Every bid opening ends the same way: somebody reads numbers off a sheet, somebody writes them down. For nineteen months — January 3, 2025 through August 11, 2026 — this desk's results ledger has been doing the writing. This week we added it all up. 709 openings. 7,712 individual bids. And $5.26 billion in low bids across the public work this desk tracks: schools, CUNY campuses, state hospitals, parks, courthouses, garages.

So let's start with the headline number. In 2025 we logged 404 openings worth $2.47 billion in low bids. In 2026 we've logged 305 openings worth $2.79 billion — and the year still has four and a half months left. The 2026 board passed all of 2025 before Labor Day. Compare the first halves straight up and it's a 51 percent jump: $1.80 billion through June of 2025, $2.72 billion through June of 2026, on more openings (292 vs. 264). Some of that is our own net getting wider — the caveat block below is not decoration — but a jump that size isn't bookkeeping. There's more work hitting the street, and the packages are bigger.

“The 2026 board passed all of 2025 before Labor Day.”

Now look at that chart again, because it's the whole rhythm of this market in seven bars. The second quarter is the year's paycheck: $1.51 billion in the spring of 2025, $2.01 billion this spring. May and June alone account for 313 of our 709 openings — 44 percent of the openings in two months out of nineteen. If your shop prices its whole year in those eight weeks, you already knew that in your bones. Now you've seen the receipts.

Here's the thing about where the money actually sits. Two-thirds of the openings on this ledger — 471 of 709 — came in under $5 million. But the 128 openings at $10 million and up carried $3.68 billion, which is 70 percent of every dollar. The big-package market and the bread-and-butter market are two different rooms that happen to share a calendar.

And the big room has famous regulars. Navillus Contracting was the low bidder on just four openings in our ledger — and those four total $588 million, anchored by the $382.3 million Saint John Villa campus package on Staten Island (two bidders) and the $107.4 million HS 382 new building in Brooklyn, which it took by $267,000 — a quarter of one percent. Adam's European Contracting was low eight times for $370.2 million, including the $96.6 million PS 626 new building in the Bronx and $83 million at the Erasmus Hall campus. Two names, low on roughly 18 percent of the ledger's total dollars. Meanwhile the busiest estimating room in the data belongs to Kel-Tech Construction, which priced 129 jobs in nineteen months — one bid every four days or so, weekends included.

One more habit of this market: it shows up. Openings averaged just under eleven bids apiece in both years — 10.85 in 2025, 10.91 in 2026 — with a median of nine. Whatever you've heard about contractors sitting this cycle out, the tabs say otherwise.

So what do you do with a $5.26 billion ledger? You stop treating bid results as trivia and start treating them as the price book for your market. Every story in this series — the photo finishes, the two-envelope jobs, the crowd curve — comes out of this same stack of tabs. The market already told us what everything costs. We're just reading it back.

What this means for you: this ledger covers 709 actual bid openings and 7,712 individual bids across the public agencies we track, from January 2025 through this August — real recorded tabs, not estimates. Treat it as a floor, not a final count: some months are covered more thickly than others, 2026 isn't finished yet, and "low bidder" means low at the opening — agencies still review responsiveness before any contract is actually awarded.