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Find a plumber near you →Most “what does it cost” content in home services is sourced from surveys and scraped averages. This report is different: it’s built from 22,582 individual contractor bids on real U.S. jobs posted to the AllBetter marketplace — actual prices real pros offered for real work. We’re publishing bid-level pricing data that most platforms keep private. We’re publishing the topline numbers so homeowners, contractors, and researchers can use them. Cite freely with attribution.
What does real bid data show about home services? Three things: prices on the same job post vary enormously (the median gap between the highest and lowest bid is 140%); most job posts name no budget (89% are posted open to bids); and the historical all-time top-five-metro cohort had a median first bid of about 10 minutes.
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Finding 1: The Same Job Gets Wildly Different Prices
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Find a plumber near you →Across every job that received two or more priced bids, the median spread between the highest and lowest bid was 140% — and on 59% of jobs, at least one bid was at least double another. This is the single most consequential number in home services: it means a single quote tells you little about the range of offers on the same job post.
The pattern: the more diagnosis a trade involves, the wider the spread. Flooring, roofing, and HVAC bids price unknowns; cleaning and moving price hours. Small-sample trades (roof repair, HVAC, flooring) carry wider uncertainty — treat their exact figures as directional. Our cleaning-spread deep dive unpacks what drives the gap inside one trade.
Finding 2: 89% of Homeowners Don’t Name a Budget
Across the full dataset, 89.4% of jobs were posted “open to bids” with no budget specified. The information gap is the product: a blank budget field means the homeowner had no reference price, which is exactly the gap that lead-sale platforms monetize and that platform fee structures quietly widen. It’s also why we publish trade-by-trade cost guides — pricing literacy is the cheapest home-services upgrade there is.
Finding 3: Active Markets Move in Minutes
Across 5,224 eligible jobs with a recorded first-bid timestamp, 38.5% received a first bid within 15 minutes and 50.6% within 60 minutes. The ~10-minute figure is historical: it is the all-time median for the top-five-metro cohort (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami), not a current response-time promise. Chicago’s all-time cohort median was 8 minutes. The long tail is real too: about 3 in 10 first bids take more than three days, typically in thin markets and specialty trades.
Methodology
Data extraction: June 11, 2026. Editorial update: September 21, 2026. Source: eligible U.S. jobs in the AllBetter marketplace export; internal test records and non-U.S. postings were excluded. The bid-amount dataset contains 22,582 positive-priced individual bids. The bid-spread analysis is a separate cohort of 3,759 jobs with two or more priced bids. Among eligible jobs that received at least one bid, the median bid count was three. Spread = (highest bid − lowest bid) ÷ lowest bid per job, reported as medians to resist outliers. Time-to-first-bid is measured from posting timestamp to first bid timestamp for 5,224 eligible jobs with a recorded first-bid timestamp; the top-five-metro ~10-minute figure is an all-time historical cohort statistic, not a current response-time promise. Per-trade sample sizes range from 23 jobs (roof repair) to 1,722 (cleaning); small-sample trades should be read as directional. We do not publish job-completion rates because off-platform completions make them undercount unreliably. AllBetter operates this marketplace — the incentive disclosure is that bid-comparison data naturally favors bid-comparison platforms; the raw distributions are reported as computed either way.
Citing this report: journalists, researchers, and creators may cite any figure with attribution to “AllBetter Marketplace Report 2026” and a link to this page. For the underlying aggregate tables, contact us.
Data Report: FAQ
How much do contractor quotes vary for the same job?
In AllBetter marketplace data, 22,582 positive-priced individual bids were observed across eligible U.S. jobs; the spread analysis covers 3,759 jobs with two or more priced bids. The median gap between the highest and lowest bid on the same job is 140%, and 59% of jobs see at least one bid at least double another. Diagnosis-heavy trades like flooring (356%) and HVAC (257%) vary most.
How many bids should I get for a home project?
At least three. Among eligible AllBetter jobs that receive at least one bid, the median is 3 bids. With a 140% median spread between high and low quotes in the multi-bid cohort, the third bid shows you the range of offers on the same job post.
How fast do contractors respond to job posts?
Historically, the all-time median first bid in AllBetter’s top-five-metro cohort was about 10 minutes (Chicago all-time: 8 minutes); it is not a current response-time promise. Across 5,224 eligible jobs with a recorded first-bid timestamp, 38.5% of first bids landed within 15 minutes and 50.6% within 60 minutes, with a long tail in thin markets and specialty trades.
Where does this data come from?
From the AllBetter marketplace itself: 22,582 positive-priced individual contractor bids across eligible U.S. jobs, with test records and non-U.S. posts excluded. The spread analysis uses 3,759 jobs with two or more priced bids. The extraction date, sample sizes, and exclusion rules are published in the methodology section above.
