May 28, 2025. A roof replacement at PS 004/179 in Queens. Not a glamour job — a school roof. Thirty-four contractors bid it. Skyview Construction took low at $4,786,000, with Litehouse Builders a hundred and two grand behind, and thirty-two other estimating rooms did the takeoff, priced the insulation, paid for the bond letter, and went home with nothing. That's the most crowded opening in our nineteen-month ledger — and it wasn't lonely. 105 openings drew twenty or more bidders. 190 drew fifteen or more.

So who gets the crowd? Line up all 709 openings by size and a curve appears that every estimator feels in their gut but nobody had drawn. Jobs under $1 million average 8.2 bidders. From $1 to $5 million: 10.3. From $5 to $10 million: 14.1. And from $10 to $25 million — the fat part of the public-work market — 16.2 bidders per opening. Then you cross $25 million and the curve falls off a cliff: 9.4 bidders on average, and often far fewer. The Saint John Villa campus package — $382 million, the biggest contract in the ledger — drew two.

“The crowd doesn't thin above $25 million because contractors stop wanting the work. It thins because the bonding desk hangs up.”

Now, why is the curve shaped like that? Going up, it's simple economics: a $15 million exterior package carries enough margin to feed a real company for a year, and the plans are usually the same roofs-parapets-masonry scope a hundred Queens and Brooklyn firms already know by heart. Everybody's bonding program reaches $15 million. Almost nobody's reaches $80 million. That right side of the curve isn't about appetite — it's about surety credit, single-job limits, and how much backlog your balance sheet can hold. The crowd doesn't thin above $25 million because contractors stop wanting the work. It thins because the bonding desk hangs up.

And the crowd does exactly what you'd expect to the money. Median gap between first and second on jobs under $1 million: 11.47 percent — the small-job market prices loose because the rooms are small and the estimates are quick. At $10 to $25 million, with sixteen bidders in the room, the median gap is 3.66 percent. Sixteen bidders will grind a price down to the bone and leave it there.

One more thing the curve explains: the calendar. The crowds peak when the work does — 313 of our 709 openings landed in May and June, the agencies' end-of-fiscal-year sprint, and the 30-bidder monsters cluster there and in the winter rebid season. A 32-bidder tab at Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in January 2026 went down to $1,485,000 — thirty-two firms fighting over a job that won't gross what some of them bill in a month. That's what a hungry January looks like.

So here's the Monday-morning read. If you're bidding $10-to-$25 million public packages, you are in the most crowded room in New York construction, and the tabs say you'll need a number within four percent of perfect to see your name on top. If you can bond past $25 million, every step of surety credit you build is literally thinning the field — the room above the cliff averages nine bidders and shrinks fast from there. And if you're under $1 million? You've got the loosest pricing in the market and eight rivals instead of sixteen. Small jobs, it turns out, are where the margin still lives.

What this means for you: these numbers track 709 actual bid openings across the public agencies we cover, from January 2025 through this August — real recorded tabs, not posted plan-holder guesses. Treat the pattern 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.