Every contractor guesses at the field before a bid opens: how many other trucks are going to show up. This week's tally answers that for the whole state — at least for the jobs we can actually see. Across 932 recorded bid results now on the board, the average public job in New York drew 9.6 bidders. Call it ten, if you want a number you can say out loud in a bid room.

The tab also shows where the money landed. The average low bid came in 2.9% under the engineer's estimate — so estimators statewide are guessing a little high, not a little low. That's a market where competition is still doing its job: enough firms are chasing enough work that nobody's sneaking in fat.

“A field of ten means padding your number is a losing bet.”

Where the data actually names an agency, MTA runs the table. New York City Transit shows up on 115 of the results, MTA Construction & Development on another 71 — together, more tabs than every other named agency put together. CUNY logged 55, the state's Office of Mental Health 27, DDC 10, NYC DEP 7. If you build for transit, you're not short on comparable jobs to check your number against.

Here's the catch: 613 of those 932 results — two out of three — carry no agency name at all in the record. Read the labeled slice as a preview of the market's shape, not the full census. The pattern itself — crowded fields, tight-but-not-brutal spreads — is worth trusting. The exact bidder count for any one job still needs its own tab.

For anyone estimating this month: a field of ten means padding your number is a losing bet, and undercutting the engineer's estimate by more than 3% probably means you left money on the table too. Pull the tab for anything MTA, DDC, or CUNY-branded before you bid — those are the agencies with enough history on our board to actually tell you something.

Source: The RFI Wire's own tracking of agency-posted bid results, statewide.