Business Development

Benchmarking Labor Rates

How to research and competitively price labor rates

October 2026•4 min read•Berkeley Bridge Advisors Documentation Team

Overview of Price Benchmarking

The BBA 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Labor rate benchmarking distribution chart by Title

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.
  • Labor rate benchmarking with Small Businesses Only and Worksite Contractor Site filter

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

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The labor pricing tool includes more than 470,000 active prices and more than 10,000 job titles.

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.

GSA Schedules section in Awardee profile

Contract-Level Labor Pricing

For most federal labor contracts over $500,000 that are more than 18 months old, BBA 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.

Labor Services Billing section showing annual labor billing rates and FTE

Product Pricing or Other Labor Categories

If you need pricing for a product or a job title that is not available in the tool, you can search for Federal Schedules, Pricing Lists, Subcontract Proposals and other documents that may disclose pricing by going to Market Intelligence -> Documents in the sidebar or clicking here. To filter for documents with pricing, we recommend selecting the Source filter and then choosing Federal Schedule and GSA Price List or typing pricing into the Keyword filter.