Pad prep, septic, trenching, driveway, hauling, and hourly. Six job types in one app with soil class multipliers, fill dirt, compaction, and erosion control. Built for the truck, not the office.
Excavation is the most variable trade in land work. The same machine that digs a $400 utility trench in the morning can be working a $40,000 septic install by afternoon. What changes is the job type, the soil, and the line items you remember to put in the bid. Get any of those wrong and your margin disappears.
Every excavation bid follows one of three pricing formulas. Time and materials for hourly work, where you bill the operated-and-maintained rate for as long as the machine is on site. Unit pricing for cubic yards (pad prep, bulk earthmoving), linear feet (trenching), or tons (driveway gravel). And fixed-bid for scoped work like septic installs where the components are known.
The job type drives everything: equipment selection, crew size, billing structure, and which add-ons matter. There are six common excavation job types:
Cubic yard rates assume sandy soil. Real ground rarely is. Soil class is the single biggest variable in excavation bidding because it determines how fast you can move material. The same 100 CY pad takes one day in sand and three days in hardpan.
The biggest excavation bidding mistake: quoting a sandy rate and hitting rock at 3 feet. Always probe the site before bidding. If you can't verify soil conditions, bid hourly with a soil contingency clause instead of fixed-price.
Most pad prep jobs need fill imported. A typical 60×40 building pad needs 60–100 CY of structural fill. At $18–$25/CY delivered, that's $1,200–$2,500 in material plus trucking that operators routinely forget to bid. Always walk the site and estimate cut-vs-fill before pricing the job.
Required on every pad and most driveway jobs by code. Compaction adds $3–$5/CY for typical work and requires either a vibratory roller or a plate compactor depending on the lift depth. Skip it and the inspector fails the job. Bid it and the customer pays for what they need.
Required by permit on most jobs over a certain acreage or with slope. Silt fence runs $3–$5/LF installed. Construction entrance pads run $400–$800. Inlet protection runs $100–$200 per drain. Check dams, straw bales, and hydroseed add more. If you don't bid erosion control, you eat the cost and the fine.
Pass-through costs that always need to be in the bid. Land disturbance permits run $200–$500. Septic permits run $300–$1,500. Driveway permits run $100–$400. 811 utility locates are free but mandatory before any trenching. Inspections may require multiple visits at $75–$150 each.
Every job. Every time. Distance-based. Default $350 base fee plus per-mile rate over 30 free miles. A two-hour drive each way with a lowboy and machine is real cost that has to be in the bid before profit. Operators who absorb mobilization on small jobs are losing money on every one of them.
LandWorkPro builds all of this into every excavation bid. Six job types with their own forms, soil class multipliers, fill dirt and compaction toggles, erosion control and permits add-ons. One estimate that takes 30 seconds to build and sends directly to the customer's phone.
All your line items, multipliers, and add-ons built into one estimate. Sends straight to the customer's phone with deposit collection built in.
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