Benchmarking Labor Rates

How to research and competitively price labor rates

Overview of Price Benchmarking

The HigherGov Price Benchmarking tool allows you to research labor rates offered to the government by other government contractors. By benchmarking labor rates, you can determine whether the labor rates you offer are likely to be competitive when submitting RFPs, submitting pricing for GSA Schedules or contract vehicles, or making decisions about what markets to enter. The price benchmarking tool can be found at Business Development -> Labor Pricing or by clicking here.

All prices in the labor tool are not-to-exceed (ceiling) fully-burdened labor rates. Actual rates will typically be 10-20% below the not-to-exceed rates.

The labor rate tool takes rates from a number of different sources including MAS Schedules, 8(a) STARS III, TSA eFast, Alliant II, and VETS 2.

Filtering for Relevant Rates

Finding Relevant Job Titles

The quickest way to find relevant job titles is to search for relevant Keywords; however, this can sometimes find too many or non-relevant results. Alternatively, you can search for specific job titles by selecting Title from the Filters dropdown and searching for relevant job titles. If filtering for Titles, we strongly recommend selecting multiple relevant titles as this will help increase the diversity of pricing sources, which will improve accuracy and better allow for the application of additional filters.

Refining Your Search

Adding the below filters can help you to narrow prices to the ones most relevant to your analysis.

• Education: Filter for rates where the relevant position requires a minimum educational level.

• Min. Years Experience: Filter for rates where the position requires a minimum number of years of experience.

• Small / Large Businesses Only: Filter for rates from contractors that were classified either as a small business or a large business by the contracting officer.

• Worksite: Filter for rates applicable for Contractor or Customer site.

Moreover, you can remove specific prices that are not relevant by clicking the next to the price.

The labor pricing tool includes more than 470,000 active prices and more than 10,000 job titles. If you need pricing for a competitor or job title that is not included in the tool, you can submit a request by clicking the Research button and letting us know what you are looking for (required Standard subscription). Note that we are only able to provide pricing for vehicles and schedules with publicly disclosd pricing.

Other Ways to Find Competitive Prices

Pricing for a Particular Competitor

If you need pricing for a particular competitor and it is not available in the pricing tool, you can also check if the competitor has a GSA Schedule that may include pricing. To find a competitor's GSA Schedule search for them either in the search bar at the top of the page or in the Awardee search in Market Intelligence --> Awardees. If the competitor has a GSA Schedule, it will be available in the Schedules section of the Awardee profile.

Contract-Level Labor Pricing

For most federal labor contracts over $500,000 that are more than 18 months old, HigherGov tracks the applicable blended labor rate on the contract. This will be available in the Labor Services Billing section on the federal contract award page. These rates represent the average blended rate that the government paid for the services component of the contract as reported by the Awardee.

Product Pricing or Other Labor Categories

If you need pricing for a product or a job title that is not available in the tool, or if you would like to find additional prices, you can search other GSA Schedules for relevant job titles. To find additional GSA schedules, go to Market Intelligence -> Documents, select the filter for Source and choose Federal Schedule (or click here). To find schedules with relevant job titles, search for relevant Keywords. You can further narrow results by putting the keyword search in quotes (e.g., "Janitorial Services").