Concrete estimating and takeoff field guide for contractors

What a concrete estimate is, and why it decides the profit

A concrete estimate is the takeoff and the pricing that turn a set of plans into a number you can stand behind: how much concrete, how much forming, how much steel, and how much labor to place and finish it, with overhead and profit added on top. The takeoff is the quantities. The estimate is what those quantities cost. The bid is what you charge. Three different things, and people blur them at their own expense.

Here is the part that surprises people new to estimating concrete. The concrete is rarely the biggest line. A cubic yard of ready-mix is a near-fixed cost you can get by calling the plant. The forming, the placing, and the finishing are labor, and on flatwork the finish labor alone can run past what the concrete in the slab costs. Estimate concrete as if the mud is the whole job and you will lose money on the part that actually eats the hours.

The estimate also does not end on a spreadsheet. It funnels into a quote, the quote becomes a contract, and the contract is what you order against and bill against. The companion guides on ordering ready-mix and on mix design cover the material side in detail. This guide is the money side: the quantities, the labor, the markup, and the bid.

How do you estimate a concrete job?

You estimate a concrete job in a fixed order, and skipping a step is how the misses happen. Read the plans and the spec, take off the quantities, price each quantity, add the markup, then write the proposal with its exclusions. The sequence matters because each step feeds the next. A wrong quantity early poisons everything after it.

The quantities break into a short list. Concrete volume in cubic yards. Formwork in square feet of contact area. Reinforcement in pounds or tons of rebar and square feet of welded wire. Then the labor to set forms, place the concrete, finish it, and strip the forms. Then the equipment: the pump or crane, the power trowels, the saw. Then the site work, if it is yours: excavation, grade, base, vapor barrier.

Price each of those against your own cost history, not a number off the internet. Add overhead and profit last, on the total cost, not buried inside each line. The thing that separates an estimator who makes money from one who guesses is that the first prices labor from jobs actually run, and the second prices it from hope.

How do you calculate concrete yardage?

Concrete yardage is the volume in cubic yards: length times width times thickness, all in feet, divided by 27. The 27 converts cubic feet to cubic yards, because there are 27 cubic feet in a yard. Convert thickness to feet before you multiply. A 4 in slab is 0.333 ft, a 6 in slab is 0.5 ft, an 8 in slab is 0.667 ft. Leaving thickness in inches is the single most common yardage error, and it orders you a fraction of what the job needs.

Different shapes, same idea. A slab is area times thickness. A continuous footing is width times depth times length. A wall is length times height times thickness. A round pier is the area of the circle, 3.1416 times the radius squared, times the height. Take off each element separately, sum the cubic feet, then divide by 27 once at the end so rounding does not stack up.

The yardage is the core quantity, because it drives the material order, part of the labor, and the pump. The companion ordering guide covers turning that yardage into a delivery, and the concrete yardage calculator on this site runs slabs, footings, and walls with the waste factor built in. Take the yardage off carefully, because every line downstream leans on it.

T

Thickness or depth in feet, converted from inches before the calculation (4 in = 0.333 ft)

27

Cubic feet in one cubic yard, the divisor that takes the volume to orderable units

Waste, short loads, and ordering long

Concrete yardage off the plan is the neat number. The order is always a little more, because concrete gets lost between the truck and the cure. A common waste allowance is 5 to 10 percent. Use the low end on a clean, machine-placed slab on flat grade, and the high end on hand work, irregular shapes, thickened edges, or a subgrade that is not dead level. Over-excavation, a form that bows, spillage at the chute, and the mud left in the pump line all come out of that allowance.

Two things to price in beyond the percentage. Plants charge a short-load fee when you order less than a full truck, commonly under about 8 to 10 cubic yards, so a small pour carries a premium per yard you have to put in the bid. And plants batch in full and half yards, so you round up, never down.

Running 5 percent short on a slab is not a rounding error. It is a cold joint, or a second truck mobilized at full price for a quarter yard. The ordering guide goes deeper on the short-load fee and the discharge clock. The estimating lesson is simpler: the extra quarter yard is the cheapest insurance on the job.

Pricing the concrete itself

The concrete material cost starts at the supplier's price per cubic yard and climbs with everything the spec adds to the base mix. Get a current quote for the exact mix, because the base price moves with cement and fuel and is not something to carry from last quarter. Then add the premiums: higher strength, air entrainment, water reducers and other admixtures, fiber, and any specified cement type or supplementary cementitious material. Each is a line the plant adds per yard, and the spec, not you, decides which apply.

