Tenders 2026: how to justify labour costs

You submitted your bid for that cleaning contract with your usual care. Round figures, a fair margin, a competitive price. Then comes the contracting authority’s request: prove that the labour costs quoted actually cover the hours needed to provide the service. And there, staring at the sheet of paper, you realise that you’ve estimated the hours, not measured them. You have a price, but you have no proof of how you arrived at it.

This is the trap that the 2026 tendering process is tightening. With the Ministry of Labour’s Directorial Decree No. 25 of 30 March 2026, the tables setting the average hourly labour cost for cleaning and multi-service companies have been updated. These tables incorporate the renewal of the Multiservizi contract and become the yardstick by which the contracting authority checks whether your bid is viable or whether it is an anomalous bid, below the actual labour cost.

In short: the price of a contract is no longer just a question of how much you want to earn. It is a question of how many hours are actually needed, multiplied by an hourly cost that is now set out in a decree. If your hours are an estimate, your price is an estimate, and an estimate does not hold up during a reasonableness check.

This is precisely the crux of the matter. The government tables tell you how much an hour’s work costs. They don’t tell you how many hours your site requires. Only you know that number, and you only know it properly if you’ve measured it on site, not if you’ve pieced it together from memory by looking at the calendar and guessing.

The quote based on memory

In most cleaning companies, a quote for a tender is put together like this: you look at a similar site, estimate roughly how many hours the team will spend there, add a safety margin, and that’s it. It works as long as no one asks for details. But a serious tender does ask for an explanation, and that safety margin guessed at off the top of your head can turn into two things, both unpleasant: a price that’s too high, causing you to lose the contract, or a price that’s too low, causing you to win it at a loss.

Known hours are a weapon in a tender

Let’s turn the argument on its head. If you knew, precisely, how many hours your team actually spends on a site of that type, the quote would cease to be a gamble. It would become a calculation. And when the contracting authority asks you to justify the labour cost, you don’t reply with a reassuring phrase; you reply with a record of actual, geolocated hours, site by site. It’s the difference between saying ‘I think that’s enough’ and proving that it is enough.

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Entering a tender with estimated hours whilst the hourly rate is set by decree is like betting on a match knowing only half the score. You might even guess right. But those who know the full score usually don’t bet.

Measuring rather than estimating

What’s needed isn’t a complicated system, but a reliable one: a way to know how many hours the team has worked on each site, without anyone having to piece it together at the end of the month. Hours must be linked to the correct site at the moment the work is carried out, so the history builds up automatically and, when the next tender comes along, the figures are already there.

That is exactly what GeoTapp does. With geofencing, the system recognises when the team has arrived at and left the site, and links the hours to the right location. One tap to start, one tap to finish. No paperwork, no mental calculations. When you need to justify labour costs in a tender, you have a record of actual hours to put on the table, not a promise.

The tables in Decree 25 are fixed figures. What you can change is where your quote starts from. So, before the next tender: have you measured the hours you’re basing your bid on, or have you just guessed them? If you hesitated, take a look at how to keep a record of hours per site.