Painting Bid Alternates and Unit Prices: How to Price What Might Happen

A bid form usually asks for more than one number. There is the base bid, and then there are boxes for alternates and, on many projects, a table of unit prices. Painters who fill those in casually are being casual about the part of the bid that gets used most, because scope that is uncertain at bid time is scope that changes later, and the numbers you wrote are the numbers that govern.

Presenting choices to a homeowner is a different exercise, covered in how to price painting jobs in tiers. This is the formal version, where the buyer defines the options and you only supply prices.

What an alternate is, and who chooses it

An alternate is a defined package of work that the owner may add to or subtract from the base scope, at a price you state at bid time. The documents describe exactly what each alternate covers. You do not get to define it, and you do not get to decline it later.

Alternates exist because owners commonly design more than the budget supports. Rather than redesign, they bid the whole thing and decide after the numbers arrive. That is why alternates are usually the parts of the job somebody suspects may be unaffordable: the upper floor, the exterior, the specialty finish in the lobby.

Two directions exist. An add alternate is work priced on top of the base. A deduct alternate is work included in the base that may be removed for a stated credit. Deducts are the more dangerous of the two, for reasons below.

What a unit price is, and how it differs

A unit price is a rate for a defined quantity of work, used to value quantities that are not known at bid time. It is not a package and it does not correspond to a decision. It is arithmetic waiting for a number.

Typical painting unit prices are a rate per additional door, per additional colour, per square foot of additional wall preparation, or per hour of after hours working. They get applied when the real quantity turns out to differ from what the documents showed.

The distinction from alternates is worth being precise about. An alternate answers whether a defined piece of work happens at all. A unit price answers how much of something there turns out to be. A bid that answers the second question with an alternate, or the first with a unit price, will be corrected by whoever administers the contract, and not in your favour.

How award actually works when alternates are in play

This is the part most bidders miss. On many public and institutional projects, award is decided on the base bid plus whichever alternates the owner selects, and the selection is often made after the numbers are opened.

The practical consequence is that a bidder can win on a low base bid and expensive alternates, or lose on a competitive base bid and one alternate priced badly. You cannot know in advance which combination will decide it, which means every number on the form has to be defensible on its own.

The temptation is to load the alternates and shave the base, on the theory that the base is what gets compared. Sometimes that works. When the owner selects every alternate it produces a loss, and when the selection rule is published in the instructions it produces nothing at all. Read the instructions to see how award will be determined before deciding how to distribute the money, and where the rule is unstated, price each item to stand alone.

Pricing an add alternate honestly

An add alternate is a small job in its own right and should be priced as one. The mistake is pricing it as a marginal extension of the base, at the base rate per square foot, as though the crew were simply carrying on.

They are not. An added area usually means a separate mobilisation, its own setup and protection, possibly its own access equipment, and its own supervision, none of which is spread across the base quantity. It may also happen at a different time, which is its own cost.

Price it as a standalone package with its own production rates, drawn from painting production rates, and then decide consciously whether to discount for the efficiency of doing it alongside the base. Discounting a number you built properly is a decision. Building it low by default is an accident.

The deduct alternate trap

A deduct alternate asks what you will credit if a portion of the base is removed. It looks symmetrical with an add and it is not.

The reason is that the removed portion carries a share of your fixed costs. Setup, mobilisation, supervision, submittals and overhead do not shrink in proportion to the area removed. If you credit the full marginal value of the work you have refunded costs you are still going to incur, and if the deduct is taken you are left doing the remaining work with less money and the same fixed burden.

The correct credit is the avoidable cost, not the priced value. Work out what genuinely stops being spent if that scope disappears, add the profit attached to it, and credit that. Explaining the logic is unnecessary. Getting it right is not, and the arithmetic behind the fixed and variable split is the subject of painting business overhead and painting business break even.

Building a unit price that survives being used

A unit price will be applied in circumstances you did not imagine, in quantities you did not expect, by somebody reading only the number and the unit of measure. Everything you assumed has to be in the definition or it does not exist.

State the unit precisely, including what it includes. A rate per door should say whether that means one face or both, whether the frame is included, whether it covers preparation of a previously coated surface, and how many coats. A rate per square foot of additional preparation should say what preparation means, because the word covers everything from a wash to full removal.

