Bond Rate
One of the questions that we consistently get is what is the rate of the surety bond? That is, what does the bond cost? Although it is nearly impossible in this short bond post to give you an exact cost for your cost, we can give you some great outlines on the bond rate.
For a performance bond, payment bond and other types of contract bonds, the following is what we use for a general rule of thumb on what the bond is going to cost.
The Surety Bond Rate Varies Based on the Size of the Contract
If the contract underlying the bond is $400,000 or less, then a good rule of thumb is 3%. If the cost of the bond is greater than that, we try and use a sliding scale so that the cost reduces down to 1% at $1.5 million. There are a couple of caveats to this. First, this assumes that your company meets the requirements of a preferred vendor. We recently had a great client that didn't meet this and ended up with the 3% rate for the bond (which was slightly less than $1 million).
This brings us to a great point. Once you start getting bonded, we like to have the company underwritten and pre-approved for a better bond rate. This allows your company to get better rates in the future as well.
For probate bonds, we like to use a general rate of 1% for preferred clients and then 2% for "standard" clients. We also have a super preferred rate of 0.5% for many clients as well.
I hope that this helps just a bit about the cost rate of a surety bond for you and your company.
What is the Rate on a Surety Bond?
The costs can depend on several factors. The first, of course, is the type of a bond. For performance bonds, the general starting rate is three percent (3%) of the contract. This amount will go lower as the contract size grows. For other bonds, the price is typically lower. For a probate bond, the standard price is around 1% and Notary bonds are usually priced using a fixed fee price for several years.
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