used since 1923. It gives each item a Normal, Difficult and Very Difficult value.

Two things about published units matter when you bid:

• They already include the small stuff. NECA's units cover material handling, drawing study, layout, installation and normal non-productive time. Adding those again double-counts.
• They do not include supervision. NECA says its units carry no supervision labour of any type. Add foreman and project management hours as their own line.

Job factors adjust the base hours for the conditions on this job: working height, an occupied building, long material runs, winter work. In the worked example in our estimating guide, 132 base hours become 165 after a combined factor of 1.25.

Published units are a starting point. The units to trust most are the ones you build from your own finished jobs. Electrical labour units explained shows how to build them.

5. Price it: cost, overhead and profit

Price the job at what it costs you first. Then add overhead and profit as separate, deliberate numbers.

Labour. Multiply the hours by your cost rate, and remember that a wage is not a cost rate. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median electrician wage at $30.38 an hour for May 2025. That is what an electrician earns. Your cost rate adds payroll taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, vacation pay, the truck and the tools. Your billed rate then adds overhead and profit. Our estimating guide's worked example uses a $62 cost rate and a $110 billed rate on a BC tenant improvement, which shows how far apart the two sit.

Material. Use a dated supplier quote and note when it expires. Add a few percent for waste on wire and conduit. Get separate quotes for the lighting package and the switchgear, because they are often the largest material lines.

Direct job costs. The permit, lift or trencher rental, disposal, parking and travel.

Overhead. What it costs to keep the shop open whether or not you are on a job: the office, insurance, estimating time, software and the trucks. Divide last year's overhead by last year's direct job costs to get your own percentage.

Profit. What is left after overhead. Set it on purpose, and do not let it be whatever remains.

Then keep markup and margin apart, because mixing them up is an easy way to underbid. Markup is a percentage of your cost. Margin is a percentage of your selling price. Margin equals markup divided by one plus markup.

If you want to keep 20% of every dollar you bill, a 20% markup will not get you there. You need 25%.

6. Check the number: per square foot, per opening, per hour

Shortcut pricing is a check on a detailed bid, and on small simple work it can be the bid. Each method fits a different kind of job.

How to bid electrical jobs by the square foot. Take the pre-tax price of jobs you have finished, divide each by its floor area, and keep the results by building type. The tenant-improvement example in our estimating guide bids $38,417 before tax on 2,400 square feet, which is $16.01 per square foot. That figure belongs to that example. It is not a market rate, and we do not publish one because we have not found a source we can defend.

If your detailed bid lands far from your own square-foot history, find out why before you send it. Either the job is unusual or the takeoff missed something.

The electrical pricing guide worth having is your own. A price book lists what you charge for each installed assembly: the box, device, plate, cable allowance and labour for one receptacle, for example. Build it from your labour units and current supplier prices, and update it when those prices change. Published pricing guides are a starting point, because they do not know your crew, your suppliers or your market.

7. Add the permit and the tax

Carry the permit as its own line with the issuing authority named beside it. A visible permit line is easy to defend and easy to revise when the scope changes.

The fee comes from the authority's published schedule, so look it up for each job. In British Columbia that is Technical Safety BC unless the city runs its own electrical permits, as Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey do. What an electrical permit costs in BC lists the 2026 schedules.

Then quote the amount the customer will actually pay:

• Canada. GST or HST applies to the bid. In BC, PST can also apply to materials on real-property contracts. The tax section of our estimating guide walks through an example.
• United States. Sales tax on contractor labour and materials varies by state. Check your state's rule before you set the price.

Say in the bid whether the price includes tax. A total that grows at invoice time starts an argument you did not need.

8. Write the bid the customer reads

The customer never sees your takeoff. They see one or two pages, and those pages decide what you are owed and what you are not. An electrical bid should state:

• Scope of work, by area or system, in plain words.
• The documents you priced: drawing numbers, dates and every addendum.
• Inclusions: permit, inspections, fixtures, trenching, whatever you carry.
• Exclusions: patching, painting, utility fees, anything the customer might assume.
• Assumptions: what you saw on the site visit and what you could not see.
• The price, and whether it includes tax.
• Alternates and unit prices, if the customer asked for them.
• Schedule: when you can start and how long you need.
• Payment terms and how long the price is valid.
• Your licence number and a place to sign.

An electrical bid example

This is example wording for a small residential job. Replace every bracket with your own details.

How to bid residential and commercial electrical jobs differently

The math is the same. What changes is who reads the bid and what they compare.

Change orders

The scope will change after you win, so set the rules in the bid. State that extra work is priced in writing and approved before it starts, and state the hourly rate and material markup that extras will use. An electrical change order should carry the same parts as the bid: scope, price, effect on schedule and a signature.

9. Submit on time, follow up and keep score

Send the bid before the deadline, not at it. Formal tenders usually reject a late bid no matter how good the price is. Confirm it arrived.

Then follow up. Ask the homeowner if they have questions about the scope. Ask the general contractor where your number landed once the job is awarded. Many will tell you, and that answer is free market research.

Keep a simple log of every bid:

• The date, the customer and the type of work.
• The amount you bid and the hours the bid took.
• Whether you won, and the reason if you lost.

Count your win rate two ways, by number of bids and by dollars. Winning nearly everything you bid in open competition is a warning that your prices are low, not a sign that your bids are good.

When a job you won is finished, compare the hours you estimated with the hours you spent, system by system. That comparison is where your next set of labour units comes from, and it is what makes the next bid more accurate than this one.

Tools for bidding: a template, software or both

You can bid with a pencil. The tools below save time on the arithmetic and the counting, and none of them replaces the judgment in steps 1, 2 and 4.

A spreadsheet template. Start with the free electrical bid template if you bid a few jobs a month. It handles labour factors, markup, margin and Canadian tax. It stops being enough when typing every quantity takes longer than pricing the job. How to switch from Excel to estimating software covers that move.

Electrical estimating and bidding software. A database of items and labour units, a takeoff tool and a quote builder in one place. These guides compare the options:

• Best electrical estimating software in Canada, a shortlist with the tradeoffs of each.
• What software electrical estimators use, the five kinds and who uses them.
• Free electrical estimating software, and what "free" limits.
• The real cost of electrical estimating software, beyond the sticker price.
• VOLTA compared with Accubid, ConEst and McCormick.

AI takeoff. Software that drafts the takeoff from the drawings. AI electrical takeoff software: what it does and doesn't explains who drafts, who reviews and who decides.

Where VOLTA fits. We make VOLTA, so weigh this part accordingly. VOLTA is electrical estimating software built in British Columbia. It reads a text-based PDF drawing set in your browser and drafts a takeoff for you to review. It prices the takeoff with your labour rates, factors, markup, contingency and tax, then produces a quote for the customer. The draft comes from the drawing text, not measured geometry, so wire and conduit lengths are allowances you adjust before you bid. It costs $9.99 CAD a month after a 30-day trial, and it is built for small electrical shops.

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