The RFI Wire's bid board added 18 open solicitations in the last cycle, climbing from 434 to 452, and the pricing picture underneath it barely twitched. Bidders on the latest 1,000 recorded results are still averaging 9.4 per job, flat against the prior cycle. Low bids are landing 31.7% under engineers' estimates — the same read as the day before.
So this isn't a market correcting itself. It's a market adding volume at the same clip it's been running. New Jersey's Department of Transportation stayed the single busiest board on the open side, holding at 18 live packages. The Dormitory Authority of New York held 15, the New York State Office of General Services 13, and NYS Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation ticked up a notch to 14 from 13. None of the big agencies emptied out and none of them flooded the board — the growth came in ones and twos spread across dozens of small owners, from a single Nassau County Department of Public Works posting to a lone job from the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.
“A gap that big usually closes when material costs spike or the bid pool thins out. Neither happened here.”
Trade mix moved the same way — nowhere, really. General Construction held at 15 open jobs, Electrical at 9, Construction/Construction Services at 16. The categories marked merely "Construction Related Services" or left blank climbed from 285 combined to 303, which tells you more about how these postings get tagged at the source than about any shift in what's getting built. Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, water/sewer — all parked at the same counts as the cycle before.
What usually moves a spread is a crunch: a June rush of SCA work, a storm-driven sewer emergency, a federal shutdown backing up GSA lettings. None of that shows up here. The federal board stayed at zero postings again, continuing a stretch with nothing flowing in from SAM.gov. That's worth a contractor's attention on its own — if you chase federal set-asides, there's simply nothing on this board to chase right now, and that gap has held for more than one cycle running.
The headline number that hasn't moved in days is the 31.7% average gap between low bids and engineers' estimates. That's a wide, stable discount, and wide-and-stable is its own kind of signal: estimators on the public side are still pricing conservatively, or padding contingency, and contractors are still finding room to underbid them by nearly a third. A gap that big usually closes when material costs spike or the bid pool thins out. Neither happened here — bidder counts held at 9.4, so competition isn't the brake either.
What this means for you: If you're estimating against a public engineer's number right now, the data says you've still got room — bids are clearing nearly a third under estimate with no sign the pool has tightened. How we count: Figures come from The RFI Wire's own bid board snapshot comparing this cycle (452 open bids, 1,000 recorded results) against the prior cycle one day earlier; spread and bidder averages are drawn from the same 1,000-result sample both times.