EXCAVATION: IRON ECONOMICS
Same ownership math as civil: roughly $200 per day for a CAT 330 parked, $150 to $200 per hour loaded, industry idle rates near 30 percent. An operator's cubic yards per hour is the revenue engine, and unmeasured production turns good iron into expensive lawn art.
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This page covers one problem. The full picture for this trade, including the other places margin leaks, is on the excavation operating system page.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES.
Covered in full in the quick answer above. The sourced numbers and what controls it are below.
THE SAME PROBLEM, WRITTEN UP.
Every machine on the job costs money, whether it's moving or sitting idle.
Excavating Insurance Partners, 2026
THE NUMBER TO MEASURE IT AGAINST.
Excavation contractors have about 7% net profit at $1M to $5M, rising to roughly 10% at $5M to $10M. The CFOS net profit target is 10.5% before taxes at $1M to $5M, the trade's average plus 3.5 points, never below 10%. A problem like this one lives in the distance between those two figures rather than in a loss on any single job.
Gross margin over the same bands is 21% to 23%,against CFOS targets of 23.5% and 25.5%.
THE SYSTEM THAT FIXES THIS.
Cost codes built against the estimate, so a job can be read while it is open.
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