The bid board held nearly flat overnight: 340 open solicitations against 340 the day before, and the two pricing numbers that matter most to an estimator didn't move at all. The average spread between the low bidder and the next-closest competitor sits at 22.8%. The average low bid still lands 4.7% under the engineer's estimate. Both are exactly where they were a day earlier.
That stability is the story. Across 1,000 recorded bid results, public work in this region is pricing itself in a tight, repeatable band: contractors are bidding close enough together that the field isn't getting surprised by lowballs, and owners' estimators are coming in only modestly rich of what the market actually wants to charge. A -4.7% gap means the people writing engineer's estimates right now are doing it with real information, not guesswork padded for safety.
“A -4.7% gap between low bid and estimate means the people writing those estimates right now are working with real information, not padding for safety.”
New Jersey's Department of Transportation and its Treasury's Division of Property Management & Construction remain the two biggest single sources of recorded results in the dataset, at 101 and 74 respectively, with NYC's School Construction Authority next at 42. Those three alone account for more than a fifth of all 1,000 results on file, which means they're doing more than anyone to set the going rate other agencies get compared against.
The open pipeline, meanwhile, skews toward trades that take time to estimate and schedule: 29 general construction postings, 16 construction-related services, 14 listed only by NAICS code 236220 (general building construction), 13 roofing jobs, 11 structural/steel and 11 electrical. SUNY leads all owners with 19 open postings, trailed by the Department of Veterans Affairs at 16 and NYS Office of General Services at 11.
Average bidder turnout across the 1,000 results stands at 8.3 firms per job — enough competition to keep pricing honest without so many bidders that a single job turns into a bloodbath on margin.
What this means for you: If you're pricing public work this week, price it the way the market has been pricing it all month — a tight spread means there's little room to lowball your way to a win, and estimators should trust current unit pricing over a cushion built for surprises. How we count: Figures cover 1,000 recorded bid results and 340 currently open postings on the board as of November 1, 2026; averages are computed across the full result set, not a single agency or trade.