How Much Do Government Construction Contracts Pay? The Real Medians

The median government construction award is $148,660

Almost nobody publishes this number, and the reason is boring: it is hard to get. Open bid notices do not carry a price. Governments publish what they want built, not what they intend to pay, and they publish the amount only after the work is awarded — in a different system, under a different record, months later. So the question every contractor asks first is the one the bid boards cannot answer.

We hold 316,617 awarded contracts with a real dollar amount attached, across 825 industry codes. Across the four construction codes — 236220 commercial building, 236210 industrial building, 237310 highway, street and bridge, and 237110 water and sewer lines — the middle award is $148,660.

That is the middle of 1,940 awards, each one a contract a government actually signed and actually paid for. It is not a survey, not an average of the ranges people post in forums, and not our opinion of what the work is worth.

The method, stated plainly so you can argue with it

A number without its method is a rumour with a decimal point. Here is ours, in full, so you can decide how much weight it deserves.

Source

federal award records published by USAspending, keyed to the industry code the buying agency assigned to the contract.

Sample: the recent-awards sample per industry code

roughly 500 awards per code, 309,150 rows in total across 825 codes.

Filter

awards with a dollar amount greater than zero. Rows with no amount are dropped rather than counted as zero, because a missing amount is not a free contract.

Statistic: the median

the award in the exact middle when you line them all up. Half the contracts paid less, half paid more.

Measured

2026-08-21. These figures move as new awards land. The date is in the sentence for a reason.

Median, not average — and the difference is not academic

Public construction contains a small number of enormous contracts. A single airfield reconstruction or hospital wing can be worth more than several hundred roof replacements put together. Averages are pulled upward by those, and the resulting figure describes nothing: it is larger than almost every contract in the set.

The median ignores the size of the outliers and only counts their position in the line. That makes it the number a small firm should plan against, because it answers the question that actually matters — what does a typical contract in my trade look like — instead of what does the arithmetic of the whole market look like.

It is also why you should treat any pay figure that does not say which statistic it used as unusable. Average and median differ by a factor of several in this market.

The medians, code by code

Trade averages hide more than they reveal, because a roofing contract and a highway resurfacing contract are not the same business. Broken out by industry code, all from the same sample and the same date, 2026-08-21:

237310

highway, street and bridge construction: median $313,529 across 499 awards.

236220

commercial and institutional building construction: median $246,433 across 486 awards.

541330

engineering services: median $199,835 across 496 awards.

238160

roofing contractors: median $144,672 across 493 awards.

236210

industrial building construction: median $87,433 across 497 awards.

237110

water and sewer line construction: median $75,000 across 458 awards.

561730

landscaping services: median $50,469 across 497 awards.

238220

plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors: median $44,283 across 494 awards.

238210

electrical contractors: median $43,998 across 495 awards.

561720

janitorial services: median $27,302 across 491 awards.

The spread tells you more than the middle does

A single number is a poor description of a market. Across the same 1,940 construction awards, one in four came in under $36,148 and one in four came in above $661,405. The middle half of the market therefore runs from roughly thirty-six thousand dollars to roughly six hundred and sixty thousand.

That spread is the practical finding, not the median. It says the same industry code contains both a two-week repair a three-person crew can absorb and a project that will consume a year of your bonding capacity. Both arrive through the same notice board, described in similar language, and the only way to tell them apart before you commit is to read the scope.

It also means a bid strategy built around one contract size is fragile. The firms that stay busy across a slow quarter are usually the ones registered for the small repair work as well as the large projects, because the small work keeps arriving when capital budgets are frozen.

What this number is not

The median award is what the government paid the winning contractor for the whole contract. It is not your revenue, because you may be a subcontractor on it. It is not your margin, because it includes materials, bonding, insurance, prevailing wage where it applies, and the cost of the compliance work that got you eligible to bid. And it is not a forecast of your next award, because your next award depends on your scope, your geography and who else showed up.

It is also a federal figure. State, county and municipal construction is bought under different rules, and the award records for it are scattered across the individual portals rather than pooled in one national system. Where the work overlaps — school roofs, county road resurfacing, municipal water lines — the federal median is a reasonable proxy for scale. Where it does not, it is not.

Used correctly, this number does one job well: it tells you whether the market you are about to spend six weeks registering for is a market that pays contracts your size. That is worth knowing before the paperwork, not after.

What is open right now, as opposed to what was paid

Across those same four construction codes, 1,545 contracts are open for bid as we serve this page, and 662 of them carry a set-aside that requires small-business status, which bars the largest national contractors from competing. In roofing alone, 127 are open; in mechanical and plumbing, 422; in electrical, 270.

Those counts are recalculated against the live corpus rather than typed into this article, which is why they will not match the paragraph above the next time you read it.

How to price a bid when you know the median

Knowing the middle of the market does not price your bid. It does three narrower things, and each of them is worth real money.

First, it sets your expectation of scale so you stop chasing contracts that cannot carry your overhead. Second, it tells you when a scope is unusual — a building-construction notice with an obvious quarter-million-dollar scope and a stated ceiling of forty thousand is a notice with something wrong in it, and reading the amendments is cheaper than discovering the problem at award. Third, it gives you a defensible starting point when a public buyer asks why your number looks the way it does.

What it cannot do is tell you the winning price on the specific contract in front of you. For that you need the award history for that agency, in that code, at that size — the record of what this buyer has actually paid for comparable work, not what the market paid on average.

That record is exactly what YNTELRADAR attaches to the contract in front of you: the awards that agency has made in that code at that size, the companies it paid, and the dates — the specific history rather than the market middle. It sits beside the score and the reason, next to the requirements pulled out of the attachments, and it feeds the draft of your bid. The median tells you whether to be in this market. The award history tells you what to write on the line.

Knowing the price is one step of seven

Finding the contract is the easy half, and it is the half everyone does.

After the number comes the rest: which of this week's jobs your firm can actually win, the bonding band and the wage determination buried in the attachments, the proposal, the compliance matrix, the dates. That is where bids die — not in the pricing spreadsheet, but in the six steps nobody has time for after it.

That is the work YNTELRADAR does for you. It is the most complete government contracting platform on the market, and the only one that takes you from found to WON: the price built from what the government actually paid on comparable awards, the companies that won them named with their agency, their amount and their date, every federal, state and local notice scored against your business with the reasons written out, the solicitation documents read and broken down, your proposal drafted, and a step-by-step plan that tracks the bid to its result. In English and in Spanish.

You have the price. This is the other six steps.

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