Comparing bids
Making three kitchen bids comparable before comparing them
Kitchen bids can differ in what they include. One includes the appliances and the flooring; another excludes both and says so in a line on page three. Comparing the bottom lines of those two documents is not a comparison, and the cheaper bottom line can turn out not to be the cheaper job.
Three bids, normalised against each other
Cheapest for the job you described
Bid A
Bid A is cheapest both on its bottom line and after the gaps are priced.
| Bid | Stated total | Excluded items | Priced gap | Normalised total | Implied cabinet cost per ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bid A | $54,200 | Appliances, supplied, Flooring, supplied and installed, Backsplash, Permits and inspection fees | $15,150 | $69,350 | $457 |
| Bid C | $61,500 | Appliances, supplied, Permits and inspection fees | $8,750 | $70,250 | $604 |
| Bid B | $71,800 | none | $0 | $71,800 | $552 |
- Implied cabinet cost runs from $456.52 to $604.35 per linear foot across these bids. A gap that size can come from box construction, drawer hardware or finish; ask each contractor to name the line and the door style rather than arguing about the total.
- The workmanship warranties differ by a year or more. That difference is not priced in any of the totals above.
- Normalising cut the spread between these bids by more than half, which suggests much of the difference is in what each bid includes.
The three bid totals, cabinetry lines, allowances and warranties pre-filled above are an example — Illustrative assumption — not a market quote. Replace them with the figures on your own bids.
How the gaps were priced
Each gap above is priced at the median of the matching line items in the other bids. This example comes with line items for each bid already filled in — illustrative assumptions, not market quotes — and only the totals, cabinetry lines, allowances, warranties and Bid A’s four inclusions have controls on this page, so treat the normalised totals as an illustration of the method rather than a result for your bids. The line items behind the gaps are listed here:
| Bid | Line items pre-filled in this example (illustrative assumptions, not market quotes) |
|---|---|
| Bid A | Cabinetry, supplied and installed $21,000; Countertops, templated and installed $6,800; Demolition and haul-away $2,400; Electrical rough and trim $5,100; Plumbing rough and trim $4,300; Drywall repair and paint $3,900; Dumpster and disposal $1,200 |
| Bid B | Cabinetry, supplied and installed $25,400; Countertops, templated and installed $8,200; Appliances, supplied $7,900; Flooring, supplied and installed $4,100; Demolition and haul-away $2,900; Electrical rough and trim $5,900; Plumbing rough and trim $5,200; Drywall repair and paint $4,400; Backsplash $2,600; Permits and inspection fees $850; Dumpster and disposal $1,400 |
| Bid C | Cabinetry, supplied and installed $27,800; Countertops, templated and installed $7,400; Flooring, supplied and installed $3,800; Demolition and haul-away $2,600; Electrical rough and trim $4,800; Plumbing rough and trim $4,600; Drywall repair and paint $4,100; Backsplash $2,300; Dumpster and disposal $1,100 |
Where no bid breaks out an item, the gap is reported and left unpriced rather than filled in with a guess. An exclusion nobody has quoted is not a zero — it is a cost you will be buying separately at a price that has not yet been named to you, and pretending otherwise would defeat the point of the exercise.
Two honest bids can be far apart, and here is how far
Normalising the scope removes the differences that are really exclusions. What remains is a genuine difference in price for the same work, and the reflex is to read that as one bidder being greedy. Before you do, look at how wide the government’s own measurement of a single trade is.
Hourly 25th percentile wage, Carpenters (SOC 47-2031), all industries, United States — series OEUN000000000000047203107, year 2025, period A01 ("Annual"), value 23.32 in the API response
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (national, 2025 annual) — BLS public API, series OEUN000000000000047203107; original retrieval recorded 2026-08-06; that copy was not retained; checked against our saved copy of 2026-10-05.
What it means for your kitchen A quarter of carpenters nationally are paid at or below it, and the crew on the cheapest of your three bids may be among them.
Hourly 75th percentile wage, Carpenters (SOC 47-2031), all industries, United States — series OEUN000000000000047203109, year 2025, period A01 ("Annual"), value 36.94 in the API response
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (national, 2025 annual) — BLS public API, series OEUN000000000000047203109; original retrieval recorded 2026-08-06; that copy was not retained; checked against our saved copy of 2026-10-05.
What it means for your kitchen A quarter are paid at or above this one, a gap of 58.4% across a single occupation — so two bids for an identical cabinet set can differ by that much on labour before anybody has added a margin.
Which means the useful question is about hours, not dollars
When one bid is well above another on labour, ask whether the difference is hours; hours are a scope statement you can interrogate. Ask each bidder how many days each trade will be on site. The labour page prices those days against the published distribution, so you can see which answer is plausible rather than which number is smaller.
What normalising cannot fix
- An exclusion nobody quoted. If none of the three priced the flooring, the tool reports the gap and refuses to fill it, because a median of zero quotes is not a number.
- An allowance that is really a placeholder: a low allowance on an undecided finish can become a change order.
- A warranty of a different length. The table above shows the months and prices none of them, because nobody can honestly price the difference between a one-year and a ten-year workmanship promise from an unfamiliar contractor.
- A crew that is not the crew. The person who priced the job may not be the person who does it, and a subcontracted trade at a fixed task price has an implied hourly rate that no published series predicted.
Exclusions that can do damage later
| Items a bid may exclude | Why it gets left out | What it can cost you later |
|---|---|---|
| Appliances | The homeowner is expected to buy them, and may not have decided | The full package price plus delivery and installation, arriving in the same month as the final payment |
| Permits and inspection fees | Fees vary by jurisdiction and the contractor cannot know yours | The fee itself, plus the schedule cost if nobody filed early enough |
| Flooring | It can be treated as a separate trade and a separate decision | Material, labour, and a transition detail into the next room that nobody has designed |
| Backsplash | The selection may be made after the counters are in | Material and tile-setter labour, at a point where the crew has already demobilised |
| Drywall repair beyond the immediate work | Nobody knows how far the damage goes until the cabinets are out | Board, tape, texture match and paint, in a room that was supposed to be finished |
| Disposal | Small enough to be forgotten and large enough to notice | A dumpster, permits for it in some cities, and haul-away of anything that will not go in it |
What to ask before you sign anything
- What exactly is excluded? Ask for it as a list, not as a sentence in the terms; a list is easier to check.
- What is an allowance rather than a price, and what happens when the selection exceeds it?
- Who orders and receives the cabinets, and who is responsible if a box arrives damaged? The answer decides who waits for the replacement.
- How many days will the site be unattended? Not out of suspicion — an unattended site is a schedule signal, and it tells you how many jobs this crew is running.
- What is the workmanship warranty, in months, in writing, and what specifically does it cover? A lifetime cabinet warranty from a manufacturer is not a workmanship warranty from an installer.
- What is the payment schedule tied to? Payments tied to milestones protect both sides. Payments tied to dates protect neither.
- Then take the winner's cabinet line back to the takeoff page and check the implied cost per linear foot against the number your own walls derive.
Sources for this page
The comparison itself cites nothing, on purpose: each gap is priced from the other bids in front of you rather than from a table imported from elsewhere. The two series below are cited only for the wage band quoted above.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (national, 2025 annual)Twenty-fifth percentile hourly wage, carpenters — the bottom of the band.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (national, 2025 annual)Seventy-fifth percentile hourly wage, carpenters — the top of it.