Estimate review checklist: 43 checks before you sign
A free interactive checklist for reading a construction estimate, a bid or a tender the way an estimator reads it — scope first, quantities second, price last. Tick as you go, print it, take it into the review meeting.
Most bad numbers are not wrong prices. They are a missing scaffold line, a rebar quantity measured without laps, a sub quote against the wrong drawing revision, or a retainage clause that quietly funds somebody else's cash flow for eleven months. This list is the order in which those things surface: what the price covers, whether the quantities are real, what each rate is made of, and what the contract does to you after the number is agreed.
It will not tell you whether a price is right — nothing on a web page can do that without the drawings. It tells you which questions have not been answered yet, and that is where the money usually goes. Your ticks are saved in this browser only: nothing is uploaded, no account, no email address. The long version, with what each failure looks like on a real bid, is in how to review a contractor's estimate before you sign .
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Project ________________________ Estimate ref. ______________ Contractor ________________________
01 Scope and exclusions 0/5
Read the exclusions list before you read a single price. An estimate with no written exclusions list has no scope, only a number. Every gap it leaves open is yours by default.
Match the drawing and specification revisions on the cover sheet against the set you actually issued, addenda included. A price built on Rev B and a building built on Rev D is a change order that has already been written — it just has not been sent yet.
Settle scaffolding, hoisting and access equipment: who supplies it, who moves it, and for how many weeks. Nearly every trade excludes it and it is rented by the week, so a façade that runs two weeks long lands on whoever forgot to name an owner.
Hunt for the work that lives between two trades: firestopping, sleeves and penetrations, blocking and backing, patching after MEP rough-in. Everybody excludes it because it belongs to nobody, and it is always discovered at the worst moment — after the ceiling is closed.
Confirm the temporary and end-of-job items are priced: temporary power and water, fencing, dust barriers, protection of finished work, progressive and final cleaning. None of it appears on a drawing, which is exactly why none of it appears in the estimate either.
02 Quantities and takeoff 0/6
Re-measure the two or three lines that carry the most money, and compare quantity against quantity — not total against total. Almost all of the error in an estimate lives in a handful of lines. Checking the other forty is how you run out of time before you reach them.
Check the reinforcing steel includes laps and splices, chairs, ties, bends and waste — not the net weight off the bar schedule. Lap lengths alone add weight that nobody notices until the steel arrives short and the extra is bought at retail, mid-pour week.
Check formwork is measured by contact area, not derived from concrete volume. A thin, tall wall has very little concrete in it and an enormous amount of form. Pricing form off cubic metres or cubic yards systematically underprices exactly that wall.
Check the deduction rule for openings — and that masonry, drywall, paint and finishes all use the same one. When two subs deduct openings differently, their bids are not comparable at all, and the gap looks like a discount when it is a measurement convention.
Check the unit on every line: area against volume, linear against each, kilos against tonnes, per sheet against per square metre or square foot. A unit mistake is not a ten per cent error, it is a tenfold one, and it survives every review that only looks at the prices.
Ask for the backup behind the biggest lines: colour-coded takeoff markups or an exported quantity report. If nobody can show where a number came from, it did not come from the drawings. That is the whole test.
04 Labour and productivity 0/4
Check labour hours are shown per line rather than folded into a rate. Hours divided by crew size gives days, and those days have to agree with the schedule in the same document. When they do not, one of the two numbers is fiction.
Check the crew behind the rate: which trades, what apprentice-to-journeyman ratio, and whether the rate is burdened or bare. A bare wage and a burdened wage — taxes, insurance, workers' compensation, benefits — are not close to each other, and only one of them is what the job actually costs.
Check the productivity assumed matches the real conditions: working height, occupied building, restricted access, small repetitive rooms, night or weekend work. The same square metre is not installed at the same speed on the ground floor and on the twenty-second, and catalogue output rates assume the ground floor.
Check whether the job demands a wage the estimate has not used: prevailing-wage or public-works rules, a union agreement, shift premiums, travel time or per diem. This is a rate correction applied to every labour line at once, so it is never a small number when it is found late.
05 Materials and price escalation 0/4
Check the validity date on every major material quote behind the estimate. A quote that expires in thirty days, sitting under a bid you will sign in ten weeks, is not a price. It is an expectation with somebody else's name on it.
Check whether there is a price adjustment clause, what triggers it, which index it follows and who absorbs the movement before it bites. Silence on escalation is not protection. It only means the argument will happen later, with the steel already ordered.
