Ask ten estimators what a "good" win rate is and you will get numbers from 10% to 50% — and most of them are right, for their trade and their market. The bid-hit ratio is not one benchmark; it is a family of benchmarks that depend on trade, delivery method, and bidder count. Judging a drywall shop by a GC's hard-bid numbers, or vice versa, leads to exactly the wrong decisions.
This piece consolidates what FMI's contractor performance data, CFMA benchmarking, and two decades of precon-desk experience say a healthy ratio looks like — trade by trade — and how to diagnose a number that is off in either direction.
First: measure it correctly
Hit ratio = jobs won ÷ jobs bid, trailing 12 months
Three rules that keep the number honest:
- Count pursuits, not dollars — then track dollar-weighted hit rate as a second line. Winning 3 of 10 bids but only the three smallest is a different disease than the same ratio spread evenly.
- Count withdrawn bids as losses. If you spent the estimating hours, it goes in the denominator.
- Segment by pipeline. Negotiated work and hard-bid work must never share a ratio — blending 55% negotiated with 12% hard-bid produces a meaningless 30%.
The benchmarks
| Trade / pipeline | Healthy range | Investigate below | Investigate above |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical subcontractor | 20-30% | 10% | 40% |
| Mechanical / HVAC subcontractor | 18-28% | 10% | 38% |
| Plumbing subcontractor | 20-30% | 10% | 40% |
| Drywall / interiors subcontractor | 25-35% | 12% | 45% |
| Structural steel (fab & erect) | 15-25% | 8% | 35% |
| Concrete subcontractor | 20-30% | 10% | 40% |
| Roofing (new construction) | 15-25% | 8% | 35% |
| Sitework / earthwork | 15-25% | 8% | 35% |
| GC — hard-bid public | 10-15% | 5% | 25% |
| GC / sub — negotiated & CM-at-risk | 40-60% | 25% | — |
Why the ranges differ: bidder count and scope interpretation. Interiors packages typically see 4-6 bidders and reward relationships; public GC work sees 8-15 bidders and rewards nothing but price. Steel sits low because fabrication capacity swings force shops in and out of aggressive pricing cycles. Negotiated work is high because selection happens before pricing — the "bid" is mostly confirmation.
The break-even floor
Whatever your trade, your floor is arithmetic, not a benchmark:
Break-even hit rate = estimating cost per bid ÷ gross profit per won job
A shop spending $4,800 of loaded estimating time per pursuit against $95,000 average gross profit breaks even at ~5%. The same shop bidding small tenant-improvement work at $1,800 per pursuit and $18,000 average GP breaks even at 10% — double the floor, half the margin for error. Small-job shops need higher hit rates than their big-job competitors, which is the opposite of how most owners intuit it. Run your own numbers in the bid/no-bid scorecard tool — it computes the break-even floor and the expected value of each pursuit from your shop's actual figures.
Diagnosing a ratio that is too low
Under the "investigate below" line, one of three things is true:
- Wrong pursuits. The shop bids everything that arrives instead of scoring pursuits. This is the most common cause and the cheapest to fix — a weighted go/no-go scorecard applied for two quarters typically moves a sub from single digits to the high teens with zero pricing changes.
- Uncompetitive cost structure. You are consistently 8-15% above the winners on level scopes. That is a production-rate or overhead problem, not an estimating problem.
- Coverage bidding. You are being invited as the third number for GCs who already know who is winning. Watch for invitations that always arrive late with short turnarounds — decline them fast with a no-bid letter and spend the hours where you have a real chance.
Diagnosing a ratio that is too high
This is the diagnosis owners resist, because winning feels like health. It usually is not:
"In a sealed-bid market, a 45% win rate is not a sales achievement. It is the market telling you, forty-five times out of a hundred, that nobody else was willing to do the work for your number."
Precon director, ENR Top-400 specialty contractor
The test: pull your last ten wins and check the bid tabs where available. If your spread to second place averages more than 6-8%, you are systematically underpricing — that spread is pure margin you never collected. The fix is not "raise prices 10%"; it is selective repricing on the pursuit types where your spread is widest, one bid cycle at a time, while watching the ratio drift down toward the healthy band.
Every point of hit ratio you gain through better selection (not lower pricing) compounds: fewer wasted takeoffs means more hours per live pursuit, which means better quantification, sharper subcontractor coverage, and fewer scope-gap losses. Selection quality and estimate quality are the same budget.
Moving the number: the only two levers that work
Shops that migrated from 10-12% to the low-20s over 12-18 months all did the same two things, in the same order:
- Installed a written go/no-go gate — scored before the takeoff starts, with hard-kill rules for pay history and AR exposure. Bid volume drops 25-40%; the pursuits that survive are ones the shop can actually win and collect on.
- Reinvested the freed estimating hours into the surviving bids: full spec review, RFI discipline, real subcontractor coverage instead of plug numbers, and takeoff automation so quantification stops consuming the schedule.
The order matters. Automating the takeoff while still bidding everything just produces more losing bids per week. Select first, then accelerate — that is where the hit-rate curve actually bends. PILARS handles the second half: AI takeoff at $100 per trade per plan so the hours go into strategy instead of counting. See pricing here.