Copper moved and your bid didn't
You priced the wire in February and you buy it in November. The metal doesn't care what you signed.
Wire and cable are a commodity position you hold from bid day to buyout day, and on a hard bid with no escalation language you hold all of it. Exposure scales with how much of the job is copper and how many months sit between pricing and purchase. The biggest jobs with the longest schedules therefore carry the most risk, and those are usually the ones bid most aggressively. You're holding a priced bet whether or not anybody priced it.
Three moves, in order
Step 04: Estimating system
The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.
Other problems step 04 solves
Other things that go wrong
What owners ask
How to handle copper price increases after bidding an electrical job?
You priced the wire in February and you buy it in November. The metal doesn't care what you signed. Wire and cable are a commodity position you hold from bid day to buyout day, and on a hard bid with no escalation language you hold all of it. Exposure scales with how much of the job is copper and how many months sit between pricing and purchase. The biggest jobs with the longest schedules therefore carry the most risk, and those are usually the ones bid most aggressively. You're holding a priced bet whether or not anybody priced it.
Which part of the system fixes this?
The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It's drawn from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Does this only happen in electrical?
Effectively yes, and that's why it has its own page. Electrical sits in electrical and technology and runs 9% net profit at $1M–$5M. The mechanism behind this problem has no real analog in the other 47 trades, so the general advice doesn't fit it.
Where do I start?
Track the copper content of every bid as a percentage of material cost, so you know which jobs are exposed and by how much.
Can I fix this without touching anything else?
You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 04 depends on step 01, job cost structure and step 03, overhead calculation. Install it ahead of those and it produces numbers nobody trusts, which is worse than the problem you started with.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.