Labor-rate benchmarks
Sanity-check a labor rate against hourly rates the government has actually awarded.
You have a labor rate in mind for a bid. Is it in the right neighborhood? Labor-rate benchmarks let you check it against rates the government has already agreed to pay, before you build a whole price around it.
Search by job title — "senior systems engineer," "program manager" — and you get the spread of awarded rates for that kind of work.
What you are looking at
The numbers come from awarded ceiling rates on federal supply-schedule contracts. A supply schedule is a pre-negotiated contract agencies buy from. The ceiling rate is the highest hourly rate the government agreed a contractor may charge for that job title.
You see three numbers for each labor category:
| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | A quarter of awarded ceilings sit below this |
| Median | The middle of the pack |
| 75th percentile | Three quarters of awarded ceilings sit below this |
You can also filter to small-business contractors and by education level, so you compare against companies in a similar position to yours.
A ceiling rate is not a bid price
These are the maximums a contractor is allowed to charge. Actual task-order pricing is often discounted well below the ceiling. Your competitive rate is usually below the median, not at it. Treat the median as a plausibility anchor, not a target.
What these numbers can and cannot do
They can tell you whether your assumption is in a believable range for this kind of work, using real prices the government negotiated and accepted — not survey data, not self-reported salaries.
They cannot be:
- A bid price.
- A certified cost or pricing estimate.
- Evidence of what any particular competitor charges.
A few more limits worth knowing:
- Only supply-schedule contracts are covered. Rates on other kinds of contracts are not in here.
- Job titles are not standardized across contracts. "Systems engineer" on one vehicle may describe different work than on another. Read the category descriptions behind a comparison before you trust it.
- Coverage follows the underlying schedule data. Niche job titles may have only a handful of comparison points, and a thin comparison set deserves less weight.
How to use it well
Search the labor category and read the whole spread, not one number.
Apply the filters that match your situation — the small-business comparison set if you are a small business.
Open the example records behind the statistic and confirm the work described actually matches your scope.
Write down the assumption you took — for example, "median awarded ceiling for senior systems engineer, small-business set" — so it survives your own pricing review.
A real example: a team pricing a proposal checks its program-manager rate and finds it sitting above the 75th percentile of awarded ceilings. They revisit the staffing mix. That half-hour check saved them from an evaluator raising it as a pricing concern.
FedScope does not give pricing advice
FedScope organizes public award records so you can compare. It does not tell you what to bid, and it is not a system of record. Confirm anything you rely on at the official source.
Rate benchmarks require a FedScope account. Every signed-in plan gets the full 25th / median / 75th spread and all the filters — there is no paid tier for more depth here.