What is spec review costing you?
Enter your numbers. See what your team spends on spec review today, what misses are costing you, and what changes when every page gets read with the same precision at 4pm as at 8am.
Volume swings month to month, so everything below is shown per year.
When the bid desk is buried, the usual fix is a hire. This calculator shows what that headcount is buying you, and what changes when we take the spec reading instead.
Each sales rep reviews about 24 specs per year. That is 120 hours per person spent reading spec documents. Not pricing. Not taking off quantities. Just reading and hoping nothing gets missed.
Your sales rep reads specs differently at 8am than at 4pm. Mistakes happen when the team is rushing to make bid day. 3 hours back per bid means they finish the review with time to think, not time to panic.
LEFT ON THE TABLE EVERY YEAR
The industry average net margin is 6.9%. We use a conservative 4.5% here, which puts your annual profit on $15,000,000 at $675,000. A single missed exclusion or unfunded scope item on one project can erase 6% of your entire year. Your team processes 48 bids per year.
Industry research shows that about 1 in every 100 dollars you bill goes back to fixing problems that started with something missed in the specs. On $15,000,000 in revenue, that is $150,000 a year in rework your team never sees line-itemed.
One caught exclusion runs $15K to $75K and can cover a year of working with us on its own. The hours and the extra wins are on top. That is $30,000 a year against the $106,500 to $130,000 it costs to add a fully loaded hire. And if the first report does not surface a risk your team missed, the first month is free.
Nearly half of contractors are turning down work right now because they do not have enough people. Your sales reps are the bottleneck. Every hour they spend reading specs is an hour they are not spending on the next bid.
See it on your next spec.
Send us a spec from your next bid. We will read every page and send you back every risk, every scope gap, and every contract trap we find. First one is free.
Get Your Free Bid ReviewSend us a spec from your next bid. Results within 24 hours.
Wages: Bureau of Labor Statistics, SOC 13-1051, May 2023. Loaded cost multiplier: CFMA Annual Financial Survey (1.37x).
Rework costs: Construction Industry Institute Research Summary 153-1 (351 projects, $4.2B installed cost). Cause breakdown: CII RT-252.
Net margins: CFMA Annual Financial Survey, specialty trades median 4.0-4.5%. Verified against public filings (MYR Group 3.2%, Primoris 3.6%, EMCOR 7.5%, Comfort Systems 11.2%).
Win rates: CFMA, FMI Nonresidential Construction Index, ENR/Dodge survey data. Range: 15-25%, calculator uses 20%.
Workforce data: AGC 2025 Workforce Survey (92% hiring difficulty), NCCER (41% retire by 2031), U.S. Chamber of Commerce (half of contractors turning down work).
Loaded hire costs: BLS SOC 13-1051 median wage x CFMA 1.37 loaded multiplier x 2,080 hours. Assistant PM figure is an industry loaded-cost estimate.
All assumptions use conservative values. Calculator uses BLS median wages (not 75th percentile), miss costs scaled at 2.5% of your average project value and bounded to the industry range of $15,000-$75,000, and a 30% prevention rate (not 50%+). Your actual results will likely exceed these estimates.