Pull the last 1,000 bid results off the board and count who actually posted them, and New York almost disappears. New Jersey's Department of Transportation accounts for 101 of those results. NJ Treasury's Division of Property Management and Construction adds another 72. Between just those two agencies, that's 173 results — more than CUNY, MTA New York City Transit, and NYS Office of Mental Health combined.

Now, that's not because Jersey is out-building New York. It's because these two agencies actually post their tabs. CUNY shows up 55 times, MTA New York City Transit 70 times, NYS Office of Mental Health 27 times — real numbers, but a fraction of what their capital programs actually let. And 613 of the 1,000 results — better than three in five — carry no agency name at all. That's not evidence those jobs don't exist. It's evidence of exactly what this desk keeps having to say: a posted result is a floor, not a census.

“Three in five posted results carry no agency name at all. That's not evidence the jobs don't exist — it's evidence the record was never built to be complete.”

So if you're an estimator trying to read the market off public results alone, you're mostly reading New Jersey DOT paving jobs and DPMC building work, plus whatever slice of New York's public agencies bother to close the loop. The open-bid side tells a straighter story — NYCHA has 18 live packages right now, MTA NYC Transit has 15, Parks Recreation & Historic Preservation has 13, SUNY has 12 — real, current New York work. It just doesn't finish in the results feed at anywhere close to that rate.

Across all 1,000 results, the average bid pulls 10.1 bidders and the spread between low and high runs 200.5% — meaning on a typical job, the top bid can be triple the low one. Low bids are landing an average of 2.9% under the engineer's estimate, which is the kind of number an owner likes and a bidder should treat as a ceiling, not a target.

Here's what to do with this: if you're chasing New Jersey DOT or Treasury/DPMC work, you have real comparables — over 170 closed results to benchmark your pricing against. If you're chasing New York agency work, don't expect the results feed to tell you what the last job went for. You'll get a better read from the open pipeline itself, from FOIL requests, or from attending the opening — the posted record was never built to be complete, and on the New York side of this ledger, it still isn't.