Government flagging and traffic control contracts: how the on-call market works

• Pay items inside a construction contract. Maintenance of traffic as a lump sum, flagger hours, arrow board and message board days, truck-mounted attenuator days, drum and barricade days, temporary pavement marking. The prime carries these and usually subcontracts them. Your customer is the paving, utility or bridge prime, and your bid is a quote to them before the letting. See how to get government paving contracts and how to get government excavation and underground utility contracts.
• On-call and standby contracts with agencies. A DOT district, city or county buys traffic control for its own maintenance crews, emergency response, special events and utility work, on unit rates with a response time. Awarded by low bid on a hypothetical quantity schedule or by a scored evaluation of rates, inventory and response capability. See IDIQ contract and Not-to-exceed (NTE).
• Direct service to primes and utilities. Private-side flagging for gas, electric and telecom crews, and rentals to contractors who do not carry the equipment. Not public procurement, but it fills the calendar between public calls.

The public on-call contract is the one that changes a flagging business, because it produces work at short notice for years, and because holding it makes you the obvious subcontractor for every prime working in that agency's roads.

Agencies write these on a unit-rate schedule that mirrors their standard specification pay items. A representative schedule:

The buyer applies estimated quantities to produce a comparison total. Because any line can be ordered in any quantity, price every line at real cost plus margin rather than loading the ones you expect. Contracts run one year with renewals, carry a not-to-exceed value, and are bonded to that value or per order. See Unit price contract.

The flagger hour is the item that decides most on-call awards, and it has to be built from the bottom.

1. Base wage. On federal-aid and most state-funded road work the flagger classification in the wage determination sets the floor, with a fringe amount paid in benefits or cash. See Prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon for contractors and Davis-Bacon Act.
2. Burden. Payroll taxes, workers' compensation at the traffic control classification rate, which is high, and general liability with auto coverage that satisfies the agency's limits.
3. Non-billable time. Travel to a site that cancels, the four-hour minimum that the customer disputes, training days for certification renewals, and the standby crew you keep for the response-time commitment.
4. Supervision and equipment. A supervisor across several closures, a truck per crew, radios, paddles, PPE, and the devices on a device-day basis with a loss reserve.
5. Margin. Applied last, and lower than you would like, because the hour is what the buyer compares.

Contractors lose money on flagging when they price the hour from the private-work rate, when they miss the night and overtime lines, when their four-hour minimum is not in the contract, and when device loss on a highway is on their account. Get all four into the bid or the questions period. See how much does it cost to bid on a government contract?.

The certified person is the product, so certification is checked before rates are read. ATSSA's flagger, Traffic Control Technician and Traffic Control Supervisor courses are the common standard and are accepted by DOTs across the country, but the requirement and the card life are set by each state.

ATSSA technician and supervisor certifications run four years, and in some state programs ATSSA flagger cards expire on December 31 of the year following training. Check the current requirement with the DOT before you bid, keep a roster with expiration dates, and put renewals on the same calendar as the bid season. A crew whose cards lapse in June is a crew you cannot bill in July.

Every closure is set to a plan, either a typical application from the MUTCD Part 6 and the state's supplement or a site-specific drawing the agency approves. On-call contracts increasingly ask the contractor to prepare the plan, which means someone on staff who can read the DOT's standard drawings, size tapers and buffers to the posted speed, and get the drawing approved before the closure date.

The agency's inspector checks the set closure against the plan and the state's temporary traffic control standard, not the national manual alone. Device spacing, sign sequence, flagger station placement, arrow board mode and attenuator positioning are the items written up. A closure corrected by the inspector is a mark against the renewal; a closure involved in an incident can end the contract. This is the part of the business that certification courses teach and that experience makes reliable.

Price gets you the first year. Four things get you the next five: the response time met every time it was called, closures set to plan without correction, no incidents and no device losses disputed, and invoices that match the work order and the agency's pay items so they are approved without a call. Agencies renew on-call contracts by exception; the incumbent who does those four things is rarely rebid.

The agencies buying this work are every DOT district, city, county and authority in your radius, and their on-call contracts are advertised on their own schedules for a few weeks at a time. We find them, read every page of the rate schedule, certification requirements and wage determination, and write the response; you price the hour and sign. Book a call and we will show you which contracts are open right now.