How far is worth driving for a public job
A job forty miles out is not the same job. Mobilisation is a line item, and so is everything you do not know about the town.
Every bid meeting eventually includes the sentence "how far are you willing to go?" The honest answer is a number with a reason behind it, because distance changes a job in ways that do not appear on the drawings — and the further out you go, the more of your margin is spent getting there.
Mobilisation is a real line, and most bidders forget it
Price the travel properly instead of absorbing it. Drive time both ways, multiplied by the crew and by what their hour costs you. Vehicle cost per mile, not just fuel. Overnight accommodation if the job runs past a sensible drive home. The cost of a second trip for a forgotten tool or a punch-list item that is now four hours away instead of twenty minutes.
A rough rule that works: the same scope at 20 miles and at 200 miles are different businesses, and the difference is usually bigger than the difference between your price and the next bidder's.
What else changes with distance
- Suppliers. Local yards deliver and stock; distant ones add freight and lead time.
- Subcontractors. Your reliable subs may not travel, and a stranger's reliability is unknown until it matters.
- Licensing and registration. Work in another state can mean another registration, another tax account, another set of rules.
- Response time. Warranty calls, punch lists and emergencies are measured in hours, and distance is the multiplier on all of them.
- Local knowledge. Which inspector is strict, which supplier actually delivers, where the site access really is. You either have it or you are paying for it in surprises.
Distance needs an address
You cannot price travel to a place nobody has named. This sounds obvious and it is the single most common flaw in a bid feed: a notice with no city, no county, no site — just an agency name and a deadline. A distance figure attached to a notice like that is a guess dressed up as a measurement, and a guess about where the work is, is a guess about whether the job is worth bidding at all.
Our own rule is blunt: a distance is a claim about where the work is, so it needs a published location. When a buyer does not publish one, the notice still appears — nobody's work gets quietly dropped — but it appears without a mileage figure, and it says why. You can then decide for yourself whether to call and ask.
Choosing your own radius
Work backwards from the drive you would make twice a week without resenting it, then add the jobs you would make once. Most contractors find the honest radius is smaller than the one they claim at a barbecue and larger than the one they actually bid. Write it down, price the travel at the edge of it, and then hold to it — because the job that eats a day of driving is usually the one that was marginal before you left.
If you want the other side of this — how to find work close enough to be worth the drive — that is the comparison piece.
The email is the easy part: every public notice we can place inside your radius, in one message, every weekday at 6am, closing dates first.
See what it costs