How to compare contractor quotes: the brief, the site visit, the response

The comparison happens against criteria you wrote before any quote arrived. The brief states three or four weighted criteria (typically speed, comfort, warranty, and extras handling) alongside a clear note that you are asking multiple contractors, with a due date for quotes and your decision date after it. Each contractor visits the site before quoting. Each gets the same brief. The comparison runs against the criteria you set, not against the other quotes that came in. The work is to set up the comparison correctly. Once that is done, the comparison itself is mostly a matter of reading what came back honestly.

Start with the brief, not with the quotes

When work is planned rather than urgent, the time available before the work begins is the resource that lets you compare on more than price. The mistake is spending that time only on collecting more quotes. Three quotes against a vague brief is a price range. Three quotes against a brief that names three or four weighted criteria is a comparison. The leverage is in the brief.

The brief contains four things in this section: the criteria you will judge on with weights, a clear statement that you are asking multiple contractors plus the two dates (quotes in, decision after), a request for a site visit before quoting, and a mandate clause that applies to anything found during the work. The rest of the brief is the standard structure (what you observe, where, component details, contact for access) and is covered in the contractor brief guide. What follows here is the part specific to comparing quotes for planned work.

State the criteria, with weights

Three or four criteria is enough to judge on, and four is the upper end. The pool to choose from is larger (speed, comfort, warranty, materials, extras handling, disposal, ecological credentials) but the brief commits to a smaller list with explicit weights. The reason is that six criteria with one weighted at seven percent of the decision is a non-factor on that line; the contractor is not going to compete on something that would change a few hundred euros at most. Three or four at clear weights shapes how a contractor writes the quote.

Price below fifty percent of the total. If price is sixty percent of the decision, it is still the only thing the comparison rules on, because nothing else has the weight to overcome a price gap. Below fifty, the other criteria can carry. A workable split for many planned jobs is forty for price, twenty for warranty, twenty for schedule reliability, twenty for extras handling. The exact numbers matter less than naming them in the brief, so every contractor knows what they are competing on before they visit.

Tell them you are asking multiple

A separate line in the brief says: we are asking three or more contractors for this work; quotes in by [date], and we decide in the week after. This neutralises the “valid for a month” pressure tactic without ruling out the contractor whose schedule depends on a quicker answer. The bad-faith version of “valid for a month” is pressure; the good-faith version is a contractor who would otherwise have to commit a crew to another job. The brief lets you tell them apart: a contractor in the second category will reply that they need an answer by a specific date for scheduling reasons, and that conversation is reasonable. A contractor in the first category will keep pressing.

Three or more is the rule for planned work worth comparing. A small corrective repair follows the size thresholds in How to read a contractor quote: under EUR 500, one trusted contractor is fine; above it, two; above EUR 2,000, three.

Set two dates with a buffer between them: quotes in by a due date, your decision some days after it. A single promised return date (two weeks, five days) commits you to a timeline that depends on the slowest quote; the two-date shape keeps your word even when a contractor goes silent, because the buffer is where you find a replacement. If only two quotes arrive by the due date, you ask a fourth contractor instead of comparing two. And a quote that expires before your stated decision date was written to rush you.

The site visit is non-negotiable

For any work above a small repair, the contractor visits the site before quoting. A photograph cannot tell you whether the underlying material is wood or brick. We have seen experienced contractors with twenty years in the trade arrive at a site visit assuming they knew the construction and revise everything (materials, method, price) once they walked the building. Without the visit they would have delivered a quote priced for a wall that did not exist.

The exception that some guides make for “small repairs visible from a clear photograph” does not hold. A homeowner cannot tell whether the photograph is of the symptom or the cause. The crack in the wall is the visible thing; the gutter overflowing two metres above is what’s making it spread. A contractor who has not been on site cannot diagnose, and a quote without diagnosis is an estimate that will revise upward when the actual cause becomes visible. The site visit is the single piece of the process that turns an estimate into a quote. The small-repair line in the rule above is an economic threshold, not a photo exception: below roughly a call-out’s worth of work, the visit and the repair collapse into one appointment and the diagnosis happens when the contractor arrives, never from your photograph.

A contractor who refuses to visit is quoting from assumptions. Treat the refusal as a strike against them, even if their number on the page is the lowest one.

The same question to every contractor

The discipline is one brief, sent identically to every contractor. They will answer differently. The differences are what you are looking at: different methods, different materials, different schedules, different scope of clean-up, different warranties. The comparison is each one against the criteria you wrote, not each one against the others.

The trap is asking contractor A’s question of contractor B. Once one quote is in, the temptation is to take a piece of it (a method, a material grade, a scheduling approach) and ask the others whether they could match it. The instinct is reasonable. The result is that you have switched the test from “how would you do this work” to “match A’s prescription,” and most contractors will answer the question they were asked. You then have A’s plan and B’s reluctant approximation of A’s plan, which is not a comparison. Same brief to everyone, different answers, criteria-anchored grading. That is the discipline.

Translate warranty into your annual save rate

Warranty length looks like a footnote and is closer to money than most homeowners read it as. Divide the quote price by the warranty duration. The result is the amount you should be putting aside each year toward the next instance of this work: your annual save rate for that asset, indexed for inflation when you set the multi-year plan. It is the same arithmetic How to read a contractor quote runs as warranty-adjusted annual cost: one division, read two ways: what the work costs per year of cover, and what you put aside for its next instance.

