Idaho Construction Estimating Services

Idaho is the opposite of Texas. There’s one code, and the legislature owns it.

Building codes here are adopted by state statute, and a new edition doesn’t take effect until the legislature passes it. A city can adopt extra codes on top, and it can amend — but an amendment can’t be weaker than what the state adopted. So you don’t burn your pre-bid week working out which edition the building department is on. That part is settled before you open the drawings.

The catch is which editions. Boise’s list, in force for anything submitted on or after 1 January 2021: 2018 IBC, with the mass timber provisions pulled forward from the 2021 IBC. 2018 IRC. 2018 IEBC. 2018 IECC. 2018 IMC and IFGC. The 2017 Idaho State Plumbing Code, which is built on the 2015 UPC. 2018 IFC. And the 2023 NEC, live since 26 April 2024.

Look at that spread. The plumbing book is a decade old and the electrical book is current. If you price the plumbing rough-in off one era and the electrical gear off another without noticing, you’re going to eat the difference on both.

Then there’s the tax, and Idaho’s version catches people from every direction. Idaho doesn’t tax construction labor. It taxes you, the contractor, as the consumer of the material. You pay sales or use tax when you buy it, you don’t add tax to the contract, and — this is the expensive part — you owe it even when the customer is tax-exempt. A church, a school district, a city: doesn’t matter. Their exemption isn’t yours. That tax lives inside your material line where nobody reimburses it.

And then the sky. Boise publishes a 20 psf ground snow load, 25 psf on the roof, a 24-inch minimum frost depth, 90 mph wind and seismic design category C for houses. Those are valley numbers. Two hours north or east, they aren’t. One code, a dozen climates under it.

1. Material tax on a tax-exempt job. The Tax Commission’s guide is blunt about it: contractors are the consumers of everything they use, and they owe the tax “regardless of whether the customer is tax-exempt.” The examples run at 6%. There is a narrow real-property exemption certificate, ST-103C, but it covers out-of-state contracts in no-tax states, production equipment, ag irrigation and fabricated production machinery — not your material buy on a school gym in Nampa. If your public-work bid quietly assumed the owner’s exemption flowed to your purchase orders, that’s six points of your material cost, gone.

2. The public works license. Idaho Code 54-1902 makes it unlawful to act as a public works contractor without one. Federal-aid-funded work is the one door left open — you may bid without the license, but you have to hold it before award. There’s also a cap on how much you hand off: a contractor can’t subcontract more than 80% of the work without the subcontractor licensing requirements being satisfied. On public work in this state, who is licensed to do what belongs in the estimate, not in a phone call the week after you win.

3. Boise’s permit math. The city’s fee schedule is a formula, not a round number: $913.09 for the first $100,000 of valuation, plus $5.17 for each additional $1,000. Commercial plan review is another 65% of that permit fee; residential is 20%. Run a $1,000,000 valuation through it and you get $5,566.09 in permit plus $3,618.96 in plan review — $9,185.05 before you’ve moved dirt. Most bids we’re handed to check carry a round $5,000 for the whole line.

4. Snow, frost and the mountain jurisdictions. A 24-inch frost depth sets your footing excavation in the valley. Roof framing, drift loads at parapets and mechanical screens, and the snow load itself are where the mountain towns separate from Boise. If you price a Ketchum or McCall roof off Boise’s 25 psf, you’re going to be short on framing and short on the crane day it takes to set it.

Sixteen real estimates are on this page — four in each of the four categories we work in. $144.6M of construction value across 163 pages of takeoff and pricing. Twelve of them are Idaho jobs. Four come from next door, and they’re labelled with their state, because our Idaho file didn’t hold that building type at that size and we’d rather show you the real thing than pad the page.

Commercial Buildings — ground-up retail, hospitality, office and institutional.

• Symphony Park Block C, Las Vegas NV – $110M (89106)
• Eagle River VII, Eagle – $5.3M (83616)
• Meridien Office Shell, Meridian – $2.4M (83642)
• Caldwell Crossing, Caldwell – $1.2M (83607)

Multi Family and Apartments — apartments, townhomes and multi-unit housing.

• Steelwood Station Apartments, Boise – $6.1M (83713)
• 36th Street Apts, Garden City – $5.4M (83714)
• Jocelyn Court Townhomes, Provo UT – $4.7M (84605)
• Bridgetower Townhomes – Clubhouse, Meridian – $541K (83646)

Residential — custom homes, cabins, shops and whole-house work.

• 667 Scenic Rim Dr Residence, Henderson NV – $3.9M (89012)
• The PIET House, Tetonia – $1.2M (83404)
• Foxtail Farm, Post Falls – $1M (83854)
• Workshop, Priest River – $235K (83856)

Tenant Buildouts — interior fit-outs in existing buildings.

• Cheyenne Medical Clinic, Cheyenne WY – $1.9M (82001)
• Terre Cafe, Post Falls – $608K (83854)
• Albertsons Project, Homedale – $56K (83628)
• Urgent Care, Idaho Falls – $16K (83404)

Four building types, from a $16K clinic finish-out to a $110M city-block project. That range is the point. Most shops price one lane and call it a service.

Look at the two Treasure Valley shells. Meridien Office Shell is $2.4M over seven pages — sitework, concrete, metals, envelope — because a shell is structure and skin and almost nothing else. Caldwell Crossing is $1.2M over four, with a 10,192 square-foot slab, a TPO roof and a fire sprinkler allowance sitting right there in the line items. Same valley, same code, two completely different estimates.

Then look at Terre Cafe in Post Falls, $608K, seven pages. A cafe fit-out is openings, finishes and equipment coordination, and every one of those is its own takeoff. It’s also the kind of job where the material tax question decides whether you made money.

We estimate statewide. Here’s where the volume actually is.

Treasure Valley. Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Eagle, Garden City, Kuna and Star. Eight of the sixteen estimates above are Treasure Valley jobs, and Boise’s fee schedule and design criteria are the ones most of our clients are pricing against.

North Idaho. Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls, Priest River, Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry and Lewiston. Longer hauls, thinner sub markets, real snow. Three of the sixteen are up there.

Eastern Idaho. Idaho Falls, Rexburg, Pocatello, Tetonia and Driggs. The PIET House and the Idaho Falls urgent care are both on this page.

Magic Valley. Twin Falls, Jerome, Burley, Buhl, Filer and Homedale out to the west end.

The mountain and resort towns. McCall, Ketchum, Sun Valley, Driggs and Schweitzer. Same statewide code, different snow, different logistics, different labor availability — and the estimate has to say so.

General contractors bidding hard-bid and negotiated work. Subs who need a takeoff that survives a scope review. Developers who want a real number before they commit capital. Architects who’d rather price a design now than explain a surprise at bid day.

Idaho added 2,000 construction jobs in a single month this spring — up 2.6%, the largest percentage gain of any state that month. That’s a market where everyone is busy and nobody has a spare estimator. Our Idaho construction estimating services exist to fix exactly that: you send the plans, we send back a priced estimate with the quantities shown, in a format you can hand straight to a client or an owner.

We’re not a lead service and we’re not a software subscription. A person does the takeoff. Another person checks it. You can call and ask why a number is what it is, and get an answer.

What you’re hiring is a cost estimator who has already priced work under Idaho’s code editions, on your frost depth, at your city’s fee schedule. Not a national square-foot average with a potato on it.

Send us your plans. We’ll tell you what it costs.