After every public bid opening, the tabulation becomes a public record showing what every bidder priced. It is the best free competitive intelligence in construction, and most contractors never look at it.
When a public agency opens sealed bids, the results are recorded and published. Depending on the agency and the solicitation type you will see:
On an FDOT letting or a county unit-price resurfacing contract, that line-by-line detail tells you exactly how each competitor priced every item.
This is public record because public money is being spent. No subscription buys it, no relationship unlocks it, and it costs nothing but the time to look.
FDOT publishes bid tabulations after each letting, and they are among the most detailed available.
Counties and cities post results on their procurement pages or through whichever platform they use. Some post promptly; others take weeks.
SAM.gov publishes award notices for federal contracts, showing the winner and the amount, though usually without the line-item detail state and local tabs provide.
Public records requests work where results are not posted. Florida’s public records law is broad, and a bid tabulation is squarely within it.
The gap between low and high bid tells you how the market read the job. A tight spread means everyone understood the scope similarly. A wide spread — high bid double the low — usually means the scope was ambiguous, and it is worth understanding why before you bid similar work.
If you were the outlier, that is the most useful information on the page. Either you missed something everyone else caught, or you caught something everyone else missed. Both are worth knowing.
Second place by one percent is a different problem from second place by thirty. The first says your pricing is competitive and you lost on a detail; the second says you are pricing a different job than your competitors.
Track your gap over multiple bids. A consistent five percent above low suggests a structural cost difference — overhead, production rates, buying power — rather than bad luck.
On unit-price work this is where the real learning sits. You may be competitive overall but badly out on specific items. Comparing your unit prices against the field shows exactly where.
Contractors frequently discover they are pricing one item far above market because of an assumption made years ago and never revisited.
Over several tabs you learn who actually competes in your market, which agencies they favour, and how aggressive they are. A firm that appears on every county tab but never on city work has a pattern worth understanding.
Where published, comparing bids against it tells you whether the market is running hot or cold. Bids consistently under estimate suggest competition is fierce and margins thin. Bids consistently over suggest capacity is tight and pricing power exists.
Build a reference file. Save tabs for work in your trade and area. Over a year this becomes a genuine pricing database specific to your market — far more useful than national cost guides.
Review after every bid you lose. The tab tells you whether you were close or nowhere, and that determines whether to keep chasing that agency.
Identify where you are uncompetitive. Consistent outliers on specific items point at cost assumptions worth revisiting.
Decide where not to bid. If one contractor wins every job at an agency at prices you cannot match, that is useful information. Spending estimating hours there is spending them badly.
A tab shows the number, not the reasoning. A competitor bidding low may have a materials position you lack, a crew already mobilised nearby, or a strategic reason to buy the work. Or they may have made a mistake — low bids are sometimes errors, which is precisely what a bid bond protects the owner against.
Chasing a competitor’s number without understanding why it was low is how contractors bid themselves into unprofitable work.
Set aside twenty minutes after each letting or award cycle for the agencies you care about. Pull the tabs, note where you landed, and file them. Contractors who do this consistently price better than contractors who do not, and the only cost is attention.
Every new solicitation in your trade and counties, summarised and scored, at 7am — so you have days to prepare rather than hours. Twenty-five founding seats at $79/mo, locked for life.
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