Look at where the volume actually sits on the results side of the board right now, and one name jumps out from a crowded field: the New Jersey Department of Transportation, with 101 recorded bid results — more than any other agency we track, NJ Treasury's Division of Property Management & Construction close behind at 72.

On the open-bid side, NJDOT is still posting — 10 live solicitations today, steady from 10 yesterday — while its in-state counterpart, New York State DOT, holds 5 open and New York City's own DOT shows nothing open at all on today's count. If you do highway or heavy-civil work and you're only watching the five boroughs, you're watching the quieter half of the region.

“Nine bidders a job, a 17% spread, bids landing just under the engineer's number — that's a market working normally. It's just working normally in New Jersey.”

Across the whole results set — a thousand recorded tabs — the average job draws about 9 bidders and a spread of 17.3% between low and second bid. That's a competitive, well-attended market by any measure; a job with single-digit bidder counts and a tight spread is a job the pros all showed up for and priced close. Low bids are also landing about 4.3% under the engineer's own estimate, on average — agencies are getting a small break at the bid table right now, not getting squeezed.

That average spread number moved a lot from the last time we pulled it — 202.2% in the prior cycle versus 17.3% now — which tells you more about which jobs happened to close in each window than about the market swinging wildly overnight. A single oddball tab with a blown-out spread (a job where one bidder was wildly out of line with the rest) can drag a thousand-job average around by itself. Read the level, not the delta, until we can show you the same underlying set two days running.

What doesn't move: NJDOT and NJ Treasury together account for nearly a fifth of every recorded result in our set. If you're bonded for heavy-civil or public-building work and you haven't registered on the New Jersey side, you're leaving the state with the deepest bench of recent competitive data uncontested.