Most contractors set prices based on two things: what the job costs them and what they think the market will bear. That's a reasonable starting point, but it leaves a significant amount of information on the table — specifically, the data sitting in your own bid history.
If you've been tracking bids for a few months, you have something genuinely valuable: a record of which jobs you win, which you lose, and at what price points. That data, read correctly, can sharpen your pricing more than any industry benchmark.
The first thing worth looking at is your win rate broken down by job type. Are you closing kitchen remodels at 70% but bathrooms at 30%? Are your landscaping bids winning consistently while your fence jobs rarely close?
A high win rate on a particular job type is a signal — but not always the signal you think. It might mean your pricing is competitive. It might also mean your pricing is too low. If you're winning 90% of your deck builds, you might be leaving money on every job you close.
A low win rate is worth investigating differently. Is the problem price, or is it something else? If you're losing bids on large commercial jobs consistently, the issue might be that customers at that scale want a different kind of contractor — more crew, more insurance, more references — and no amount of price adjustment will close that gap.
Many contractors notice a pattern when they look at their bid history over time: win rates drop sharply above a certain dollar amount. Bids under $5,000 close reliably. Bids between $5,000 and $10,000 close less often. Bids over $10,000 rarely close.
This threshold effect is real, and it varies significantly by contractor, market, and trade. Understanding where your threshold is helps you make better decisions. You might decide to focus on the job sizes you close well and stop chasing the big jobs that rarely come through. Or you might invest in the things that help close larger jobs — better references, cleaner proposals, more thorough site assessments — because the upside is worth the effort.
If you're using BidTrackr, you don't have to build a spreadsheet to get these insights. The pipeline AI assistant can answer questions directly from your bid history. Ask it "what type of job do I win most often?" or "what's my average win rate on bids over $8,000?" and it will pull the answer from your actual data instantly.
The goal isn't to optimize yourself into a formula. It's to replace guesswork with information — so when you price a job, you're not estimating in the dark.