Twenty new jobs hit the board overnight. Not one number on the pricing side moved.
The open-bid count went from 475 to 495 between Monday's read and Tuesday's — a 4% jump in live solicitations in a single day. That's the kind of swing that usually drags the pricing stats around with it, because new postings mean new engineer's estimates, new trade mixes, new agencies setting the tone. Not this time.
“Twenty new jobs hit the board overnight. Not one number on the pricing side moved.”
Average bidders per job: 9.1. Average spread between low and second bid: 16.1%. Average low bid versus the engineer's estimate: -4.7%. All three numbers are identical to the prior cycle, down to the decimal, even though the board carries 1,000 results built from a completely different and much larger pool of underlying jobs than the 495 open right now. That's not a coincidence worth chasing — it's a sign the results dataset is deep enough that one day's worth of new postings doesn't move it, and a sign the market itself hasn't shifted its temperature in 24 hours.
Where the new work landed tells you more than the pricing did. New Jersey DOT alone carries 21 open postings — the single largest agency share outside the 70 unspecified-agency listings — and NJ Treasury's DPMC adds another 9. On the results side those two agencies are even more dominant: NJDOT shows 101 closed results and DPMC shows 73, together accounting for roughly 17% of the entire 1,000-result sample. If you bid New Jersey public work, you are bidding into the single deepest, most liquid part of this market, full stop.
On this side of the river, MTA Construction & Development (10 open, 21 closed results) and NYCHA (4 open, 3 closed) keep steady drips rather than blitzes, and the Dormitory Authority holds 14 open postings against 5 closed results — a pipeline that's clearly still filling, not yet converting to award data at the same pace.
So what does a flat spread and a flat low-vs-estimate number actually tell a contractor? It says the gap between a careful estimate and what wins a job hasn't widened or narrowed — no sudden rush of desperate low bids, no sudden pullback into fat pricing. If you're estimating this week, price it the way you'd have priced it last week. The only thing that changed is there's simply more of it to price.