NIC (not in contract)
NIC — "not in contract" — is the notation a bidder uses to mark work it has deliberately excluded from its price.
Also written as NIC, not in contract.
Last updated
Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
It appears throughout subcontractor proposals, usually as a short list near the end, and it is the single most important part of a bid to read. A proposal's total tells you what the bidder wants to be paid; its NIC list tells you what that money does not buy.
NIC is a statement about the contract, not about the project. Marking an item NIC does not mean it is unnecessary — it means this bidder is not pricing it. The work still has to be done by someone, and identifying who is exactly the question leveling answers. When no other bidder or package picks it up, the exclusion has become a scope gap.
In practice "NIC" and "by others" are used interchangeably by most subcontractors, and both are usually safe to read as the same exclusion. The distinction some estimators draw — that "by others" names a party expected to carry the work while "NIC" is silent on who does — is real but not reliably observed, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Exclusions are also easy to miss mechanically. They are often prose rather than line items, sometimes in a smaller typeface at the end of a scanned PDF, and they are not totalled anywhere. A bid can be low precisely because its exclusion list is long.
- NIC vs by others
What is the difference between NIC and "by others" on a bid?
- 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.
- Bid leveling
Bid leveling is the process of adjusting subcontractor bids onto a common scope so their prices can be compared like for like.
- By others
"By others" is a note a bidder places against work it is not pricing, indicating the work is expected to be performed by some other party.
- Exclusions
Exclusions are the items a bidder states are not included in its price.
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