Every tender costs you time.
InfraBid gives some of it back. Here is the arithmetic, with its sources.
One estimator’s year
230 working days · 1,794 hours
up to 80% of the estimating load
6 weeks
the average tender period, and your estimator lives on it
1 in 5
46 public bids a year; one in five comes in
€69k
one estimator, all in, per year, before the desk and the van
The average tender takes six weeks. Irish civils contractors bid for 46 public jobs a year and win one in five. Each bid costs around 1% of the job. An estimator costs about €69,000 a year. InfraBid takes up to 80% of the estimating load: 1,435 hours a year, 184 days. Half of lost bids are lost on price alone.
We don’t replace estimators. We give back the one thing you can’t make more of. Time.
Run your own numbers.
The same arithmetic, on your desk.
What would InfraBid hand back to your desk?
Your numbers; our arithmetic, shown.
80% is the design ceiling, not a promise: the slider is yours. The €69k default is the evidenced all-in cost below; the year is 39 hours by 46 weeks.
- 92 days
- handed back a year (718 hours)
- €27,600
- of estimating time, per year
- 4.5 weeks
- to pay for itself at €199.99 a month
- +9 bids
- the freed days could price, at 10 days a bid
Arithmetic on your inputs, not a measured result: hours = 1,794 × share × estimators; value = all-in cost × share. At a 1-in-5 win rate, more priced bids is more won work.
The numbers behind it.
Every figure, its basis, its source.
6 weeks
Average tender period 6.2 weeks (range 4 to 12) across 35 tenders at a UK contractor. Two observed UK civils tenders (£6.5m, £7.5m) ran 6 and 7 weeks. One lead estimator spent 78% of the tender period on one bid.
Laryea and Lubbock (2017); Laryea and Hughes (2011)
1 in 5
Irish civils contractors bid for 46 public tenders a year and win 21%; private work runs at 19 a year and 27%. Sample: 69 firms, €2.3bn combined turnover.
Idiro Analytics for CECA/CIF (2022)
Around 1% per bid
CECA/Idiro’s working figure: clients indirectly fund about 5% of project cost in bid costs at a 1-in-5 win rate. Constructing Excellence measured 0.57% across £8bn of costed bids (0.65% for winners), so 1% is the top of the evidence, where smaller jobs with fixed bid effort sit.
Idiro Analytics (2022); Constructing Excellence (2016a)
€69k
Indeed’s average Irish estimator salary, €61,044 from 379 salaries (14 August 2026), plus 11.25% employer PRSI (11.4% from 1 October 2026) and 1.5% employer auto-enrolment: €68,827. No overhead. Morgan McKinley (2026) puts a Dublin estimator with 5+ years at €55,000 to €80,000, so a senior costs over €90k loaded.
Indeed (2026); Morgan McKinley (2026); NKC (n.d.); Citizens Information (2026)
Up to 1,435 hours, 184 days
39 hours × 46 working weeks (four weeks’ leave, ten public holidays) = 1,794 hours; 80% = 1,435 hours = 184 days of 7.8 hours = 37 weeks, the whole year taken as estimating time. On pricing hours only, the figure drops in proportion. Each point of load is about 18 hours and €690 a year per estimator.
Arithmetic
Half of lost bids
Price was given as the single reason for 50% of losing bids and 30% of winning ones. Freed hours go into the number that decides half the losses.
Constructing Excellence (2016b)
The share of the load is the one uncited figure, so it is claimed as a ceiling: up to 80%.
The sources.
The ten publications behind the figures
- Building Ireland (2022) ‘Civil engineering contractors believe public works tendering structured to incentivise below-cost bidding: CIF’, 27 April. buildingirelandmagazine.com
- Citizens Information (2026) ‘Auto-enrolment pension: MyFutureFund’. www.citizensinformation.ie
- Constructing Excellence (2016a) ‘Bid Cost Survey Blog 1: bid cost as % of project value’, 28 January. constructingexcellence.org.uk
- Constructing Excellence (2016b) ‘Bid Cost Survey Blog 2: improving the win rate’. constructingexcellence.org.uk
- Idiro Analytics (2022) Public Tendering Practices and their Impact on Delivering Value in the Construction Sector. Report for the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, Construction Industry Federation. cif.ie
- Indeed (2026) ‘Estimator salary in Ireland’, updated 14 August. ie.indeed.com
- Laryea, S. and Hughes, W. (2011) ‘Risk and price in the bidding process of contractors’, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 137(4), pp. 248–258. doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000293.
- Laryea, S. and Lubbock, A. (2017) ‘Nature and features of tenders processed by a UK contractor in 2010’, in Proceedings of the 7th West Africa Built Environment Research (WABER) Conference, Accra, 16–18 August, pp. 1079–1096. www.researchgate.net
- Morgan McKinley (2026) ‘Estimator salaries Ireland: 2026 salary guide’. www.morganmckinley.com
- NKC (n.d.) ‘PRSI rate increases: key changes for 2025 to 2028’. www.nkc.ie
Get the hours back.
The arithmetic is the average desk. Run it on yours from day one.