Pull up our own board today and you'll find 748 bid results sitting in the tally — actual tabulations, not just postings waiting on an outcome. That's a big enough sample to say something real about how this market's pricing public work right now.

The average job in that pile drew 10.8 bidders. That's not a ghost-town letting. That's a real bid room, plenty of firms still showing up and fighting for public contracts even with two years of everybody grumbling about material costs and labor.

“The low bid, on average, came in 2.9% under the engineer's own number — the estimate is a ceiling most bidders are already ducking under.”

Here's the number that should get an estimator's attention. The average spread between the low bid and the high bid ran 16.4% — a real fight for the job, not a giveaway. And the low bid, on average, landed 2.9% under the engineer's own estimate. So the person setting the number for the agency is running a little high, not low, against where this market is actually settling.

The heaviest lanes in the sample: CUNY, with 55 recorded results, and the New York State Office of Mental Health, with 27, most of that running through DASNY. NYC DEP logged seven, DDC four, NYS Office of General Services six, Nassau County Department of Public Works four. Colleges, mental-health facilities, sewer plants, and county roadwork, all landing in the same window.

One honest note on the sample: more than 600 of these 748 results came through without a clean agency tag in the record — the cost of pulling from public tabs that don't all name themselves the same way. The overall averages hold up fine across a sample this size; the agency breakdown above is the part we can attribute cleanly, and it's worth treating as a floor, not a full census.

For a contractor deciding where to spend estimating hours this week, the data says don't pad the number chasing an easy win. Eleven firms are already in that room with you, and the ones landing the job are shaving under the engineer's line, not over it. If your number comes back 10% above the estimate, you're not just high — you're outside where this market is actually clearing.