Run the bid-results averages from yesterday against today's and you get the same three numbers, digit for digit: 10.1 bidders per job, a 200.5% spread between the low and second bid, and a low bid landing 2.9% under the engineer's estimate. A thousand results in the sample both times.

Now, you might expect that kind of stability to mean nothing moved. Something did — the agency mix underneath those averages didn't hold still. New Jersey DOT alone accounts for 101 of the 1,000 results on file, more than any New York agency including CUNY's 55 and MTA New York City Transit's 70. New Jersey Treasury's DPMC adds another 72. Between those two New Jersey buyers, you're looking at 173 of the results in the file — better than one in six.

“A number that refuses to move is still telling you something — just not what a spike would.”

Here's why that matters if you bid on both sides of the river: when averages hold flat while the underlying agency mix churns, it usually means the market itself is genuinely stable, not that we're looking at a fluke month. A 200% spread between low and second bid sounds enormous until you remember it's an average pulled across specialty trades, small IDIQ task orders, and nine-figure heavy-civil jobs all at once — the number tells you competition is inconsistent, not that every job gets bid four times over.

The number worth sitting with is -2.9%. Low bids are coming in just under engineer's estimates, on average, across a thousand contracts. That's not a market where everybody's lowballing to buy work, and it's not one where estimators are getting bled by escalation either. It's close to textbook. If you're building a bid strategy around beating the estimate by double digits to win, the data says that's not what's actually happening out there — you're more likely handing back margin than needed to.

So what do you do with a number that refuses to move? Trust it as your baseline. If your own bid results are landing more than a few points off -2.9% versus estimate, or your bidder counts are running well under 10, that's the signal to ask why your jobs look different from the market's, not the other way around.