Schedule of values
A schedule of values is the breakdown of a contract price into line items, used to measure progress and to determine how much is payable in each application for payment.
Also written as SOV, schedule of value.
Last updated
Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
It divides the contract sum into activities or components whose sum equals the total. Each month the contractor states the percentage complete for each line, and the payment application is built from that rather than from a single judgment about the job as a whole.
Its accuracy governs whether payments track earned value, which is why it is scrutinized at the start of a job rather than accepted as a formality. A schedule of values with too few lines cannot measure anything precisely; one deliberately weighted toward early activities is front-loading.
It is worth requesting during comparison, not only after award. A bidder's breakdown reveals what it actually carried — whether general conditions are in there, whether a bond appears, whether a scope the others included is present at all. A single lump sum reveals none of that, and asking for the breakdown is often faster than asking a list of questions.
It should not be confused with a cost estimate. The schedule of values distributes a contract price and includes markup within each line, so its figures are selling prices rather than costs.
- Front-loading
Front-loading is assigning more value to early line items on a schedule of values than they actually cost, so that a contractor is paid more than it has earned in the opening months.
- Markup
Markup is the amount added to a direct cost to arrive at a selling price, expressed as a percentage of that cost.
- General conditions
General conditions are the project-specific costs of running a job that belong to no trade — supervision, the site office, temporary utilities, cleanup, and similar.
Catch every gap before you award
MyLevelBid reads every bid line by line, maps them to one scope, and flags what nobody carried.
Request a demo