Scope letter
A scope letter is the written statement accompanying a subcontractor bid that sets out exactly what the price includes, excludes, and assumes.
Also written as scope sheet, scope of work letter.
Last updated
Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
It is where a bidder makes its exclusions and qualifications explicit, and it is the single most useful document in the package for anyone comparing bids. A price without a scope letter is a number with no stated meaning.
Good practice on the buying side is to require one and to specify its structure — inclusions listed against the same specification sections the invitation named, exclusions stated positively rather than by silence, and assumptions about schedule, access, and adjacent trades written down.
The reason to insist is asymmetric cost. Reading a structured scope letter takes minutes; discovering the same information after award, when the excluded work turns out to be nobody's, produces a change order priced without competition.
Scope letters are also where the same work gets described in five different vocabularies, which is what makes apples-to-apples comparison genuinely difficult. Two bidders can exclude the same item using words that share not a single term, and only reading both closely reveals it.
- Exclusions
Exclusions are the items a bidder states are not included in its price.
- Qualifications
Qualifications are the conditions and assumptions a bidder attaches to its price — the circumstances under which that number holds.
- Apples-to-apples comparison
An apples-to-apples comparison is one where every bid covers the same scope, so the prices differ only by what the bidders charge rather than by what they included.
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