On top of the per-yard mix price sit charges that have nothing to do with the mud. The short-load fee on small pours. Standby or demurrage if the crew holds the truck past its free unload time. Saturday, after-hours, and hot or cold weather charges. A winter mix with hot water and accelerator costs more than the same strength in spring.

Price the material to a real quote and treat the number as perishable. Concrete pricing tracks the market, so the figure you bid in March is not the figure you pour in September on a long job. Where a job runs months, say so in the proposal and tie the price to an escalation clause or a quote date. The mix-design and ordering guides cover what each premium buys and why the supplier set it where they did.

What is SFCA in concrete estimating?

SFCA is square feet of contact area, the unit formwork is measured in. It is the area of the form face that actually touches the concrete, and it drives both the form material and the form labor. A wall formed both sides counts both faces. A footing counts the two side forms, not the bottom, because the earth is the bottom. Measure the contact, not the concrete volume, because two walls with the same cubic yards can have very different SFCA depending on how tall and thin they are.

Take a continuous footing 18 in deep and 100 ft long, formed both sides: that is 1.5 ft times 100 ft times 2 sides, or 300 SFCA. A foundation wall 8 ft tall and 100 ft long, formed both faces, is 8 times 100 times 2, or 1600 SFCA. The taller, thinner element forms far more area per yard of concrete, and that is exactly where the labor hides.

Then price the SFCA two ways. The material or rental: lumber and plywood you buy and use a few times, or panel systems you rent by the square foot and the week. And the labor to set and strip, which is usually the bigger number. Forming is one of the heaviest labor lines on formed concrete, and an estimate that prices the mud and waves at the forms is an estimate that loses on walls and footings.

Taking off the rebar and welded wire

Reinforcement takes off in three pieces: rebar by weight, welded wire by area, and the accessories that hold it. Rebar is counted by total linear feet of each bar size, then converted to pounds and tons using the bar's weight per foot, because steel is bought and priced by the ton. The bar number is eighths of an inch in diameter, so a #4 is 1/2 in and a #5 is 5/8 in, and each size has a fixed weight per foot. Add the laps and the bends. A lap splice adds length wherever bars overlap, commonly tens of bar diameters, and a takeoff that ignores laps comes in light on tonnage.

Welded wire reinforcement, the sheet or roll mesh in slabs, takes off by square feet of slab plus an overlap allowance, since sheets lap a square or two at the edges. Then the accessories: chairs and bolsters to hold steel at the right height, tie wire, and dobies. Small per-piece costs that add up across a big mat.

Price the steel to a current mill or supplier quote like the concrete, because rebar pricing moves with the steel market. A rebar takeoff is its own discipline, and on a heavily reinforced footing or mat the steel and the labor to set it can rival the concrete. Take it off bar by bar, not by a rule-of-thumb percentage, when the job is reinforcement-heavy.

How do you price concrete labor?

You price concrete labor from production rates: how much your crew places and finishes in a day, against the crew's all-in hourly cost. Take the quantity, divide by the daily production to get crew-days, multiply by the daily crew cost, and you have the labor for that task. The number that makes or breaks it is the production rate, and the only honest source for it is your own past jobs.

Placement is measured in cubic yards placed per day, and it swings with the method and the access. A pour you can chute straight off the truck moves faster than one you wheel in buggies across a tight site. Finishing is measured in square feet finished per day, and it swings hard with the finish type, which gets its own section.

The all-in labor rate is more than the wage. It carries payroll taxes, workers comp, which is high on concrete, benefits, and the unproductive time around the productive time. Price labor on the base wage alone and you are short before you start. Build the burdened rate once, keep it current, and apply it to honest production from jobs you ran, not from a chart you found.

How much does the finish change the labor?

The finish is the biggest single swing in flatwork labor, and it can multiply the finishing hours several times over for the same square footage. A broom finish is the baseline: screed, float, broom, done. A hard steel-troweled floor takes more passes, more time, and tighter timing on the bleed water. Exposed aggregate, stamped, colored, and polished each add steps, materials, and skilled hours the broom finish never sees.

Stamped concrete is the clear example. The stamping, the release agent, the coloring, and the detailing run the labor on the order of a few times a plain broom finish per square foot, because the crew is doing decorative work inside a closing time window. Polished floors add grinding and densifying passes measured by the gloss and flatness the spec calls for. The higher the finish, the higher the labor, and it is not a small adder.

