Base bid
The base bid is the price for the work as specified in the contract documents, before any alternates, unit price adjustments, or allowances are applied.
Also written as base price, base scope.
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Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
It is the number the bid form asks for first and the one comparison starts from. Everything else a bidder submits — alternates, unit prices, voluntary deductions — modifies it rather than replacing it.
Keeping the base bid clean is what makes a field comparable at all. A bidder that folds an alternate into its base, or prices a substitution it prefers rather than the specified product, has submitted a number that answers a different question than the one asked. That is not always disqualifying, but it has to be caught before the columns are added up.
The base bid is also where a scope gap hides most comfortably. Because it is a single figure covering the whole specified scope, an omission inside it is invisible until the supporting breakdown is read — which is the argument for requiring one.
On public work the base bid usually decides the award, with alternates accepted in a stated order until the budget is reached. That ordering is published in advance precisely so the award cannot be steered after the prices are known.
- Alternate
An alternate is separately priced scope, added to or deducted from the base bid, that lets the owner decide at award whether to include it.
- Bid form
The bid form is the document a bidder must complete and sign to submit its price, prescribed by the owner so that every bid arrives in the same structure.
- Scope gap
A scope gap is work required by the project that no bidder included in its price, because every bidder assumed someone else was carrying it.
- Quantity takeoff
A quantity takeoff is the measurement of materials and work quantities from the drawings — square feet, linear feet, cubic yards, counts — that an estimate is built on.
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