New York's construction spending is on track to hit nearly $80 billion in 2026, a jump of about $10 billion from the prior year, according to a forecast from the New York Building Congress reported by the New York Real Estate Journal.
The Building Congress is the industry group that tracks and projects construction spending across the five boroughs, pulling from permit filings, contract awards and its own survey of owners and contractors. Its annual forecast is the number agencies, lenders and bid desks across the city build budgets around.
The group's new figure lines up with what The RFI Wire's own bid board has been showing for months: low bids beating the engineer's estimate on the average public job, and NYC building filings climbing week over week. A $10 billion jump doesn't happen because one sector got busy — it means public capital work, private towers, and institutional projects are all pulling estimators' attention at the same time.
For a contractor sizing up next year's backlog, that's the headline number worth remembering before the calendar turns: more work is coming, but more competitors are chasing it too, and the firms that get ahead on pricing now will be the ones bidding from strength in the spring letting season.
The story was first reported by the New York Real Estate Journal, which cited the Building Congress's own forecast; the RFI Wire has not independently reviewed the underlying projection documents.
What to do next
If you bid public work, treat this as a planning signal, not a guarantee — a citywide total doesn't tell you which agencies are driving it. Check the Building Congress's published reports directly at nyrej.com or through the Building Congress's own site before changing your 2026 pipeline assumptions, and keep tracking The RFI Wire's own bid board for which agencies are actually posting the volume behind the number.