How Do You Break a Job Into Bid Packages?

A bid package (or trade package) is the slice of the job you send to one group of subcontractors to price: its scope, its drawings and specification sections, its alternates and its due date. Each package becomes one subcontract when you award it, so the way you split the job now is the way you will buy it out, manage it and pay it.

The specifications give you the checklist. CSI describes MasterFormat as organizing specifications "into work results that contractors can price, procure, and build" (CSI). Divisions are a starting point, not the answer: one division can hold work for three different trades, and one trade can work from several divisions.

• Group by who performs it. Doors, frames and hardware may be one package or three, depending on whether the subs near you supply and install together.
• Split when crews, licenses or timing differ: sitework and landscaping, or early foundations and later slabs on a phased job.
• Combine small scopes a single sub would bid anyway, such as toilet accessories, signage and corner guards into one specialties package.
• Keep allowances and owner-furnished items out of the packages, or name them in the scope so every bidder treats them the same.
• Decide the alternates before you send. Federal construction invitations are expected to carry any special instructions concerning bids, alternate bids and award (FAR 36.213-3); a private GC needs the same clarity so alternates come back priced the same way.

The job is fictional: "Coyle Avenue Office", a three-story office building with a steel frame. The general contractor self-performs concrete formwork and finish carpentry and buys everything else. The specification has sections in sixteen divisions; here is how they map to packages.

That is twelve bid packages plus the GC's own work. The check that matters is placement: each of the sixteen divisions appears in the table, each section of a split division is assigned by name, and divisions 03, 07, 08 and 09 are split by section rather than sent whole, because different crews do the formwork and the rebar, the storefront and the doors, the drywall and the paint. The controls wiring is written into HVAC on purpose, and so excluded from electrical, so it is priced once.

On public work the owner or the statute may set the split. One North Carolina construction manager-at-risk contract requires one or more trade packages for each of the general construction, electrical, mechanical, fire protection and plumbing divisions, lets the construction manager define other specialty packages before prequalifying bidders, and allows combined bids covering two or more advertised packages when the advertised conditions are met (NC State University, CM-at-Risk General Provisions).

Read the procurement rules for the owner and state before you split a public job. Check your contract and your state's law.

• Sending a whole division as one package when local subs split it, so you get few bids and a high number.
• Leaving a section in no package: often sealants, firestopping, signage or final cleaning.
• Putting one item in two packages, such as controls wiring in both HVAC and electrical, and paying for it twice.
• Splitting so finely that every package draws one bidder and you manage twenty subcontracts for a small job.
• Changing a package's boundaries after bids are out without an addendum to every bidder.

Once the packages are set, write each one's scope of work and send the invitation to bid.

In Conflo, each package is a trade bid tied to a trade and its CSI division. New trade bids starts several at once: tick the job's trades, give them one deadline, and each becomes a draft that starts from suggested scope items for that trade, with how many subs in your directory work it shown beside it. A trade that already has a trade bid is not started twice. Each draft is then finished and sent from its own page.

One limit: the trade on a package comes from a fixed list of eleven trades (sitework through electrical). You can name a package anything, but a package for a trade outside the list, such as doors and hardware, has to sit under the nearest trade for now.

Split the job the way subcontractors bid it, with the specification as the checklist and every boundary item given one home. The packages you choose now are the subcontracts you will manage for the rest of the job.

Then make each package easy to price the same way: one scope, numbered items, named alternates and a due date every bidder sees.

See how trade bids work in Conflo

1. CSI Standards: MasterFormat — Construction Specifications Institute. Read October 16, 2026.
2. Section II, General Provisions (Construction Manager-at-Risk), part 3, Principal Trade & Specialty Contracts — NC State University Facilities. Read October 16, 2026.
3. FAR 36.213-3, Invitations for bids — Acquisition.gov, U.S. General Services Administration. Read October 16, 2026.