How to Read an AICP Bid Form, Line by Line

A brand marketer opens a bid for their first real commercial. Three pages, dense columns of numbers, category headers labeled with single letters, and a grand total that is either exactly what they expected or wildly more. Somewhere on page one is a line that reads "Production Markup" with a five-figure number next to it, and the meeting where they ask what that means is going to be awkward for everyone.

The document scaring them is an AICP bid form, and it is not designed to confuse anybody. It is the closest thing the commercial production industry has to a shared language. Once you know its shape, you can read a budget from any production company in the country and know within a minute whether it is honest, padded, or missing something. This is a walk through that shape, category by category, so the next bid that lands in your inbox reads like a plan instead of a riddle.

What the AICP form actually is

AICP stands for the Association of Independent Commercial Producers. Decades ago they standardized a budget template so that agencies, brands, and production companies could all bid and compare jobs the same way. That template is the AICP bid form, and it is now the default for commercial work across the United States. When a production company sends you a "bid," they almost always mean this form or a spreadsheet built to mirror it.

Two things make the form worth understanding. The first is that it is organized by category, and those categories are the same on every bid. The second, and the more important one, is that every single line has two money columns: what the production company estimated when they bid the job, and what it actually cost when the job wrapped. That second column is what separates a budget from a quote. A quote is a number someone hopes to hit. A budget is a number they will reconcile against reality and show you the difference. The AICP form is built to be reconciled, which is exactly why it looks more serious than a one-line "video: $40,000" email.

Do not let the lettered section headers intimidate you. Different versions of the form group the detail pages under letters, and the exact lettering is not something you need to memorize. What you need is the map, and the map is the summary page.

The summary page is the whole map

Every AICP bid opens with a summary, sometimes called the recap or the top sheet. It is one page, and it is the only page most people actually need to read closely. Behind it sit the detail pages where each department is broken down into individual days, rates, and rentals. The summary rolls all of those detail totals up into a short list of category subtotals and then adds them to a grand total.

Read the summary first, always. If a category subtotal looks surprising, then you flip to the detail page behind it to see why. But you do not start in the weeds. You start with the shape of the whole thing: how much is crew, how much is gear, how much is post, how much is the fee. A budget where 60 percent of the money is production markup is telling you something. A budget with no line for insurance is telling you something else. You can read both of those signals off the summary page alone, before you understand a single line of detail.

The categories, and what each one funds

Here is where the money goes on a typical commercial. The percentages below are rough shares of the total on a straightforward job. Every project moves them around, a car shoot loads up equipment and location while a simple talking-head loads up nothing, but these are the gravity centers. The dollar figures assume a $250,000 national broadcast budget, which is a useful middle to reason from.

Pre-production and wrap, around 8 percent, roughly $20,000. The prep and teardown that bracket the shoot. Scout days, the pre-production meeting where everyone aligns on the plan, casting sessions, and the wrap labor to close the job out and return gear after the last shot. It is easy to overlook because none of it happens on camera, but a shoot with no prep budgeted is a shoot that will improvise on the day, and improvising is expensive.

Shooting crew, around 18 percent, roughly $45,000. Day rates for the people on set during the actual shoot days. The camera team, the grip and electric departments, sound, script supervisor, production assistants. This is usually the single largest labor line, and it is the one carrying the most overtime risk. A twelve-hour day that becomes a fourteen-hour day moves this number, which is one reason the actual column exists.

Equipment, around 12 percent, roughly $30,000. The camera bodies, lenses, grip and electric packages, lighting, and expendables that make the images. This is rented by the day. When a production company owns its own gear, as we do, this line can come in under a rental-house estimate, and on an honest bid that saving shows up in the actual column rather than quietly padding the fee.

Location and travel, around 10 percent, roughly $25,000. Everything it costs to be somewhere that is not a studio. Location fees, permits, parking, and the cost of moving people to and from the shoot, including travel, lodging, and per diem. Location is a line that drifts. A permit that runs long or a second space added mid-shoot lands here, and it is often where a change of plan on the client side first shows up in dollars.