Check lead times on the long-lead packages — switchgear, generators, elevators, chillers, custom or impact-rated glazing — and whether the price assumes an early release and a deposit. A lead time is a schedule item and a cash-flow item before it is ever a price, and it is the one that quietly sets your completion date.
Check the product priced is the product specified: model, class, gauge, thickness, finish — and if it is an "or equal", make them name the equal now. It will be named eventually. Naming it before signature is a conversation; naming it after is a substitution request with your schedule as leverage.
06 Subcontractors 0/4
Check each sub quote is attached, dated and signed, and that it matches the line it feeds. A figure typed into a spreadsheet by the general contractor is a hope, not a quote, and nobody is bound by it.
Read each subcontractor's own exclusions, not just the main contractor's. The head exclusion list almost never repeats what the subs excluded underneath it, so the gaps stack up in silence, one trade at a time.
Check every sub was quoted against the same drawing revision and the same addenda as everyone else. Bid levelling is meaningless when three subs priced three different buildings, and the difference will look like competitiveness.
Check licence, insurance limits and bonding for that scope in that jurisdiction, and ask for the certificate before award, not after. An uninsured sub is not a cheaper sub. It is your exposure, priced at zero on somebody else's sheet.
07 Contingency and risk 0/4
Find the contingency: its own line, its percentage, and the base it is applied to. A contingency that is not a visible line is a contingency you cannot audit, cannot release and cannot argue about later.
Confirm whose contingency it is and what releases it, in writing. Under a lump sum it belongs to the contractor whether or not it is spent; under cost-plus or a guaranteed maximum price, unspent contingency should come back. Which of those is happening should not be a surprise at closeout.
Count the allowances, add them up, and read the total as risk rather than budget. Every allowance is an item nobody has priced yet. A bid carrying many of them is not a price, it is a schedule of future negotiations.
Weigh the contingency against how finished the drawings actually are, and clear now what is cheap to clear now: existing-conditions survey, hazardous-material survey, soil report, utility locates, what is behind the wall you plan to open. The less design there is, the more of the estimate is judgement — and a survey bought before signature costs a fraction of the same discovery bought mid-demolition.
08 Schedule and penalties 0/4
09 Payment terms 0/4
Check retainage: the percentage, whether it drops at substantial completion, and the exact event that releases the rest. Retainage is your margin, held by somebody else, for a period nobody reads carefully until they need the money.
Walk the payment cycle end to end — cut-off date, application, certification, payment days — and work out how many weeks of this job you are financing. A cut-off on the 25th and payment sixty days after certification is not "60 days". Count it on a calendar before you sign it.
Check whether stored materials are paid, on site and off site, and what proof is required: invoice, transfer of title, insurance, segregated storage. On a job with long-lead equipment, this single clause decides whether the schedule is fundable at all.
Check the schedule of values is not front-loaded, and that bonds, insurance and financing costs are stated as their own lines. When mobilisation and early items carry more value than they cost, your money funds somebody else's cash flow — and there is nothing left in the late items to pull the job over the finish line.
10 Local code, permits and inspections 0/4
Check which code and which edition the estimate is priced against, and which authority actually has jurisdiction over this address. "Code compliant" without an edition and an authority is not a statement about money. Two editions apart is a different building.
Check that the product approvals the jurisdiction demands are priced into the product itself, not swapped for a cheaper equivalent. In Miami-Dade, for example, openings inside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone need a Notice of Acceptance, and an NOA-approved assembly does not cost what a standard one costs. Every market has its own version of that line.
Check permits, plan-review fees, impact and connection fees and third-party reviews: who pays them, whether they are in the price, and whether the time they take sits inside the schedule. Permit time is almost always excluded from the duration and almost never excluded from reality.
Check special inspections and testing are priced: concrete cylinders, weld and bolt inspection, soil compaction, pressure and air tests, commissioning. The code requires them and the estimate routinely excludes them, which is how a mandatory cost becomes an extra.
Progress is stored in this browser only (local storage). Clearing your browser data, or opening the page somewhere else, starts a clean list.
What to do with the answers you did not get
Every unticked line on this list is either a question you still have to ask or a risk you have decided to accept. Both are fine — as long as the decision is deliberate and written down next to the number. Send the unanswered ones back to whoever produced the estimate, in one list, before you negotiate anything. A bidder who answers twelve questions in writing has just improved your bid documents for free; a bidder who cannot answer them has told you something more useful than their price.
If you want the reasoning behind each block rather than the one-line version, read how to review a contractor's estimate before you sign , or look at how a line-item estimate is actually put together in our sample estimates and in what a Pr3cise estimate contains . For measuring rather than reviewing, see construction takeoff services .
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