Free bid hit-rate calculator.
Enter your bids, wins, and estimating hours; the calculator returns your hit rate and ratio, cost per bid, cost per win, and what the same bid volume would produce at a better win percentage. A Sunflower Bank survey of more than 2,000 contractors found fewer than 10 percent know this number. Two minutes fixes that.
Hit-rate snapshot
At 20% hit rate, same volume
Assumptions: all bids take equal hours and carry the average value; the what-if holds bid volume and estimating cost constant and changes only the win percentage. Real hit rates vary sharply by customer and project type, which is exactly why they are worth tracking per customer rather than as one blended number.
Wins ÷ bids, then dollars per win.
Hit rate is bids won divided by bids submitted. The ratio is the same number flipped: bids submitted per win. Cost per bid is hours per bid times your loaded hourly rate; multiplied by annual bid volume it gives your annual estimating spend, and divided by wins it gives cost per win, the number that connects estimating labor to revenue.
The what-if holds your bid volume and estimating cost constant and changes only the win percentage. That isolates the point of the exercise: at 120 bids a year averaging $250,000, moving from 15 to 20 percent is six more wins and $1.5 million more revenue on the same estimating payroll. Nothing about the estimates changed, only which ones got bid and how they were followed.
For benchmarks and how to actually move the number, the companion guide covers ENR's 10:1 public and 4:1 private guidance, SMPS hit-rate research, bid/no-bid screening, and follow-up discipline: bid management in construction.
Frequently asked
What is a bid-hit ratio?
The number of bids you submit per bid you win, written like 5:1. It is the inverse of hit rate: a 20% hit rate is a 5:1 ratio. Both describe the same thing; estimators tend to say ratio, executives tend to say rate.
What is a good hit rate for a contractor?
Depends on the market. ENR's long-standing guidance is that hard-bid public work should not run worse than about 10:1 (10%), and private or negotiated work should target 4:1 (25%) or better. SMPS Foundation research measured AEC firm averages of 37 to 44 percent, but that skews toward negotiated and qualifications-based work. Your ratio per customer matters more than your blended number.
What counts as a bid for this math?
Anything that consumed estimating hours and produced a submitted number. Budget pricing and rough-order-of-magnitude numbers count if they took real hours; declined invitations do not. Be consistent, because the ratio is only as honest as the denominator.
Why does cost per win matter more than cost per bid?
Because bids are the input and wins are the product. A $900 bid at a 20% hit rate produces $4,500 wins; the same bid at 10% produces $9,000 wins. When leadership asks what estimating costs, cost per win is the number that connects the estimating department to revenue.
Is a higher hit rate always better?
No, and that is worth saying plainly. A very high hit rate can mean your prices are too low, or that you only bid safe work and leave growth on the table. The goal is a hit rate consistent with healthy margins, watched per customer, so you stop spending hours on GCs who never award you work.
How do I raise my hit rate without cutting price?
Bid selection does most of the work: use your per-customer history to drop the invitations you never win and put those hours into customers who award you work. Beyond that, respond fast to GC questions during bidding, follow up after submitting, and review losses for patterns. Tracking is the prerequisite for all of it, which is why fewer than 10 percent of contractors knowing their ratio (per a Sunflower Bank survey of 2,000+ contractors) is such an expensive industry habit.
Pursuit computes this from every bid you record.
This calculator works from your totals. Pursuit records the outcome of every bid as it lands and reports hit rate by customer, project type, and region, which is where the decisions live: the GC you win 40 percent with deserves different hours than the one at 5 percent. $47 to $79 per user per month, published. Free account to start.