The Census Bureau put out June construction spending on Monday and the headline was mild: down 0.1% from May. The year-over-year line is the one worth reading. Total put-in-place spending is off 3.2% from June 2025, and first-half spending came in at $1,046.9 billion against $1,084.5 billion a year ago.
Nonresidential technically rose 0.1% on the month. It’s down 3.2% annually, and almost the entire month’s gain came from one category.
Data centers are carrying nonresidential construction
Data center spending was up 7% month over month and 46% year over year. Nothing else in the nonresidential mix is doing that. Strip it out and the picture is a market that has been contracting for over a year: private nonresidential peaked at an $806.1 billion annual rate in April 2025 and has exceeded that level only three times in the fourteen months since.
Associated Builders and Contractors put a sharper number on what that split feels like from inside a company. In its June backlog reading, the 13% of member firms holding data center contracts reported 11.0 months of backlog. The other 87% reported 8.5. Same industry, same month, two and a half months of difference in forward work.
That gap is the actual story of 2026. If you’re pouring pads and setting steel for hyperscalers, or building the power infrastructure feeding them, you’re turning away work. Merchant transmission is running the same way: Invenergy’s Grain Belt Express Phase 1 put roughly $1.7 billion of EPC scope under contract with Quanta and Kiewit this year, and that’s load-driven, not policy-driven.
Residential keeps sliding
Residential fell 0.3% on the month and 4.7% on the year. Financing costs haven’t moved enough to restart the projects that got shelved in 2024, and single-family remains the weakest line in the report. Public spending held at a $544.1 billion rate, which sounds stable until you look at what’s coming.
The September 30 cliff nobody is pricing
AGC used its same-day response to flag something that isn’t in the June data at all. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires September 30, and Congress hasn’t reauthorized surface transportation funding. Highway construction is the largest public category in the report. Macrina Wilkins, AGC’s director of market insights, and ABC chief economist Anirban Basu both warned the weakness is broadening beyond housing.
Contractors reading this should be doing two things. Check how much of your 2027 backlog assumes a federal highway program that currently has no authorization past September. And if you’ve been telling yourself the market is flat, run your own numbers with data center revenue removed and see whether flat is the word you’d still use.