Guides / Estimating
Bidding commercial painting work
Commercial work is not bigger residential work. The estimating is more mechanical and the risk moves somewhere else entirely — into the contract, the schedule and the payment terms. Companies that lose money on their first commercial jobs usually priced the painting correctly.
The scope arrives as a document, not a walkthrough
On a repaint you look at the house. On a commercial bid you are handed a packet — plans, specifications, finish schedules, addenda — and the scope is distributed across all of it. The finish schedule says what goes where, the specification says which products qualify, and an addendum issued last week may have changed both.
Read the addenda first. Bidding the original documents when an addendum has revised the scope is the most common way a commercial bid is simply wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is entirely your problem.
This is the reading that the plan-sheet analyzer exists to shorten — but the decisions in it are still yours.
Price the conditions, not just the surfaces
The square footage is the easy part. What moves the number is everything around it: working nights or weekends, working around an occupied tenant, working around other trades, restricted access hours, elevator time, no storage on site, protection requirements, and a schedule that puts you on site three separate times instead of once.
Mobilizations are the quiet killer. A job you priced as one continuous visit, delivered as four separate trips because the drywall was late, is a different job and your price did not include it.
Read the payment terms before the scope
Net 30 from an invoice you can only submit monthly, plus 10 percent retention held until final completion, means you may be funding the work for months. On a job large enough to matter, that is a financing question before it is a painting question.
Work out what the job does to your cash position at its worst point, not its average. A profitable job you cannot afford to perform is still a job you should decline.
The things that are not in your residential price
- Bonding and the insurance limits the contract requires, which may exceed what you carry
- Prevailing wage or certified payroll on public work — a different labor rate and real administrative hours
- Lien rights and the notices you must serve to preserve them, on a deadline
- Retention, and when it is actually released
- Liquidated damages for delay, which can exceed the profit on the job
- Submittals, product data and sample approvals before you may start
- Safety documentation, site inductions and daily reports
Decide whether you want it, deliberately
Commercial work can smooth out a seasonal residential business and it can also consume the crew that your repeat residential customers rely on. One large job that goes well is good; one large job that goes badly while your referral pipeline goes cold is how companies this size get into trouble.
Bid it because you decided to be a commercial contractor, not because a large number was available.
Questions
What is different about bidding commercial painting?
The scope arrives as a document rather than a walkthrough, and the risk sits in the contract, the schedule and the payment terms rather than in the painting. Read the addenda first — they frequently revise the scope.
What is retention?
A percentage of each payment — commonly 10% — withheld until final completion. On a long job it means you may be financing the work for months, so check your cash position at its worst point.
Should a residential painting company take commercial work?
Only deliberately. It can smooth out seasonality, and it can also consume the crew your repeat residential customers depend on.
Where this stops being arithmetic
Aerys prices a job from your own catalog and production rates, sends it with an accept link and the invoice already attached, and then compares what the job actually cost against what you quoted — by task, while the job is still running.