The award says the contract was worth four million. It never says what an engineer went for.
Every services firm quoting federal work has the same problem: the award record is written per contract and a quote is written per hour. GSA publishes the hourly ceiling rate every company on a schedule is allowed to charge, by named job title, and it is the only place in the federal record where price is published by role rather than by contract.
1,840 awarded rates from 212 companies
Not one number, a spread
A single rate is one company's ceiling on one contract. The band is every company holding the same role: the median, the middle half, and where nine in ten fall. The argument for a spread rather than an average is the same one the award price bands rest on. A market that runs from thirty dollars an hour to four hundred has a mean nobody has ever been paid.
A role needs five rates from at least two different companies before a band is published. Below that it is not a market, it is a handful of companies, and a number there would look authoritative and be nothing of the kind.
- The median, the middle half and the ninetieth percentile per role
- Every company holding a rate for it, cheapest first, by name
- The levels either side, priced, so you can see what the title on the quote is worth
- Ceiling rates, which is the most a company may charge and not necessarily what it charged
the box is the middle half of 214 awards 42% of them drew a single offer log scale, because contract money is
What experience, a degree and a clearance are actually worth
The typical rate for a role cannot tell you whether you are quoting the right level. The same title covers a two-year body and a fifteen-year one, and the gap between them is often the whole margin.
So every role is broken down by years of experience asked for, by education level and by whether a clearance is required, with the average rate in each band. That is the part that turns a number into a decision about who to put on the contract.
- Average rate in five experience bands
- What the degree is worth, priced
- What a clearance is worth, priced
- The schedule and SIN the role usually sits under
UEI, CAGE, then normalized name
What these rates are not: the floor
These are schedule ceiling rates. They are the most a company holding that schedule may charge, which makes them the right thing to price a commercial services bid against and the wrong thing to treat as a minimum. On a service contract the FLOOR is set separately, by a Department of Labor wage determination attached to the solicitation, which fixes a minimum wage and fringe rate per job title for that place of performance. Those determinations are published on SAM.gov and there is no interface to read them in bulk, so this product does not hold them and will not pretend to. Read the one attached to your solicitation before you price the labour on it. Every product in this market has the same gap; this one says so.
Why the levels are not merged
Spellings of the same role are folded together, so "Sr. Program Manager" and "Senior Program Manager" are one band rather than two. Levels are not. A Program Manager III genuinely costs more than a Program Manager I, and merging them would produce one very wide band that describes nobody and quietly hides the thing you came to find out. The same judgement runs through the whole product: normalise the spelling, never the fact.
The other published figure: travel
A services bid has two figures an evaluator can check against something published: what a role costs an hour, and what travel is allowed. The second is the next row in the menu. Per diem rates looks up what GSA allows for a night of lodging and a day of meals, by place and by month, and the bid worksheet works a trip out from the same rates.
Where it is in the app
Labor rates, under Intelligence in the menu, in More of the market. Intelligence is the part of LastAwarded that finds the market, one of the eight parts.
Related
- What it goes forThe same question at the contract level.
- Incumbent profilesA competitor's published rates sit on their page.
- Vehicles and IDIQsThe schedule contracts these rates hang off.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
Every code, every buying office, every vendor and every recompete, organized from the federal record and read nightly. Open it with a plan.