Every contractor who's chased School Construction Authority work has a version of the same theory: the bids come in waves. Spring's a flood. Summer's dead. Nobody writes it down; everybody plans around a feeling.

We wrote it down.

“July: 31 bid dates. Not thirty-one per year — thirty-one total.”

The As-Built desk analyzed more than 4,200 SCA solicitation records with bid dates from 2013 through 2026. Now, it's a sample — a big one — not a registry of every package the SCA has ever put on the street. More on that below. But at this size, you can't miss the shape of the calendar, and it repeats year after year.

Here's the finding: across the full sample, 44 percent of all SCA bid dates fall in just two months — May and June. June alone accounts for 28 percent: 1,189 bid dates, roughly triple an average month. May is second at 16 percent. A secondary swell runs through March and April, at nine to ten percent each. Then the floor drops out.

July: 31 bid dates. In the entire sample. Not thirty-one per year — thirty-one total, an average of two or three per July. So the busiest month in the SCA calendar is followed immediately by the emptiest month in New York public construction. The fall and winter run flat and thin: August through February each carry roughly four to six percent of the year's activity. The market never fully sleeps — there are always packages moving — but from Labor Day to St. Patrick's Day, the SCA is a trickle compared to what spring brings.

Now you might be thinking — maybe one or two blowout springs are throwing off the average. They're not. In nine of the last ten years, May and June together carried between 43 and 60 percent of that year's bid dates. If anything, the concentration's been tightening: 2024 came in at 51 percent, 2025 at 60 percent, and 2026 — with the fall season still to come — is tracking at 59 percent so far. The exceptions prove the rule. 2016 was the softest spring in the sample, at 17 percent. And 2020 is the visible scar in the data: 99 bid dates all year, and not one in May or June — the season COVID erased. Every other year, the wave shows up on schedule.

So why June? Here's the likely answer: New York City's fiscal year ends June 30, and the SCA's capital program runs on the city's fiscal cycle. A June crush followed by a July silence is exactly what a budget-year deadline looks like from the outside. We're treating that as the leading explanation, not a proven one — the SCA publishes its capital plans and amendment schedules, and this desk will map the bid wave against those documents in a follow-up. What the data establishes on its own is the pattern, not the paperwork behind it.

So what do you do with this? The SCA year isn't twelve months. It's a two-month season with a long pre-season, and the firms that win in it are the ones ready before the wave, not during it. Work backward from a May–June peak: prequalification current by winter, bonding capacity confirmed by March, estimating bandwidth cleared by April — because when half the year's packages hit the street in eight weeks, an estimator who's already buried is a bid you didn't submit. The March–April swell is the warning bell, not the main event.

The flip side is just as useful. July is when nothing closes — which makes it the month to close out paperwork, chase requisitions, take stock, and get certified for the categories you passed on last season. And the thin fall market cuts both ways: fewer packages, but fewer bidders paying attention. Stay active from September to February and you're often competing against a shorter table.

What this means for you: this calendar is built from more than 4,200 SCA solicitations posted between 2013 and 2026 — not a complete registry of every package the agency has ever advertised, and coverage thins out at the edges (the earliest years, and 2026 still has months to go). None of that changes the action item: a 44 percent concentration in May and June, repeated for a decade, is a pattern solid enough to plan a whole year's bonding and staffing schedule around.

Next in this series: the same lens on DASNY, DDC, NYCHA, and the MTA — and the follow-up mapping the SCA wave against its published capital plan calendar.