Comparing bids
Making three kitchen bids comparable before comparing them
Kitchen bids are almost never for the same job. 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 one is frequently the more expensive one.
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, which is the comfortable outcome and the less common one.
| 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 is a difference in box construction, drawer hardware or finish, and it is worth asking 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 worth real money and appears on none of the totals above.
- Normalising cut the spread between these bids by more than half, which usually means the contractors agree about the work and disagree about what to include on the page.
How the gaps were priced
Every gap above is priced at the median of what the OTHER bids charge for the same item. That keeps the adjustment inside your own quotes rather than importing a table from somewhere else, which matters because your county sets your prices, not ours.
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 for Carpenters in All Industries in the United States 23.32 (2025 Annual)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025) — BLS public API, carpenter 25th percentile hourly wage
What it means for your kitchen The quarter of carpenters paid least are at or below it, and the crew on the cheapest of your three bids may well be among them — which is a fact about experience and market position, not about honesty.
Hourly 75th percentile wage for Carpenters in All Industries in the United States 36.94 (2025 Annual)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025) — BLS public API, carpenter 75th percentile hourly wage
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
Two contractors bidding the same county face broadly the same wage market. When one is well above the other on labour, it is usually because they think the job takes longer, and hours are a scope statement you can actually interrogate. Ask each of them 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. Allowances move in one direction, and a low allowance on an undecided finish is a discount on paper that becomes a change order in practice.
- 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 is not always the person who does it, and a subcontracted trade at a fixed task price has an implied hourly rate that no published series predicted.
The exclusions that do the most damage
| Commonly excluded | Why it gets left out | What it typically costs you later |
|---|---|---|
| Appliances | The homeowner is expected to buy them, and often has not 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 is often 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 is usually 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. The list is always longer than the sentence.
- What is an allowance rather than a price, and what happens when the selection exceeds it? Allowances move in one direction and it is not down.
- 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: every 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 (May 2025)Twenty-fifth percentile hourly wage, carpenters — the bottom of the band.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025)Seventy-fifth percentile hourly wage, carpenters — the top of it.