How Much Does Manually Searching Government Opportunities Cost You?

Have you taken a closer look at how much time you spend reviewing bid opportunities? You might discover that your “free” manual search can cost much more than just a few hours of your time.

Let’s say you’re an HVAC service company. Every morning before work begins, you take a look at the websites of each of the agencies you work with. You open each potentially relevant opportunity to check scope, view requirements, and flag a few to look at more in depth. It feels like a simple part of your morning routine, but that routine takes valuable time, which has a cost you might not have considered.

What counts as a search, and what doesn’t?

Once you recognize the gap in tracking this cost, you’ll need a definition of what is considered “process time” to calculate it. Searching counts as everything that happens from the time you start visiting different agency portals or website all the way to your go/no-go decision. This process includes logging in, reading notices, opening documents, checking dates and requirements, and then jotting it all down wherever you track potential opportunities. Lots to keep track of!

This doesn’t even factor in estimating or putting together your bid. While that takes time as well, those hours are spent on work you’ve already mentally decided on and are confident about. Searching is different because you pay for it on every opportunity you look at, whether you settle on bidding or not.

How do I calculate what searching costs my business?

You don’t need special software to calculate the time. You just need to track for a week and punch some numbers in a calculator.

1. Track one typical work week. Every time someone on your team opens an alert, logs into a portal, visits an agency bid page, or reads potential project details , jot down the minutes and the person involved in the task.
2. Determine the hourly cost. Pay is only part of what an hour of work costs you. In June 2026, wages and salaries made up 70 percent of what private employers spent on employee compensation, and benefits made up the other 30 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Now divide the hourly wage by 0.7.
3. Price the owner’s time, too. Use the amount you’d pay someone else to do the search, or an hourly wage. If you leave it at zero, the whole number comes out too low.
4. Multiply it out: weekly hours x hourly cost x number of weeks your actively bidding

Here’s how it looks as an example; swap in your own numbers. Say someone on your team earns $28 an hour and spends six hours a week screening. Divided by 0.7, one hour costs the company about $40. Six hours at $40 is $240 a week, and over 50 work weeks a year, that’s $12,000 spent annually on bid searching.

Why do the opportunities I pass on cost the most?

The only payoff comes from the opportunities you choose to go after and win. If your company looks at 20 opportunities in a month and bids on two, most of that search time went towards a no.

That doesn’t mean it was a mistake. Saying no is the whole point of a search process, and a quick no is a good outcome. But what matters to your business is ultimately the opportunities that you can win, so lowering the time spent on the wrong jobs helps lower your overall cost.

How can I lower my search cost on my own?

If you’d like to work it out on your own, keep a written log of why you passed every time an opportunity was a no. After a month or two, you’ll start seeing patterns show up in those solicitations that didn’t quite fit what you were looking for. Maybe it was in a region that was too far or felt like a trade that doesn’t cross with your team’s skills.

It also helps to know who’s in charge of the screening process. If you read every RFP from the first page, the most expensive hour in the company is going to be one of the simplest steps. A trained office manager can do the first search, and you can only review what’s left.

When is using a specialized bidding tool worth it?

Figuring out if you need a bidding tool to assist your workflow depends on how you bid. If you bid a few times a year with one or two agencies you know well, your number from above may be small, and the portals they have are likely enough. However, when the yearly screening number is bigger than the tool’s yearly price, and the tool takes time off that number, that gives you solid evidence you need support in scaling. Since this is a cost question, here are ours: VendorLine Pro is $547 a year, and Pro Plus AI is $897 a year. Pro Plus AI adds AI-powered bid comparisons to previous work and insights into for bid requirements on PlanetBids agency solicitations, which help you evaluate opportunities faster, as well as centralizing more than 10,000 open local, state, and federal opportunities nationwide.