What does it cost to bid? Proposal cost calculator
Estimate the real labor cost to write a federal proposal — by role, hours and loaded rate — and see it as a share of the contract value, so you know what you’re investing before you commit.
Adjust hours and loaded hourly rates to match your team. Loaded rate = fully-burdened cost per hour.
First-year or total value — used to show B&P as a share of what’s at stake.
Estimated cost to write this proposal
$45,750
370 labor hours across 6 roles
Of contract value
2.3%
Estimate only. Real bid-and-proposal (B&P) cost depends on the solicitation’s complexity, page count, number of volumes, your reuse of existing content, and how many review cycles you run. The default hours and rates are illustrative starting points — replace them with your team’s actual loaded rates and realistic level of effort.
Why knowing your B&P cost changes how you bid
Every proposal you write is an investment made before you know the outcome. Teams that win consistently treat bid-and-proposal cost as real money — because it is. Putting a number on what a pursuit will cost, up front, turns “let’s go for it” into a deliberate decision: is the value at stake, and your odds of winning, worth this much of your best people’s time?
The biggest cost driver is how much you write from scratch. A strong, reusable library of past performance, resumes and proven technical content — plus AI-assisted drafting — is what lets a lean team produce a compliant, competitive proposal without burning out.
Bid smarter across the whole pursuit
Pair this with the bid/no-bid scorecard to decide whether to invest, and the wrap rate calculator to price the work competitively. When you decide to go, GovCon’s AI drafting and reusable proposal library are built to bring that cost down — and your win rate up.
Frequently asked questions
What is bid and proposal (B&P) cost?+
B&P is what it costs your company — mostly labor — to pursue and write a proposal: the capture manager, writers, technical experts, pricing, reviewers and production staff who put the response together. It’s an investment you make before you know whether you’ll win, which is exactly why disciplined bid/no-bid decisions matter.
How much does a federal proposal cost to write?+
It varies enormously with complexity — a short commercial-item quote might take a handful of hours, while a large multi-volume proposal can run hundreds of labor hours across a full team and multiple review cycles. Rather than quote a single number, this calculator lets you build the estimate from your own roles, hours and loaded rates.
What is a reasonable B&P as a percent of contract value?+
There’s no universal rule, and it depends on your model and win rate, but proposal teams generally want B&P to be a small fraction of the value at stake. If the cost to bid approaches a large share of the prize, that’s a strong signal to question the pursuit — reduce scope, lean on reusable content, or no-bid.
How do I lower proposal cost without lowering quality?+
The biggest lever is reuse: a well-maintained library of past performance, resumes, technical approaches and compliant boilerplate cuts drafting hours dramatically. Tight bid/no-bid discipline (so you only write strong-fit proposals) and AI-assisted drafting also reduce the hours each response takes.
Are the default rates accurate for my company?+
No — they’re illustrative starting points so the tool is usable immediately. Replace them with your own fully-burdened (loaded) hourly rates and your realistic level of effort per role. The math is only as good as the inputs you give it.
Find, score & win it in one place
GovCon ties these tools together with opportunity matching, AI proposal drafting, a capture pipeline and a reusable library — free to start, no credit card.
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