Price the finish off the spec, not a guess. A drawing that says broom and a drawing that says burnished hard trowel to a flatness number are two different labor jobs on the same slab. The finishing-and-curing details have their own guide. For the estimate, read the finish off the plans and price the production that finish actually allows.

Pricing the pump and the placement method

How the concrete gets from the truck to the forms is its own cost line, and on anything you cannot chute directly it is a real number. A line pump handles ground-level and smaller pours. A boom pump reaches over and up for high walls, elevated decks, and tight sites. A crane and bucket, or power buggies, cover places a pump cannot. Each has a different rate and a different effect on placement speed.

Pumping in the United States is usually a service hire, the equipment plus a certified operator, priced as an hourly rate plus a charge per cubic yard, with a minimum number of hours and sometimes a priming charge. Get a quote for the specific pump and reach, because boom length and access drive the rate. The trap is the minimum: a small pour pays the same few-hour minimum as a medium one, so the pump cost per yard on a little job is steep.

A pump is a cost, but it buys placement speed, and that feeds back into the labor line. A pour that would take a day to wheel in buggies might place in a couple of hours pumped. Estimate the pump and the placement labor together, because the cheap-pump, slow-place choice can cost more in crew hours than the pump ever saved.

Site prep, subbase, and what is in your scope

The work under the concrete is often where the bid leaks, because it is easy to price the slab and forget what it sits on. If excavation, fine grading, the granular base, compaction, and the vapor barrier are in your scope, each is its own line with its own unit and its own cost. If they belong to the GC or the earthwork sub, say so in writing, because the gap between what you assumed and what the contract says is a classic source of loss.

Take them off in their own units. Excavation and base by the cubic yard or the ton. Fine grading and vapor barrier by the square foot. Compaction by the area or the lift. A vapor barrier under a slab is cheap material and quick labor, but leave it out of a slab that specs one and it becomes a change order, or a flooring failure later.

The blunt rule: every layer the concrete touches that is not concrete is either in your number or excluded in writing. There is no third option that ends well.

Embeds, joints, curing, and the small lines

The accessories are individually small and collectively a real number, and they are the lines a fast takeoff skips. Anchor bolts, embed plates, dowels, and weld plates are counted per piece and set during the pour. Joints are a labor and saw cost: tooled control joints during finishing, or saw-cut joints with a clock on them, since green-cutting has a window before the slab cracks on its own. Sawing takes off by linear foot.

Curing and sealing are real material and labor, not an afterthought. A cure-and-seal compound sprayed on, wet curing with blankets or burlap, or a curing membrane each cost something per square foot, and the spec usually dictates which. Then expansion joint material, bond breakers, form release, edge forms, and the consumables that never make it onto a thin estimate.

None of these is large alone. Forget the joints, the sawing, the curing, and the embeds across a whole job, and you have given away a line that should have been in the bid. The curing and jointing details have their own guide. For the estimate, count them as line items, not as something the crew quietly absorbs.

Flatwork versus formed concrete: two estimating modes

Concrete estimating runs in two modes, and the same crew bids them differently. Flatwork, the slabs, driveways, sidewalks, and floors, is driven by area: square feet to place and finish, with the volume falling out of the thickness. The finish is the big labor variable, and forming is light, just the edge forms. Formed work, the footings, walls, columns, and grade beams, is driven by the SFCA of forms and the cubic yards of concrete, and the forming labor is the heavy line.

The reason to name the mode is that the cost driver is different. On flatwork, get the finish production right and you are close. On formed work, get the SFCA and the form set-and-strip labor right and you are close. An estimator who prices formed walls with a flatwork mindset misses the forming labor, which is the largest part of that job.

Many concrete jobs are both: footings and walls formed, then slabs poured flat on top. Take off each part in its own mode and add them. Do not run one square-foot or one cubic-yard rule across the whole job and hope it averages out, because it will not.

Cubic yards or square feet: which unit?

Concrete is estimated and priced on two units, and using the wrong one for the work is a quiet source of error. Volume in cubic yards is the unit for structure and for ordering: footings, walls, columns, and the material itself all live in cubic yards. Area in square feet is the unit for flatwork and for finishing: a slab is placed and finished by the square foot, and the finish is priced per square foot.

