Cost per square foot
Cost per square foot, written $/SF, is a price divided by the building area it covers, used to compare projects and bids of different sizes.
Also written as $/SF, cost per SF, dollars per square foot.
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Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
At project level it is the standard benchmark for whether a number is plausible. At package level — the $/SF for the mechanical package, for the electrical package — it is more useful still, because it turns an unfamiliar bid into a figure that can be compared against past projects of the same type.
That makes it an effective outlier check during comparison. A bidder whose $/SF sits well outside the others on the same package has usually not found an efficiency; more often it has understood the scope differently, and the number is a signal to go and read that proposal again.
The figure is only as good as the area behind it. Gross floor area, net area, and rentable area produce materially different results from the same price, and comparisons across projects quietly break when the two sides measured differently.
It is a sanity check, not a substitute for leveling — it can tell you a bid looks wrong, but not what is missing from it.
- Bid leveling
Bid leveling is the process of adjusting subcontractor bids onto a common scope so their prices can be compared like for like.
- Bid tabulation
A bid tabulation, or bid tab, is the table that sets every bid for a package side by side so their prices and scope can be read against each other.
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