Why are my two mold remediation quotes so different?

Usually the scope, not the rates. Most insurance-related estimates price from the same regional line-item list, so the difference is in what each firm proposes to do — above all the containment and protective equipment the job is judged to require, which escalates in steps rather than smoothly.

The estimating software most US insurance-related restoration estimates are written in, priced from regional line-item lists Verisk maintains for more than 460 areas and republishes monthly. Verisk's own licence agreement states it does not warrant the accuracy of that pricing and describes it as a baseline for creating an estimate.

What is a Market Conditions line on my estimate?

A disclosed field. Verisk builds line items both bottom-up from labour, material and equipment and top-down from unit-price quotes; where the top-down price exceeds the bottom-up sum, the difference is placed in a field called Market Conditions rather than absorbed into the rates.

How Restoration Work Is Actually Priced

Two quotes for the same job can differ several-fold, and homeowners reasonably assume one of them is dishonest. Usually neither is. Restoration is priced from line items against a regional price list, and the difference lives in the scope — what each firm proposes to do — far more often than in the rates. This page explains the machinery so you can read a quote, and tells you what we cannot honestly tell you.

Sources named and dated throughout. We publish no price estimates of our own. Verified August 14, 2026.

The price list nearly every estimate runs on

Most insurance-related restoration estimates in the US are written in Xactimate, and priced from Verisk's regional price lists. Verisk publishes a free methodology document describing how those lists are built, and the mechanics are worth knowing:

It is local. Verisk maintains separate price lists for “more than 460 areas in all 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces”, mapped from roughly 42,000 US ZIP codes and 1,600 Canadian FSA codes.
It moves monthly. Lists are published monthly, and Verisk states that during demand surges “price lists can be published as often as biweekly”.
It is survey-driven. Verisk surveys a network of more than 50,000 suppliers, contractors and servicers, reviewing roughly 20,000 market surveys of randomly selected contractors each month, and states that “more than 400,000 estimates are returned to Verisk every day”.
Line items are built twice. Bottom-up from labour, material and equipment components, and top-down from unit-price quotes. Where the top-down price exceeds the bottom-up sum, the difference is exposed separately in a field called “Market Conditions”.
Outliers are clustered out. A proprietary cluster analysis groups submitted prices and “selects a representative price from the largest cluster”, rather than averaging.

Two things about that list you will not hear from an estimator

Verisk does not warrant the numbers. The Xactware licence agreement states: “We do not warrant the accuracy of pricing information in the Price Data.” It describes the data as historical information, to be used as a baseline or starting point for creating an estimate. (Xactware Solutions, Inc. License Agreement §13.3, last updated 22 April 2026.) A price list is where an estimate begins, not an authority that settles it.

Second, the feedback loop that keeps those lists current is insurer-weighted. The most-cited breakdown of estimates flowing into Verisk's system found staff adjusters submitting 63.1%, independent adjusters 25.9% and contractors 5%. Treat that as a dated snapshot rather than today's figure — it is 2016 data reported in a 2018 paper, and we could find no more recent published breakdown — but the structural point has not been contested: the data that trains the price list comes overwhelmingly from the side that pays the claim.

Source: Mark Whatley, “Xactimate: The History & The Future” (April 2018), citing Xactware's 2016 Property Report. Secondary source; we could not reach the underlying Xactware report.

Why the scope, not the rate, explains the spread

If every firm prices from the same regional list, a threefold difference between two quotes is mostly a difference in what they propose to do. The largest single driver is containment and protective equipment, and EPA's guidance shows why it is a step change rather than a gradient.

EPA's Table 2 sets remediation methods, protective equipment and containment across three bands of affected surface area: under 10 square feet, 10 to 100, and over 100 — and the top band is not purely a size trigger, reading “Greater Than 100 (ft2) or Potential for Increased Occupant or Remediator Exposure”. Containment goes from none required, to limited, to full. Protective equipment starts at a stated minimum of an “N-95 respirator, gloves, and goggles” even for the smallest job, and rises to full.

What that does and does not tell you. EPA says nothing about cost anywhere in this document — no prices, no multipliers, no statement that crossing a band makes a job more expensive. What it establishes is that a job crossing one of those lines calls for a materially different scope of work. The cost inference is yours to draw, and we are not going to dress it up as EPA's. The bands are also explicitly a matter of professional judgement, not bright lines: a 30 square foot job can legitimately sit in the top band on exposure grounds alone.

Source: US EPA, “Mold Remediation in Schools and Commercial Buildings” (EPA 402-K-01-001), Chapter 5, Table 2. Guidance for schools and commercial buildings; it is not a regulation and binds no contractor. The table covers damage from clean water only.

How to read a quote

Compare scopes before totals. Ask each firm which EPA band they have placed the job in and why. If two firms disagree about that, you have found the real difference.
Ask who determined the scope. If the firm that wrote it is also the firm performing it, you are relying on the judgement of the party that gets paid more when the scope grows. 4 of the 5 licensing jurisdictions bar the same party from assessing and remediating the same property or project: Texas, Florida, New York and Louisiana. District of Columbia does not — the rule there is disclosure of conflicts and a bar on working where the licensee has a financial interest, not a prohibition on holding both roles.
Ask what verifies completion. A scope with no defined endpoint cannot be shown to have been met.
Ask whether the estimate carries a Market Conditions component, and what drove it. It is a disclosed field, not a hidden one.

What we do not publish, and why

We publish no cost ranges. The national figures repeated across this industry — the same average, the same low and high, the same per-square-foot rate appearing verbatim on page after page — trace back to a single lead-generation marketplace's dataset, and most of the sites carrying them do not say so. We are not going to become the next site republishing that number, and we have not found a source for what a job costs that we would defend by the standard we hold every other fact on this site to.

What insurers pay on a claim is a different question with better data, and we have written that up separately: what a water claim costs insurers, and why it is not your quote.