The same slab carries both numbers, and they answer different questions. The cubic yards tell you what to order and what the placing crew handles. The square feet tell you what to finish and what the finish costs. A 1000 SF slab at 4 in is about 12.3 cubic yards. You order the 12.3 yards plus waste, and you price the finish on the 1000 square feet.

The mistake is pricing finish labor by the cubic yard, or pricing material by the square foot. Keep volume for the mud and the structure, keep area for the surface and the finish, and the estimate lines up with how the work and the supplier actually count.

Overhead, profit, and why markup is not margin

Overhead and profit go on top of the job cost, and the mistake that costs the most is confusing markup with margin. Markup is the percentage you add to your cost. Margin is the percentage of the selling price that is profit. They are not the same number, and the gap is bigger than it feels. A 20 percent markup is only about a 16.7 percent margin, because the markup is figured on cost and the margin is figured on the larger selling price.

Overhead is the cost of being in business whether or not this job runs: the office, the trucks, the insurance, the estimator's time, the equipment sitting in the yard. It gets spread across the jobs as a percentage or a rate. Profit is what is left for the company after overhead and direct cost. Many contractors target overhead and profit together in the range of about 10 to 20 percent of cost, with the right figure depending on the work, the risk, and the market, not on a chart.

If you want to clear a true margin, mark up from the margin, do not guess. To net a 20 percent margin you mark up cost by 25 percent, not 20. Run the wrong one and you bid jobs that look profitable on the spreadsheet and bleed in the bank. The conversion is arithmetic, so there is no excuse for getting it backward.

The bid, the scope, and the proposal

The bid is the priced total. The proposal is the document that wins the job and becomes the contract, and it has to say what is and is not included. Spell out the scope: the elements you are pouring, the strength and mix, the finish, the joint layout, who handles site prep, and the pump. Spell out the assumptions and the exclusions, because the proposal is the line between your number and the change order.

Carry the spec language into the proposal so there is no daylight between what you bid and what the drawings call for. State the strength, the finish, and the air the same way the ordering guide says to state them on the order. Add alternates where they help: a deduct for a broom finish instead of the specified hard trowel, an add for a thicker slab, so the customer can see the cost of the choice instead of arguing it later.

Then the terms: the payment schedule, the price validity date, the weather and access assumptions, and what triggers an extra. The proposal funnels into a quote and then a signed contract, and in a system like FieldOS that quote, the scope, and the customer record live together, so the job you bid is the job you order, schedule, and bill against. The estimate that lives only in a spreadsheet and never makes it cleanly into the contract is the one that gets argued at the end.

Exclusions and assumptions that protect the bid

Exclusions are what keep a fair bid from turning into a loss. Concrete sits at the bottom of the building, so it inherits whatever the site hands it, and the things you cannot see at bid time are the things to exclude in writing. Rock or unsuitable soil in the excavation. Dewatering. Engineered fill and compaction testing. Concrete testing and special inspection if that is the owner's. Winter heat and protection. Removal of existing concrete or obstructions.

State the assumptions plainly. You assumed truck and pump access, a buildable subgrade at the right elevation, no rock, normal weather, and a continuous pour without the GC stopping you. If any of those is false, the price moves, and the proposal says how.

The exclusion list is not hedging, it is scope control. A contractor who excludes rock and hits rock writes a change order. A contractor who stayed silent eats it. Write down what you did not price as carefully as what you did, because the unwritten assumption is the one that goes against you.

Reading the plans and the spec

The estimate starts on the drawings, and the structural plans and the project specification decide most of the cost before you price a thing. The structural sheets give the dimensions and the reinforcement, the schedules give the footing and wall sizes, and the spec gives the strength, the exposure class, the finish, the tolerances, and the testing. Miss a note and you miss a cost.

The two lines that swing the number most are the strength and the finish. A jump from 3000 to 5000 psi, or an exposure class that forces air entrainment and a low water-cement ratio, raises the material price per yard. A finish callout that goes from broom to hard trowel to a flatness number changes the finish labor on the same slab. Read both off the spec, not off habit, and price them as specified.

The mix-design guide covers how the spec strength and exposure class drive the mix the supplier proportions. For the estimate, treat the spec as the source of truth: take off the quantities from the structural plans, and let the spec set the strength, the finish, and the testing you have to carry.

