Reading the bid tab is the easy part.
Deciphering thousands of them into a number you can defend is where we come in. DOTestimate turns every bid, pay item, and unit price into a real price range, filtered to the quantity, county, and district that match your job.
Used by estimators at engineering and construction firms, small and large, to build defensible estimates, validate their bids, and benchmark every line against what the market actually bid.
Check your bid against actual market data. Know where you stand before you submit.
Pull historical unit prices by item, quantity range, and location. Stop guessing.
Visual trend charts show price escalation, seasonality, and regional shifts over time.
Coverage
Multi-State DOT Bid Coverage & Growing
Additional states coming soon.
By The Numbers
The data behind your next estimate is already here
A Look At The Workflow
From a pay item to a defensible number.
Find a pay item, see its real price range, open the full tab, size up the contractors, narrow to your district, then build the estimate. The panels below are schematic, not screenshots.
Matching letting results, by state
Unit price over time, low / avg / high
Every bidder, every line item
Win rate & activity (anonymized)
Wins vs. bids over time (anonymized)
Confidence-scored, encrypted on save
Features
Don't just search bid histories. Visualize them.
Search, trend analysis, contractor intelligence, and a confidence-scored estimate builder, all on one dataset.
Pay Item Search
Search by item code or description across every letting. Find unit prices and bid tabulation data in seconds.
Price Analytics
Low, average, and high unit prices from real bid tabs. Filter by quantity range, date, county, or district.
Visual Trend Analysis
Interactive charts show price movements over time. Spot escalation, seasonality, and market shifts at a glance.
Contractor Intelligence
Research any contractor's bidding history. Win rates, pricing patterns, geographic focus, and market share.
Full Bid Tabulations
Complete bid tabs for every letting. All bidders, all line items, all pay items in one searchable place.
Export & Integrate
Download to Excel, CSV, or PDF. Pull historical unit price data directly into your estimating workflow.
Letting Analysis
Decompose every letting into apparent low bidder, full bid tabulation, contractor participation, and regional and county activity. Built for both bid review and procurement design.
Similar Project Finder
Find comparable past projects by pay item, quantity range, county, and district, so your benchmark reflects work like the job you are pricing.
Cross-State Price Analytics
Compare unit prices for the same pay item across state lines and over time. Charts, KPIs, and exports with source contract metadata preserved on every record.
Estimate Builder
Stop guessing. Price with precision.
Turn years of historical bid tabulations and letting results into confidence-scored cost estimates. Load your pay items, choose a pricing strategy, and get a number backed by real letting data, with a clear read on how much to trust it.
Confidence Scoring
Every pay item is scored on data depth, recency, and market consistency, so you know exactly how much weight to put on each unit price.
Multiple Pricing Strategies
Price an estimate using strategies tuned for different goals, from aggressive bid positioning to market-safe coverage, all drawn from real bid tab data.
Low-Bidder Reference
See the pricing patterns of apparent low bidders on comparable work, so you understand what it has actually taken to win in your market.
Trend-Weighted Pricing
Prices move. The engine weights recent lettings more heavily, so estimates reflect where the market is heading, not just where it has been.
Accuracy Backtesting
Run the engine against past lettings and compare its number to the bids that actually came in. Backtesting is for calibration, not prediction: you see how close the engine has been on this kind of work in this region before you rely on it for a live bid.
Encrypted Estimate Vault
Saved estimates are protected with AES-256 encryption and locked to your account. Nobody else, not even us, can read your bid numbers.
Pricing
Priced like a tool, not an enterprise contract.
Start free for 30 days, then pick the plan that fits. No credit card to begin, no sales call, no long-term contract.
- Full bid history & bid tabulation search
- Historical unit prices: low / average / high
- Full bid tabs: every bidder, every line item
- Visual price-trend charts
- Filter by county, district & quantity
- Export to Excel, CSV & PDF
- One state included
- Everything in Basic
- The full analysis suite
- Letting Monitor: quickly find letting projects to bid and keep saved watchlists
- Confidence-scored Estimate Builder
- Multiple pricing strategies, aggressive to market-safe
- Trend-weighted pricing & accuracy backtesting
- Low-bidder reference pricing
- Contractor intelligence: win rate, history & specialization
- Similar-project finder by item, quantity & location
- Cross-state price analytics
- Side-by-side contract & bid comparison
- Encrypted estimate vault (AES-256)
Both plans include one state. Once you are signed up, add more states anytime from your account at a discounted member rate, so you only pay for the coverage you use.
- Cancel anytime
- No long-term contract
- AES-256 encrypted estimates
- Sourced from public DOT records
Depth Where It Counts
Enough comparable bids to trust the number.