State the conditions too: normal working hours, normal access, work performed while the crew is already on site. A unit rate applied to a single door six weeks after you demobilised is not the same job as one applied to thirty doors during the run, and if the rate does not say so, it is the same rate.

Where the form allows only a number with no room for definition, put the definitions in your clarifications and reference them, using the approach in painting bid exclusions and clarifications.

Symmetry, and the rate that works in one direction only

Many bid forms ask for a single unit price used for both additions and deletions. That is convenient for the administrator and bad for you, because the same reasoning that breaks deduct alternates applies here.

Adding a door means an extra door of work at your marginal cost plus profit. Deleting a door saves you the paint and the labour but none of the mobilisation. A single symmetrical rate cannot be right for both, and the direction that hurts is deletion.

Where the form permits separate add and deduct rates, use them. Where it does not, set the rate nearer the addition value and be aware that heavy deletions will erode your margin, or state a minimum quantity below which the rate does not apply.

Quantity thresholds and the minimum that protects you

Unit rates assume a sensible quantity. They break at both extremes. One unit is a callout. Several hundred units is a different job with different logistics, and the rate that was fair for a handful may be generous at scale.

Two protections are conventional and reasonable to state. A minimum charge, so that a trivial quantity does not have to be performed at a trivial price. And a threshold above which the rate is subject to review, so an enormous quantity variation does not lock you into a rate built for a small one.

Neither of these is unusual and both are far easier to agree at bid stage than to argue afterwards. The general principle is the same one behind a minimum job charge on ordinary work, and it exists for the same reason: the cost of turning up does not scale.

Recording what you assumed while you still remember

Alternates and unit prices are the numbers most likely to be used months after they were written, by somebody who was not part of the conversation, on a job you have half forgotten. Whatever assumptions sat behind them exist only in your worksheet.

Keep the working alongside the bid: what quantity you assumed for each alternate, what production rate you applied, what conditions the unit rate assumed, and which drawing revision the whole thing responded to. It costs a page and it settles arguments.

It also feeds the next bid. Unit rates that have been used in anger and turned out to be fair are worth far more than rates derived from a rate book, and a painter with a file of tested rates prices faster and more confidently than one starting from scratch each time.

Keeping the base bid clean

Whatever you do with alternates and unit prices, the base bid should reflect the base scope and nothing else. Slipping alternate work into the base, or carrying a contingency in the base for a quantity that has a unit rate, makes the whole bid uncomparable and usually loses it.

It also breaks your own records. When the job is finished and you compare estimated against actual using the discipline in how to track painting job costs, a base bid that quietly contained other things teaches you nothing, because you cannot tell which part of the variance came from where.

Where this shows up outside painting

Alternates and unit prices are not a painting convention, they are a construction contracting convention, and the reason they are so consistent from project to project is that public procurement standardised them. The special provisions for construction contracting are set out in the federal construction contracting rules, which is where much private practice was copied from.

They also track the market. When work is plentiful, owners bid fewer alternates because budgets are confident, and when it is not, the alternate list gets longer. The United States Census Bureau publishes new residential construction data monthly, and a long alternate list on the jobs crossing your desk usually means the same thing that series does.

Frequently asked questions

Can I decline to price an alternate

Rarely without consequence. On formal bids an incomplete form can be rejected outright. If an alternate is genuinely unpriceable from the information given, ask during the question period rather than leaving the box empty.

How long do unit prices stay valid

For the duration of the contract unless the documents say otherwise, which on a long project can be a year or more. Where the programme is long, say that your rates hold for a stated period and are subject to review after it.

Should alternates carry the same margin as the base

Usually a little more, because they are smaller, less efficient and more disruptive. Applying the base margin to a package a fraction of the size prices the disruption at nothing.

What if the owner selects alternates that change the sequence

Say so in your bid if you can see it coming. Where selecting an alternate would change the programme materially, note that the price assumes the work is performed in the same period as the base, which turns a later change into a variation rather than an absorbed cost.

Are unit prices useful on private commercial work

Very. Offering a short table of rates unprompted on a repaint with uncertain quantities makes the later conversation arithmetic instead of adversarial, and it reads as confidence rather than as hedging.

How do these interact with change orders

Where a change falls within a stated unit price, the change is valued at that rate automatically and there is little to negotiate. Where it does not, the ordinary variation process applies, as covered in how to handle change orders on a painting job. That is precisely why a well drafted unit price is worth the effort.