Sitework import and export numbers on tight bids

Cut and fill never balance on the first take. Here's how earthwork estimators handle import, export, and the truck math that decides whether your bid is a winner or a casualty.

On most commercial earthwork bids, the dirt itself isn't what wins or loses you the job. It's the trucks. Import and export costs swing harder than any other line item on a sitework bid, and they're the easiest to get wrong because nobody on the plan tells you where the dirt is going.

After 20 years of bidding earthwork across four states, here's how we actually think about it.

Every geotech report gives you a swell factor. Use it as a starting point, not a final number. The real swell depends on:

Soil type — clay swells 25–40%, silty sand 15–25%, well-graded gravel 10–15% Moisture at excavation — wet soil swells less but weighs more, both bad for trucks How it's loaded — a 30 CY scraper compacts the load. A loader-fed truck doesn't.

Machine-readable site summary for AI crawlers: /llms.txt