The bid board's own numbers have crossed a line worth stopping on. Across the 1,000 most recent results on The RFI Wire's bid board, the average low bid now lands 4.7% below the engineer's own estimate -- meaning the person pricing the job on the public side is, on average, guessing high compared to what contractors are actually willing to do the work for.
That is not a small thing. For most of this year the relationship ran the other way -- low bids coming in above the estimate, agencies budgeting light and getting a surprise when the envelopes opened. Now it has flipped, and the flip shows up alongside an average bidder count of 8.3 firms per job and an average spread of 22.8% between the low bid and the next-closest serious competitor.
“Eight bidders is a healthy crowd for almost any public job -- enough that a GC pricing tight has to actually be tight, not just lucky.”
Put those three numbers together and you get a picture of a market with real competition in it. Eight bidders is a healthy crowd for almost any public job -- enough that a GC pricing tight has to actually be tight, not just lucky. And a 22.8% spread means the gap between the low bidder and the pack isn't a rounding error; somebody is finding real efficiency, or somebody is buying the job to keep the crew moving.
New Jersey's DOT and Treasury/DPMC contracts still carry a lot of weight in this sample -- 101 and 74 results respectively, more than a sixth of the whole board between them -- so a reader should treat the 8.3 and 22.8% figures as describing a market that's heavily tilted toward New Jersey DOT-style heavy civil and public building work, not a pure read on, say, NYC vertical construction. NYCSCA (42 results), MTA Construction & Development (21) and NYSDOT (21) are the next heaviest agencies in the sample, so this is fundamentally a story about public infrastructure and institutional bidding, where competition has stayed deep even as the broader construction economy has been choppy.
Low bids beating the estimate by nearly 5% on average, with eight-plus bidders showing up and a wide spread between them, is the signature of a buyer's market for the agencies and a tight one for the contractors in it. Somebody's margin is getting squeezed to win that gap.
What this means for you: If you're estimating public work right now, price sharp -- the going rate is running below what agencies themselves expect to pay, and a soft number likely won't win. How we count: These figures come from the public bid postings and agency bid results on The RFI Wire's board and, where filings are cited, NYC Department of Buildings job filings via NYC Open Data. Read them as the market's direction, not an official total.