A state DOT site might show you two or three recent bids for your item and leave you guessing whether that is the market or an outlier. DOTestimate gives you the full picture, so the range you price against is real.
A real sample, not two data points
Narrow to recent lettings and you still have enough comparable bids to see a true low / average / high. A real distribution beats a single recent number every time.
Priced off the latest lettings
New letting results flow in as they are published, so your benchmark reflects the current market, not whatever happened to be posted last.
Every bidder, every line item
Not just the apparent low bid. The full tab on every letting, so you see the whole spread of what the market actually bid on each pay item.
Down to the county and district
Filter comparables by quantity range, county, and district so your benchmark reflects work like the job you are pricing, not a statewide average.
Escalation you can defend
When you need to bring older comparables to today, the longer record shows you the actual price trajectory, so you escalate to a defensible rate instead of guessing.
Nineteen states in one account
Search Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, Georgia and more from a single account. Compare unit prices for the same pay item across state lines.
DOTestimate has been collecting and indexing DOT bid tabulations since 2004. Current lettings and the full searchable record, in one place, with no data window to expire, no archive paywall, and no annual contract. Start a free trial and see the real price range on the items you bid.
Who It's For
Built for the people who price the work.
Whether you are preparing an engineer's estimate on the owner side or pricing a competitive bid on the contractor side, you are working from the same question: what is this work actually worth in this market right now? DOTestimate answers it with state-of-the-art tools that turn real bid data into a number you can defend.
📐 Owner-Side Estimators & Design Firms
- Build defensible engineer's estimates for DOTs, municipalities and other public owners
- Pull historical unit prices and price trends for cost studies and feasibility work
- Benchmark pay item pricing against recent letting results in your region or county
- Find comparable projects by item, quantity, and location
👷 Contractor-Side Estimators
- Validate your bid against recent letting results and full bid tabulations before you submit
- Study competitor pricing and bidding patterns with contractor intelligence
- Identify pricing opportunities by region, item, and material
- Understand what it has actually taken to be the apparent low bidder on comparable work
Working on the agency, oversight, research, or investment side? See DOTestimate for agencies & research →
FAQ
Questions estimators ask first.
The things you want to know before you put in an email address.
Every record is sourced directly from publicly available state DOT bid tabulations and letting results. We aggregate, index, and clean that public record so you can search it instantly. Source contract metadata, including contract number, letting date, and contractor, is preserved on every record so any number you pull can be traced back to its origin.
On a state DOT site, bid tabulations are scattered across individual PDFs and a given letting usually shows you only a few comparable bids for your item. To benchmark properly you would download dozens of files and retype the numbers into a spreadsheet. DOTestimate has already done that across every covered state, so you get instant search, a real price range, contractor history, and one-click export instead of a handful of PDFs.
Both. New letting results flow in as they are published, so you are pricing off the current market, and there are enough comparable bids per pay item that you can narrow to recent lettings, a quantity range, and your county or district and still see a real low / average / high instead of one or two data points. The longer record is there when you need it, mainly to set a defensible escalation rate or to tell whether a recent price is normal or an outlier.
Basic is $49/month and Pro is $129/month, each including one state, with additional states available as add-ons. No long-term contract and you can cancel anytime. You start with a 30-day free trial and pick a plan after.
You sign up free for 30 days, no credit card required, and choose your plan from inside the app once you have had a chance to use it. No sales call and no demo gate.
Yes. Saved estimates are encrypted with AES-256 and locked to your account. Your bid numbers are yours alone, and not even DOTestimate staff can read them.
Nineteen state DOTs are live today, including IL, IA, WI, MI, MN, IN, MO, KS, KY, GA, AL, AR, LA, MS, FL, NY, TX, SC, and VA, with more on the roadmap. See the coverage map above for the current footprint.
Yes to both. You can pull any contractor's full bidding history, win rate, geographic focus, and pricing posture, and you can export bid history, bid tabulations, and price data to Excel, CSV, or PDF for your own workflow.
Better estimates start with better data
Start free for 30 days. No credit card. Pick your plan after.
DOTestimate is a DOT bid history and cost-estimating platform for highway construction estimators. Search bid tabulations, historical unit prices, contractor histories, and letting results across 18 state DOTs, including IDOT, IADOT, WisDOT, MDOT, MnDOT, INDOT, MoDOT, KDOT, GDOT, ALDOT, ARDOT, LADOTD, FDOT, NYSDOT, TxDOT, SCDOT, VDOT, and Mississippi DOT, with full bid tabs, current letting coverage per state, and a confidence-scored estimate builder. All data is sourced from publicly available state DOT records. Agencies & research →