What is spec review costing you?

Enter your numbers. See what your team spends on spec review today, what misses are costing you, and what changes when every page gets read with the same precision at 4pm as at 8am.

Your Numbers
What Spec Review Costs You Today
$256
Per bid
5 hrs at $51/hr loaded
$3,073
Per month
12 bids x $256
$36,881
Per year
Just reading specs. Before any pricing or takeoff.

Each estimator reviews about 6 specs per month. That is 30 hours per month per person spent reading spec documents. Not pricing. Not taking off quantities. Just reading and hoping nothing gets missed.

Your estimator reads specs differently at 8am than at 4pm. Mistakes happen when the team is rushing to make bid day. 3 hours back per bid means they finish the review with time to think, not time to panic.

What Spec Misses Cost You
$150,000
Annual rework exposure
1% of revenue from spec-related rework
$216,000
Identifiable misses
~14 misses/yr at $15,000 avg
2%
Of annual profit
One $15,000 miss against $675,000 net

At 4.5% net margin, your annual profit on $15,000,000 is $675,000. A single missed exclusion or unfunded scope item on one project can erase 2% of your entire year. Your team processes 144 bids per year.

Industry research shows that about 1 in every 100 dollars you bill goes back to fixing problems that started with something missed in the specs. On $15,000,000 in revenue, that is $150,000 a year in rework your team never sees line-itemed.

What Changes With Airtight
Time Recovered
Hours saved per bid3 hrs
Annual hours recovered432 hrs
Labor value recovered$22,129/yr
Misses Prevented
Current annual misses~14
Misses prevented (30%)4
Value preserved$60,000/yr
$82,129
Annual value
$24,000
Annual cost
$2,000/month
342%
Conservative ROI
3.5 mo
Payback period

The math is simple. If we save your estimator 3 hours a week, the service pays for itself. If we catch one missed item worth $24,000 in a year, the service pays for itself. We used conservative numbers throughout. Your real savings will likely be higher.

Projects You Are Leaving On The Table
Your Capacity Today
Bids per month12
Bids per estimator6/mo
Spec review hrs per estimator30 hrs/mo
With Airtight
Hours freed per month36 hrs
Estimator days recovered4.5 days/mo
Additional bids possible+11/yr
+2
More projects won per year
11 more bids at 20% win rate
$1,041,667
In work you are passing on
2 wins at $520,833 avg
$46,875
In additional profit
At 4.5% net margin

Nearly half of contractors are turning down work right now because they do not have enough people. Your estimators are the bottleneck. Every hour they spend reading specs is an hour they are not spending on the next bid.

What You Are Not Seeing

See it on your next spec.

Send us a spec from your next bid. We will read every page and send you back every risk, every scope gap, and every dollar impact we find. First one is free.

Get Your Free Audit

No signup. No software to learn. Results within 24 hours.

Sources

Estimator wages: Bureau of Labor Statistics, SOC 13-1051, May 2023. Loaded cost multiplier: CFMA Annual Financial Survey (1.37x).

Rework costs: Construction Industry Institute Research Summary 153-1 (351 projects, $4.2B installed cost). Cause breakdown: CII RT-252.

Net margins: CFMA Annual Financial Survey, specialty trades median 4.0-4.5%. Verified against public filings (MYR Group 3.2%, Primoris 3.6%, EMCOR 7.5%, Comfort Systems 11.2%).

Win rates: CFMA, FMI Nonresidential Construction Index, ENR/Dodge survey data. Range: 15-25%, calculator uses 20%.

Workforce data: AGC 2025 Workforce Survey (92% hiring difficulty), Deloitte 2026 E&C Outlook (41% retire by 2031), U.S. Chamber of Commerce (half of contractors turning down work).

All assumptions use conservative values. Calculator uses BLS median wages (not 75th percentile), floor-level miss costs ($15,000 vs. industry range of $15,000-$75,000), and 30% prevention rate (not 50%+). Your actual results will likely exceed these estimates.