Quote	Price	Warranty	Annual save rate
A	EUR 7,400	5 years	EUR 1,480
B	EUR 9,200	8 years	EUR 1,150
C	EUR 6,100	3 years	EUR 2,033

Two notes about this math. First, it is the save rate, not the value of the warranty as such. The number tells you what this kind of work costs you per year of coverage; it does not tell you that one extra year of warranty is worth exactly the linear difference. Second, many real warranties are graduated, not flat. A seven-year warranty on exterior paint typically reads as full cover in year one, six-sevenths in year two, declining as the work approaches the end of the expected coverage life. The eight-versus-seven-year difference is still meaningful, but the curve matters when the gap is at the back end of the warranty rather than the front. Read the warranty terms before treating the math as gospel.

What the math does well is reframe the headline-price ranking. C is the cheapest quote on the page and the most expensive job per year of coverage. B and A switch ranks once the warranty is taken into account. The cheapest thing on the day is rarely the cheapest thing across the lifespan of the work.

The mandate clause covers calculation pricing too

A fixed-price quote commits the contractor to a number regardless of what the job involves. A calculation commits to an hourly rate and a materials list, with the final invoice depending on actual hours and materials used. Fixed prices are typically ten to thirty percent more expensive than calculations for the same job, because the contractor is pricing in the risk of overrun.

The trap with calculation pricing is the invoice that runs four times over because the crew “just solved” four extras as they came up, each one taking a day, none of them quoted in advance. This is not bad faith (the crew is solving problems they were paid to encounter) but it removes the homeowner from the decision. The fix is a mandate clause that applies to both pricing models: tell me before you start anything you did not quote, give me an adjustment, and we decide together.

The clause turns the moment of discovery into a conversation. When the contractor flags something (wet wood under the plaster, a brick course that needs replacing, a gutter section that has rotted through) the questions you get to ask are the ones that matter. What if we postpone this and address it next year? What if we do not fix it at all? When does it start to bite?

The questions matter because addressing the cause stops the degradation, even when it does not reverse the damage. A wet wall under the plaster will dry once the leak is fixed, the wood will become dry, and the problem will stop getting worse. Moss on a brick wall will dry up and die back once the gutter overflowing onto the wall is repaired. The visible damage does not heal (bricks do not un-stain, wood does not un-rot) but the degradation halts. That distinction is the difference between a useful follow-up question and a panic-fix that solves the symptom and leaves the cause running.

The mandate clause is the line that gives the homeowner the chance to ask. Without it, the four extras become four invoice items. With it, the four extras become four conversations.

What this looks like

Els lives in a 1970s row house in Utrecht. The exterior plasterwork is failing: visible cracks, some flaking near the bottom course where the path meets the wall. The house is dry. No water ingress. Nothing is on fire. She has time.

She writes a brief. Three weighted criteria: forty percent for price, twenty-five percent for warranty length, twenty for schedule reliability before October, fifteen for extras handling with named pricing. The brief states that she is asking four contractors, gives the quotes a due date, and names the week she will decide. It requests a site visit before quoting and includes the mandate clause for any work the contractor wants to do beyond the quoted scope.

Three contractors visit. One declines the visit and is removed before quoting. The three who visit each return a quote that addresses the criteria:

• Quote A: EUR 7,400 with a five-year warranty, a flexible start, and a generic line about extras.
• Quote B: EUR 9,200 with an eight-year warranty, a fixed start in May with finish before mid-June, and a named hourly rate of EUR 65 plus 25% materials markup for any extras.
• Quote D: EUR 11,500 with a ten-year warranty, three people on site, fixed dates, and an apprentice on the team.

A is the cheapest on price alone. On annual save rate the picture flips: B at EUR 1,150 per year, D tied at EUR 1,150, A at EUR 1,480. Schedule reliability splits them too: B and D both commit to dates, A does not. Same with extras handling: B and D name pricing, A does not. Adding the weights, B comes out ahead: within budget, longest warranty for the price after D, fixed schedule, named extras pricing.

When the work begins, the contractor opens the bottom course of plaster and finds wet wood underneath. He calls Els under the mandate clause. A section of gutter has been overflowing for several seasons; the wood is salvageable if the gutter is fixed and the wood allowed to dry. Els gets to ask the questions that matter: can the gutter be addressed in the same job, at what extra cost, and if the wood dries does it need replacing or can it stay? The conversation produces an adjustment of EUR 850 and an extra day. Work finishes on schedule, the wet wood dries in place, and the plaster holds.

The contractor she did not pick (the one who quoted EUR 6,100) would not have visited the site, would not have flagged the wet wood, and would have plastered over the cause. Visible work would have looked finished, and the wet wood underneath would have continued degrading until the new plaster failed in three or four years. The cheapest quote on the page would have been the most expensive job over the next decade.

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Related guides

• How to spot a good contractor before you hire them: the signals that tell you who to invite to bid in the first place.
• How contractors think, and what changes when you ask: why the brief structure changes the responses you get.
• How to read a contractor quote, and what’s missing from most of them: the eight elements every quote should contain.
• How to tell your contractor what’s wrong: the brief that goes out with the criteria.
• How to set a mandate before calling your contractor: the budget ceiling that anchors the comparison.

Glossary terms used in this guide

• Glossary: Mandate: the budget ceiling sent with the brief.
• Glossary: Corrective maintenance: the contrast that makes planned-work comparison different.