To be honest, in practice most contractors don’t price tenders from scratch tendering is highly contextual and rate-driven. Most contractors already have a mature rate library and standard rate analyses covering roughly 60–70% of items, with established decisions on what is self-performed versus subcontracted. When a new tender arrives, the exercise is largely about mapping the scope to these existing rates, updating them with current procurement data, and aligning subcontract scopes, while the real effort goes into adjusting prelims, overheads, risk, and contingency based on project-specific factors. The biggest cost impact usually comes not from re-measuring everything, but from how requirements are allocated whether they sit within direct costs, are passed to subcontractors, absorbed into prelims or risk, or deliberately excluded making the tender process more about validating assumptions and managing risk than building prices from zero.