Contingency for the risk you can name

Contingency is the money you add for the risk you can see but cannot price exactly, and it is different from profit. Weather you cannot control. A subgrade you have not seen. Restricted access. A fast schedule that forces overtime or extra crews. A pour you suspect the GC will interrupt. Each is a risk without a clean line item, and a small contingency covers the spread.

Size it to the risk, not to a flat habit. A clean slab-on-grade for a builder you know on a graded pad needs almost none. A downtown pour with no laydown, winter conditions, and a soils report full of warnings needs real contingency or a hard exclusion. The judgment is in matching the number to the actual exposure, which is exactly where your own job history pays off.

Contingency is not padding, and it is not a substitute for an exclusion. Where you can name the risk and hand it back, exclude it. Where the risk stays with you but you cannot price it to the dollar, carry the contingency and move on.

Pricing change orders and extras

A change order is a new little estimate, and it is priced the same way as the bid: quantities, cost, and markup, plus the cost of the disruption the change causes. The common error is pricing only the added concrete and forgetting that a change mid-job costs more than the same work bid up front, because it breaks the crew's rhythm, adds a remobilization, or forces an out-of-sequence pour.

Tie the change to the assumption or exclusion it violates. If you excluded rock and hit rock, the change order points straight at the exclusion, and there is no argument about whether it is extra. This is where the proposal's scope and exclusion list earns its keep. A tight original scope makes the extra obvious. A loose one makes every change a fight.

Price extras at a fair markup, document them before the work, and get them signed. Work performed on a verbal promise of a change order is work you may end up doing for free. A system that holds the original quote, the scope, and the change history together, like a CRM built for the field, is what keeps the final invoice from becoming a negotiation.

Estimating tools: field measure to signed quote

Concrete estimating runs on a few tools, and the chain from the measurement to the signed quote is where jobs are won or lost cleanly. On-screen digital takeoff measures areas and lengths off a PDF or a drawing set far faster than a scale and a highlighter, and it counts what hand takeoff misses. A spreadsheet or estimating software holds the unit costs and the production rates and does the arithmetic without the transposition errors that creep into hand math.

The part people undervalue is the handoff. The field measurement and the takeoff feed the estimate, the estimate becomes the quote, and the quote becomes the contract and then the job. Every time that number is retyped from one place to another, it can drift. Keeping the takeoff, the quote, the customer, and the job in one system, the way FieldOS holds the quote and the customer record together, cuts the retyping and keeps the job you bid lined up with the job you run.

The tool does not make the estimate right. Honest quantities and honest production rates do. The tool keeps an honest estimate from getting mangled between the truck tailgate and the contract.

Job-cost feedback: estimating from your own numbers

The best estimating data is your own finished jobs, and the contractors who price tightly are the ones who close the loop between what they bid and what it actually cost. After a pour, capture the as-built quantities and the real hours: the cubic yards that actually went in, the square feet finished, the crew-days it took, the waste that was real. Compare that to the estimate, and the gap is the correction for the next bid.

This is how production rates get honest. A finish rate you carried from a book becomes a finish rate you measured on your own crew, on your own kind of work. Do that across enough jobs and the estimate stops being a guess and becomes a forecast, because it is built on what your people actually do, not on an industry average that does not know your crew or your market.

A field system that captures the job's real quantities, hours, and photos, the way FieldOS records the work as it happens, turns every completed job into estimating data instead of a memory that fades by the next bid. The estimate is only as good as the history behind it, and the history is only as good as what you bothered to record.

Commercial structural versus residential flatwork

The two ends of concrete estimating want different things. Residential flatwork, the driveways, patios, sidewalks, garage and house slabs, is finish-driven and volume-light, often hand-placed, with the bid living or dying on the finish production and the small-pour premiums. The reinforcement is light, the forms are edge forms, and the customer is usually buying the finished surface they will look at.

Commercial and structural concrete is reinforcement-heavy and form-heavy, with engineered footings, walls, columns, elevated decks, and tighter tolerances and testing. The SFCA of forms and the tonnage of steel become major lines, the placement needs pumps and cranes, and the spec and the special inspection drive cost the residential job never sees. The estimate carries more of everything except, often, the decorative finish.

Bid them with different instincts. On residential flatwork, sharpen the finish labor and the short-load math. On commercial structural, sharpen the forming, the rebar, and the placement equipment. A contractor who is sharp on one and bids the other on the same instincts is the one who comes in wrong, high enough to lose the job or low enough to lose money on it.

