Bid-hit ratio is the number of bids a contractor submits for each job it wins. Construction business coach George Hedley defines it in a January 2025 column as the rate at which you win the jobs you bid or propose on: a 5-to-1 ratio means one award for every five bids, which is a 20% win rate. The two forms carry the same information, so this post uses the ratio for bids per win and the win rate for the percentage.
The estimator who logs a bid, and the owner or CFO who decides how many estimators to carry, both depend on the number. Hedley writes that in his survey of more than 2,000 general contractors, builders and subcontractors, fewer than 10% knew and tracked theirs.
The formulas
Three calculations come from the same bid log:
- Win rate by count: jobs won divided by jobs bid, over a fixed period such as the trailing 12 months.
- Bid-hit ratio: jobs bid divided by jobs won.
- Win rate by dollars: contract value won divided by total value bid.
Hedley recommends tracking dollars bid against dollars won because it shows whether you win more of the larger or the smaller jobs you chase. Count only bids that have been decided. A bid still waiting on an award goes in neither the numerator nor the denominator until the owner picks someone.
What to record on each bid
A spreadsheet or a Power BI table needs one row per bid with these fields: bid date, owner or client, client type, delivery method, bid amount, estimator, number of competing bidders when known, estimating hours, result, and the winning price when the owner releases it. Hedley lists the factors that move the ratio, including number of competitors, markup, location, project type, project size and customer relationship, and suggests tracking it by customer and job type monthly, quarterly and yearly.
Public bid tabulations give you the bidder count and the winning number. Private owners often do not, so record what the owner tells you and leave the cell blank otherwise.
A worked example
The tables below are an example with round numbers. They show a general contractor’s 120 decided bids over 12 months, split two ways.
| Client type | Bids | Wins | Win rate by count | Bid-hit ratio (bids per win) | Dollars bid | Dollars won | Win rate by dollars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public hard bid | 40 | 4 | 10.0% | 10.0 | $200,000,000 | $14,000,000 | 7.0% |
| Private competitive | 50 | 10 | 20.0% | 5.0 | $150,000,000 | $24,000,000 | 16.0% |
| Negotiated or repeat client | 20 | 9 | 45.0% | 2.2 | $60,000,000 | $27,000,000 | 45.0% |
| Design-build | 10 | 3 | 30.0% | 3.3 | $40,000,000 | $15,000,000 | 37.5% |
| All bids | 120 | 26 | 21.7% | 4.6 | $450,000,000 | $80,000,000 | 17.8% |
The company-wide ratio is 4.6 to 1, a 21.7% win rate. That single figure blends a 10-to-1 public hard-bid book with negotiated work the company wins 45% of the time. If next year’s mix shifts toward public work, the company-wide ratio will worsen even if the team bids every type of work exactly as well as before.
Leslie Guajardo, a CPA and CCIFP at Padgett, Stratemann & Co., gave rough ranges in a 2010 ENR column, which she attributed to industry reports. For general contractors, public works ran between 6 to 1 and 10 to 1, private bid work about 5 to 1, and negotiated work about 3 to 1. For subcontractors, public works ran 7 to 1 to 11 to 1, private bid work about 5 to 1, and negotiated work about 4 to 1. Hedley’s rule of thumb is that public bidding should not go above 10 or 11 to 1, and he suggests aiming for 4 to 1 or better on private work. These are practitioner benchmarks, and the example company sits at the edge of the public range.
Job size and the dollar view
| Job size | Bids | Wins | Win rate by count | Dollars bid | Dollars won | Win rate by dollars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $2 million | 60 | 18 | 30.0% | $60,000,000 | $18,000,000 | 30.0% |
| $2 million to $10 million | 45 | 7 | 15.6% | $225,000,000 | $32,000,000 | 14.2% |
| Over $10 million | 15 | 1 | 6.7% | $165,000,000 | $30,000,000 | 18.2% |
| All bids | 120 | 26 | 21.7% | $450,000,000 | $80,000,000 | 17.8% |
By count, the company wins 30% of jobs under $2 million and 6.7% of jobs over $10 million. By dollars, the large-job rate is 18.2%, higher than the middle band, because one $30 million award accounts for all of that row’s dollars won. One win in 15 bids is too few to call a trend, and a single loss next year would drop the dollar rate for that band to zero.
Read the two views together. A dollar rate well above the count rate means a few large awards make up most of the total, as in the over-$10 million row. When the dollar rate runs well below the count rate, the company is winning small bids and losing large ones.
Estimating hours per win
Each lost bid still costs estimating time. Multiply hours per bid by the bid-hit ratio to get hours per win. As an example, if every bid took 30 estimating hours, a public job would cost 300 hours to win and a negotiated job about 67. Real hours differ by job type, which is why the bid log records them.
Hedley writes that a ratio above 11 to 1 costs too much in estimating expense to leave a reasonable profit. Hours per win is the figure that lets an owner test that against their own overhead.
Bidder count and your fair share
On a public hard bid with six bidders, a contractor priced like everyone else would win about one in six, or 16.7%. Compare your public win rate with the average of one divided by the bidder count across your bids. The example company’s 10% would fall short of that fair share if its public bids averaged six bidders.
Bidder count matters for price as well. Lindsey Currier, a researcher at Harvard University, assembled a dataset covering nearly every state highway auction from 2002 to 2024. In a working paper posted to SSRN in September 2026, she reports that auctions with one or two bidders account for a third of awards, and estimates that each additional bidder lowers prices by 10%. Her estimate covers highway work. Recording the bidder count and the spread to the winning number on each of your public bids lets you check whether your own results follow it.
Reading it by estimator
Splitting by estimator needs care, because the samples are small. Suppose one estimator bid 30 jobs and won 6, a 20% win rate. A standard deviation, the typical distance between a measured rate and the true one, is about 7.3 percentage points at that sample size. A true 20% rate could plausibly show up anywhere from about 5% to 35% in a given year.
Compare estimators only within the same client type, since an estimator who handles the public work will post a lower rate for reasons outside their control. Look at two or three years before drawing a conclusion about any one person.
How to start on your bids
The ratio feeds the next step of planning. Bid volume multiplied by win rate by dollars gives the contract value you can expect to sign, and that is what adds to the backlog in months figure on your WIP schedule. If backlog is falling and bid volume is steady, the win rate by client type is the first column to check.
Pull every bid decided in the last 12 months from your estimating software or bid calendar. Add client type, result and dollar amount to each row, and compute the count and dollar win rates for each client type before adding the other fields.