Should you hire another assistant estimator or hand off vendor quote entry?

Which estimating work is judgment and which is keystrokes?

Sort the work before you sort the people. Most estimating desks mix two kinds of work.

A hire adds a person who can learn the left column. Handing off the work removes the right column from the desk. If the junior estimator you already have spends most of bid week in the right column, a second junior will likely spend it there too.

What does an assistant estimator cost, and how long until they help?

Public data gives a range, not an answer for your market. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports:

• The median annual wage for cost estimators was $78,740 in May 2025. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $48,530, and the highest 10 percent more than $130,820.
• In heavy and civil engineering construction, the median was $99,910.
• Wages are not the whole cost. In June 2026, benefits were 30.0 percent of employer compensation costs for private-industry workers.
• BLS lists the typical training as moderate-term on-the-job training, which it defines as more than 1 month and up to 12 months.

BLS does not report assistant estimators separately. A junior hire will usually start toward the lower part of that range. Check postings in your own area before you budget.

Why do bid-day peaks and turnover matter?

A hire is fixed capacity. Supplier quotes tend to arrive late, close to bid day, so the keystroke work comes in a spike. A team sized for the spike carries slack the rest of the week. A team sized for the average falls back on plug prices when the spike hits.

Turnover is the other cost. BLS projects about 17,600 openings for cost estimators each year through 2035, and it says all of them come from replacing people who move to other jobs or leave the workforce. Each departure takes training time with it. Work that lives in a person's head, such as which vendor calls a part what, leaves with them unless it is written down somewhere the firm keeps.

What can you hand off safely?

The keystroke column, with your rules and a check. Good candidates:

• Reading every vendor quote and pulling its lines.
• Matching each line to your material list or HeavyBid resource codes.
• Showing unit and quantity differences instead of hiding them.
• Marking items not quoted, partly quoted or needing review.
• Building the comparison sheet in your workbook.
• Drafting POs from the vendor lines you select.

Each of these has a right answer someone on your team can check against the quote.

What should never leave your estimating team?

The decisions and the relationships.

• The carry. Which vendor, which price, and whether a line carries a quote or a plug.
• Vendor relationships. Who to ask, who to push, and who gets the call when a number looks wrong.
• Final review. The person who signs the number checks the number.
• Anything sent out. RFQs, POs and the bid itself go out under your name, from your team.

If a tool or service asks you to give up any of these, it is selling something other than quote entry.

How do you decide?

Ask one question about the last few bids: if vendor quote entry left your estimators' desks tomorrow, what would they do with the time?

• If the answer is "get more vendors quoted, check means and methods, bid more work," the bottleneck is keystrokes. Hand them off first.
• If the answer is "nothing different, we are short on people who can price the work," the bottleneck is judgment. Hire.
• If it is both, hand off the keystrokes and hire for judgment. The new estimator then learns estimating, not data entry.

Where does a quote-entry service fit?

A service takes the keystroke column as a job, not as software your team has to run. Coffer is one option. It is a quote-to-PO service for heavy-civil contractors. You send the material list and the vendor quotes that came back. Coffer reads, matches and levels every quote against your list or HeavyBid resource codes and returns the comparison sheet in your workbook with PO drafts. It recommends a carry for each row and shows why. Your estimator makes the final carry decision. Your learnings stay yours and export whenever you need, so the knowledge does not leave with a person or a vendor.

A $300M self-perform civil contractor in Texas is moving into deployment after seeing it on their own bids.

What is the next step?

Send one past bid's material list and the supplier quotes that came back to declan@coffer.build, or use the contact form below. You get the mapped, leveled comparison back, and you can judge how much of the keystroke column it covered.