What is a good bid response rate for subcontractors?

Response rate is the number most estimating teams complain about and few actually measure. Before comparing yours to a benchmark, it's worth agreeing on what counts, because people count very different things.

What counts as a response

A response is any of:

1. A bid
2. A clear "not bidding"
3. A "maybe" that turns into one of the above before bid day

A response is not:

• Opening the email
• Downloading the drawings
• Clicking the link

Those are engagement. They tell you the invitation arrived; they don't tell you whether a price is coming.

Bid response rate benchmarks

Figures vary with how invitations are sent and how the list is kept. The first row is a published industry figure; the rest are rules of thumb from how GCs describe their own rounds, not audited benchmarks.

Two takeaways. First, the widely quoted "subs only respond 10 to 15 percent of the time" applies to broadcast invitations, not to invitations sent to people who know you. Second, the gap between 40 and 70 percent is process, not the market.

How to calculate yours

Per project, per scope:

Response rate = (bidding + bid received + not bidding + resolved maybes) ÷ (everyone invited)

Track it per scope, not just per project, because a 70 percent overall rate can hide a 30 percent rate on mechanical, which is the one that ruins bid day.

If you track invitations in a spreadsheet, this is a pivot table. If you use a tool that records responses, it's on the dashboard.

What a good number gets you

The reason to care is arithmetic. To land five real bids on a major trade:

• At 70 percent response, with roughly 60 percent of responders bidding and 85 percent of those delivering, you invite about 12 to 14.
• At 40 percent response, the same target needs 22 to 25 invitations.

Every point of response rate shrinks the list you have to manage, the follow-up you have to do, and the leveling you have to finish on bid day. How many to invite per scope.

7 ways to raise it

In the order to try them:

1. Clean the list. Mark inactive anyone unheard-from in three years; fix every bounce the day it happens. A stale list inflates the denominator with people who were never going to answer. How to rebuild it.
2. Send individual emails. One person, one email, their name, the trade in the subject. Templates.
3. Ask a direct question. "Can you let me know by Wednesday whether you're bidding? No is a fine answer."
4. Follow up non-responders only, on day three or four. Never the people who already answered.
5. Give long-lead trades more time. Mechanical, electrical, curtain wall and elevators usually need two weeks minimum.
6. Send from your own mailbox to a named person. Platform notifications and generic inboxes both lose mail. Why invitations land in spam.
7. Track per person, per scope, so you can see who's silent and act.

Measuring "not bidding" separately

A useful secondary number is the share of "not bidding" answers. On a healthy round it's typically 10 to 15 percent. Near zero means subs aren't telling you no, they're going silent, which means you can't fill the slot. Above 30 percent means your list has drifted from your work: wrong regions, wrong project types, wrong size. Both are worth knowing and only visible if you make declining easy.

The short version

Count bids, declines and resolved maybes. Ignore opens. Aim for 70 percent on the trades that matter, measure it per scope, and treat anything under 50 as a process problem rather than a market problem.

Invite All (our product) records the Bidding / Maybe / Not bidding click for every contact and rolls the rate up per scope, which is the view this article describes and the fastest way to get the number without typing anything. A spreadsheet with a status column gets you there too, with more effort.