The large mat pour and the data-center job

A large mat pour, the kind under a data center, a tower core, or heavy equipment, is its own estimating problem because the volume and the continuity change everything. A mat foundation can be hundreds or thousands of cubic yards placed in one continuous operation, and the estimate has to account for a pour that cannot stop without putting a cold joint in a structural element.

The lines that grow are placement and logistics. Multiple pumps, a tight truck rotation timed to the discharge clock, night pours to beat heat, and mass-concrete provisions to control the heat the curing concrete generates inside a thick section. Thermal control, cooling, monitoring, and the engineering around heat of hydration become real costs on a thick mat, costs a thin slab never carries. The reinforcement is heavy and congested, which slows placement and adds labor.

Estimate the big mat around continuity and heat, not around the per-yard price of the concrete. The mud is almost the easy part. The schedule that gets a thousand yards placed without a cold joint, and the thermal plan that keeps a thick section from cracking itself, are where the cost and the risk actually sit. Underbid the logistics on a mat and the per-yard savings will not come close to covering it.

What to document in a concrete estimate

Six months on, you should be able to open this estimate and see every quantity, rate, and assumption that built the total. Record what went into the number so the next bid can lean on it and the change orders can point back to it. The point is not paperwork. It is that the assumptions you priced today are the ones you will be arguing about when the job runs.

Common mistakes

• Leaving slab thickness in inches instead of feet, which orders a fraction of the concrete the job needs.
• Carrying no waste allowance, or ignoring the short-load fee on a small pour.
• Pricing the concrete carefully and underestimating the form set-and-strip and the finish labor.
• Forgetting the rebar laps, the pump, the site prep, the sawing, or the curing as line items.
• Adding no overhead and profit, or confusing a markup with the margin it actually yields.
• Writing no exclusions, so rock, dewatering, and testing become losses instead of change orders.
• Pricing finish labor for a broom finish when the spec calls for hard trowel, stamp, or polish.
• Mixing units: pricing finish by the cubic yard or material by the square foot.
• Estimating from a chart or last year's numbers instead of your own job-cost history.

Field checklist

Standards and references

There is no single code that tells you how to bid concrete, but several bodies shape what you are bidding and how the trade measures it. The American Concrete Institute, ACI, sets the design and construction standards the spec leans on, ACI 318 for structural design and ACI 301 for construction, which is where strength, durability, and tolerance requirements come from. ASTM standards govern the materials and the tests you may have to carry as a line, like ASTM C39 for compressive-strength cylinders. The structural engineer of record and the project specification control the actual job.

For pricing method and production, the trade leans on published cost data such as the RSMeans-type unit cost references, which give material, labor, and equipment costs and crew production rates by work item. Treat that data the way you treat any chart: a starting point and a sanity check, not a substitute for your own job-cost history and your own current quotes. The published numbers do not know your crew, your market, or this month's concrete price.

Hedge every cost and production figure to the market and to your own data. Material and steel prices move. Labor rates and burden vary by region and by shop. Production swings with the crew and the conditions. Cite the standard that governs the work, get current quotes for the material and the pump, and price the labor from the jobs you actually ran. No number in an estimate is a law of physics. The yardage formula is the only thing on the page that does not move.

Units, terms, and conversions

Concrete estimating uses a handful of units and a vocabulary worth keeping straight, because the same job is measured in volume, area, weight, and contact area at different stages.

Volume is cubic yards, abbreviated CY or yd3, and one cubic yard is 27 cubic feet. Area is square feet, SF or sq ft. Reinforcing steel is pounds and tons, where one ton is 2000 pounds. Formwork is square feet of contact area, SFCA. These do not interchange, and the skill is knowing which one the work, the supplier, and the spec each use.

Takeoff

The measured quantities pulled off the plans, before any pricing

Cubic yard (CY)

The volume unit for concrete, equal to 27 cubic feet

SFCA

Square feet of contact area, the unit for formwork, measured on the form face that touches the concrete

Production rate

How much a crew places or finishes per day, the basis for the labor cost

Burdened labor rate

The wage plus payroll taxes, workers comp, benefits, and unproductive time

Markup

The percentage added to cost; not the same as margin

Margin

Profit as a percentage of the selling price, equal to markup divided by one plus markup

O&P

Overhead and profit, added on top of the direct job cost

Short load

A delivery below a full truck, which carries a per-load premium

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