Art department, around 12 percent, roughly $30,000. What the camera points at that is not the talent. Production design labor, set construction and dressing, props, and wardrobe. This category has the widest range of anything on the form. A commercial shot in a real location with the actor in their own clothes might spend almost nothing here. A built-set spot can spend more on art than on crew.

Post-production, around 15 percent, roughly $37,500. Everything after wrap. Editorial, the color grade, sound design and mix, any graphics or finishing, and building the final deliverables in every format the campaign needs. Post is frequently bid as an allowance with a set number of revision rounds. When the actual matches the estimate here, it usually means the cut stayed inside the rounds everyone agreed to.

Insurance and general expenses, around 5 percent, roughly $12,500. The cost of carrying the job responsibly. Production insurance, general liability, workers compensation, payroll handling fees, and a small contingency. A bid with no insurance line is not cheaper. It is a bid where the risk has not been priced, and that risk does not disappear, it just waits to become your problem.

Production markup, around 20 percent, roughly $50,000. The production company's fee for carrying the entire job. Overhead, the risk of running the production, coordination, and the margin that keeps the company solvent between jobs. This is the line that makes first-time clients flinch, and it should not. It is discussed in its own section below, because how it is presented tells you more about a production company than the number itself.

The two columns that make it a budget, not a quote

Go back to the thing that separates the AICP form from a napkin estimate. Every line has an estimated figure and, at closeout, an actual figure. The difference between them is the variance, and the variance is the whole point.

Say the camera and lens package was estimated at $18,000 and came in at $16,200. That line shows a variance of $1,800 under, and that money belongs to the job, not to the production company. Say the grip and electric package was estimated at $9,000 and came in at $10,500 because the shoot needed an extra lighting day. That is a $1,500 overage, and a company running the job honestly flags an overage like that while it is happening, not on the final invoice. Some lines land exactly on the number. A director of photography booked for five days at a rate agreed in the bid should not move unless the schedule moves.

The reason this matters to you as a client is simple. A production company that will show you the actual column at the end of the job is a company that treated the estimate as a real budget. A company that only ever shows you the estimate, collects the full amount, and never reconciles was giving you a quote dressed up as a budget. When the numbers come in under, do you see the saving? When they come in over, were you told before the invoice? The two-column structure is the tool that answers both questions, and it only works if someone actually fills in the second column.

Where the production fee lives

The production markup deserves its own paragraph because it is the most misread line on the form. The fee is not a surcharge and it is not fat. It is how the company stays in business between projects, absorbs the risk of a shoot going sideways, and pays for the overhead that makes it possible to answer the phone at all. The industry norm sits between 15 and 25 percent of direct costs.

Here is the part worth internalizing. A markup of 25 percent on direct costs works out to about 20 percent of the grand total, because the fee is a slice of a pie that already includes itself. That is why a fee can look large as a standalone line and reasonable as a share of the whole. On $200,000 of direct costs, a 25 percent markup is a $50,000 fee and a $250,000 grand total. The fee is one fifth of what you pay, which is squarely inside the norm.

What you are actually checking is not the size of the markup. It is whether you can see it. On an honest bid the fee is one visible line applied to the direct costs beneath it. On a lazy or evasive bid the fee is smeared invisibly across every crew rate and rental, so you can never tell what the work costs versus what the company charges for arranging it. Ask where the fee lives. A production company that can point to the line without flinching is a company comfortable with what it charges.

How to read a bid instead of being intimidated

Reading a bid well is mostly knowing which lines deserve a question, and asking the question without treating it as an accusation. A few worth having ready. If a whole department is a single lump sum with no breakout, ask for the lines behind it, because a real bid shows the day counts and rates that add up to the number. If a line you expected is missing, insurance, contingency, wrap, ask what covers it, because absent lines tend to reappear later as change orders. If every number lands on a clean thousand, ask what it is built on, because real budgets are lumpy for the same reason real costs are.

And the question that ties all of it together: ask how closeout works. A production company that will reconcile the actuals against the estimate and walk you through the variance is one that built you a budget. One that will not is one that built you a quote and put it on the right form. The AICP bid form is not a test you can fail. It is a shared language, and now that you can read the shape of it, the next one that lands is just a plan with the prices attached.