How pricing works
The price is the engineering
Two identical floor plans can carry very different steel once wind, span and what hangs from the frame are counted. This page explains where the number comes from.
Why is there no simple price per square foot?
Per-square-foot pricing misleads because floor area is not what the steel responds to: span, eave height, design loads and what the frame must carry set the member sizes, and member sizes set the cost.
Widen a building and the rafters deepen. Raise the eave and every column and wall panel grows. Put the same building where the wind blows harder and the whole frame stiffens. None of that shows up in square footage, which is why two 60 by 100 quotes can sit thousands of dollars apart and both be correct.
Scope does the rest of the damage in a comparison. One number includes delivery and erection; another is bare steel. The only way to compare quotes is to compare what each one includes and what loads each one was engineered to, which is exactly what a complete proposal writes down.
What should a complete proposal put in writing?
A complete proposal states the all-in price with its payment schedule and validity window, itemizes what is included, and prints the site-specific design loads the structure was engineered to, so the number can be checked and compared.
Anything less is a teaser, not a proposal. When the price, the schedule, the inclusions and the loads are all on paper, three good things happen: the quote can be compared against another one line by line, the permit office sees the engineering basis up front, and nobody discovers at delivery what the number quietly excluded.
- All-in price with a payment schedule and a stated validity window
- Included features itemized, from insulation to gutters to color
- Site-specific design loads: code, wind, exposure, snow, seismic
- A delivery timeline, stated rather than implied
Ask any supplier to print the design loads their number was engineered to. A building that was engineered for your site has them on hand; a catalog price has to go find some.
Our proposals carry site-specific design loads per IBC as standard.Pricing mechanics
Three short answers about how these numbers behave.
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Why do steel building quotes expire so quickly?
Because the underlying commodity moves. Steel is repriced continuously, and a quote holds its number only for a stated window; ours run ten days. A quote with no expiry date is not braver, it just has the movement hidden in its margin.
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What is almost never in the base price?
The concrete work, the permits and the labor to put the steel up. Those price locally, off your soil, your jurisdiction and your labor market, so they are quoted separately or by local trades. A building price that looks dramatically cheaper is usually a building price with more of these missing.
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Does a bigger building really cost less per square foot?
Usually, within reason. The fixed costs of engineering, freight mobilization and erection setup spread across more area, and a long building repeats the same frame economically. The exception is width: pushing a clear span wider adds steel faster than it adds floor, which is why very wide buildings price above their footprint.
Watch a number get engineered
Set a size, a site and a use in the designer. The proposal that comes back shows its work: price, schedule, inclusions, loads.