How to estimate sitework: from takeoff to a bid you can run as a budget

For each item of work:

unit cost = (crew's cost for a day ÷ what the crew installs in a day) + materials per unit + trucking and subs per unit

Add the items up, then add general conditions, overhead and profit. The two numbers that decide whether you win and make money are the crew's daily cost and its daily production. Every other figure is a quantity or a quote. Get those two from your own crews, not from a spreadsheet someone built years ago, and keep them current as the jobs come in.

Break the estimate into the work your crews actually do, in the order they do it, each with the unit it's measured and paid in. A typical turnkey site looks like this:

Keep pipe split by size and depth. Fifteen-inch pipe at 4 ft and at 12 ft are different crews, different shoring and very different production. One average depth for the whole run is the most common way a utility number goes wrong.

Measure from the engineer's CAD files where you can get them (DWG, DXF or LandXML surfaces and pipe networks), and from the PDF set at a checked scale where you can't. For earthwork, build the existing and proposed surfaces and let the software compute cut and fill. For pipe, take each run from structure to structure with its inverts, so trench depth comes from the profile rather than a guess.

Three corrections every sitework takeoff needs:

• Shrink and swell. Bank yards cut are not the yards you haul or the compacted yards you place. Convert with your soil's factors (soil converter, cut and fill calculator). In Aggrado that's the project's fill factor (bank CY per compacted CY), set once on the Volumes tab, and its swell (bank to loose) for trucking.
• Topsoil and undercut. Strip depth comes off the cut before balancing, and unsuitable soil to remove and replace is its own item (topsoil calculator).
• Trench, not pipe. A pipe item carries its excavation, bedding stone, backfill and the spoil left over (trench calculator).

A crew-based unit price has four parts:

• Labor: each person's wage plus your labor burden (payroll taxes, workers' comp, liability, benefits). See labor burden.
• Equipment: each machine's ownership and operating cost by the hour, plus its fuel. See the equipment cost calculator.
• Production: what this crew installs in a day on this kind of work. This is the number that wins or loses the job.
• Materials, trucking and subs: quantities from the takeoff, priced from quotes.

Divide the crew's day by its production and you have the labor and equipment cost of one unit. Build that once per crew in your Codebook and every estimate prices the same work the same way. See setting up your Codebook.

A storm run of 400 ft of 15 in reinforced concrete pipe, 7 ft to the invert at one end and 9 ft at the other, so it sits in the 6–10 ft band: an 8 ft trench box, a 336-class excavator digging and a 320 backfilling behind it. Ten-hour days. The figures are the starting rates Aggrado ships with; yours replace them.

1. The crew's cost for a day

The crew costs $4,462.68 a day.

2. What it installs in a day

This crew lays 180 LF of 15–24 in RCP a day at 6–10 ft. So the labor and equipment in one foot is $4,462.68 ÷ 180 = $24.79, and the run takes 2.2 crew days.

3. Materials

The trench calculator puts the trench at 3.6 ft wide at the bottom (the pipe's 19.5 in outside diameter plus 2 ft; check the owner's detail, since some call for more), with 6 in of #57 stone under the pipe and up to its springline: 77.31 tons for the run, or 0.193 tons a foot. It also leaves about 44 bank yards of spoil to spread or haul off.

4. The unit price

Overhead and profit go on at the end, as percentages of cost or as a lump, not hidden inside unit prices. If your overhead and profit come to 15%, this pipe bids at $54.64 × 1.15 = $62.83 a foot. The 15% is an example; the percentage is yours.

On bid day, know which numbers are still guesses: material quotes still out, a sub you plugged with your own number, an item priced from a rough rate instead of a crew. Close those before the number goes in, and lock the submitted bid exactly as sent so you can tell later what you bid and why. In Aggrado, a project's Bid day screen holds those last hours: prices still out, what's still plugged, adds and cuts, the checks and Lock as submitted, which locks the bid in Aggrado without sending anything. See the Bid tab for what's decided before the day.

Priced this way, the estimate already says how the job should go: this run is 2.2 crew days and about 133 man-hours, at 180 LF a day. Carry those numbers into the job as its budget and have the foreman report hours and installed feet every day.

Then the job tells you early. If the crew lays 150 LF a day instead of 180, a foot costs $29.75 in crew instead of $24.79, about $1,983.41 over on this run. You see it on day one, while there is still time to change the crew or the method, not when the month closes. And what the crews actually do becomes the production rate on the next bid.

• Pipe priced at one average depth, instead of by depth band.
• Earthwork balanced in bank yards without shrink, swell or topsoil, so the site that looked balanced needs import.
• Unit prices copied from an old job instead of built from today's wages, equipment and production.
• Equipment priced without its fuel, or a crew priced without the loader and backfill machine that work alongside the excavator.
• Shoring left out: OSHA requires a protective system for trenches 5 ft and deeper, unless they're entirely in stable rock.
• The won bid never becomes a budget, so nobody knows the job is behind until it's over.

Aggrado Site is built around this method: takeoff from CAD and PDF, pipe priced by depth band, crews and production rates in one Codebook, and the won bid opening as the job's budget, with the field reporting against it from a phone.

• Production: Aggrado's starter crew figures, from Ryan Lindsey's crew sheet (storm pipe, 15–24 in RCP, 6–10 ft: 180 LF in a 10-hour day).
• Wages: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro area, hourly mean. Burden 32%: payroll taxes, workers' comp, liability and an open-shop allowance for benefits.
• Equipment: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, EP 1110-1-8, Construction Equipment Ownership and Operating Expense Schedule, Region 2, December 2022: ownership plus operating without fuel, the median of each class. Shoring and small tools are Aggrado estimates.
• Fuel: typical burn by machine class at medium or light load; off-road diesel at $3.40 a gallon.
• Pipe and stone: 15 in RCP from a 2025 Charlotte-area county pipe bid; #57 stone an Aggrado estimate for the Charlotte area, 2025–26. Check both against your suppliers.
• Shoring: OSHA 29 CFR 1926.652.