The Dodge Momentum Index rose 6.9% in July to 291.7, its strongest monthly move in some time. Then Dodge published the number that matters more: without data centers, the commercial half of that index would be down 16.2% year over year.
Commercial planning grew 4.1% for the month and institutional planning grew 13.1%, against an upwardly revised June reading of 273.0. Year over year the full index is up 11.7%, commercial up 13.8% and institutional up 7.6%. Data center planning resumed after a brief June pause, while office, warehouse, retail and hotel planning all slowed.
Look at What Entered Planning
The three largest commercial projects are a $500 million data center campus in Petersburg, Virginia, the $500 million DFW20C Data Center in Fairfield, Texas, and a $500 million Google data center in Buffalo, West Virginia, listed as Project Avalon Building 2. That’s $1.5 billion of a single asset class sitting at the top of the commercial list.
The institutional side is the more interesting read, and the more durable one. Education, healthcare, recreational, religious and public building planning all accelerated, with education and public buildings driving most of the move. Public building planning has expanded more than 100% in two months, which is the kind of small-base statistic that reverses easily, but the breadth across five institutional subsectors is not noise. The largest institutional project entering planning was the $351 million Northwestern Memorial Hospital Cancer Center in Chicago, followed by a $300 million BeOne Medicines R&D expansion in Pennington, New Jersey and a $300 million Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo agricultural complex.
Fifty-nine projects valued at $100 million or more entered planning during the period.
Two Cautions Before You Build a Forecast on This
Sarah Martin, Dodge’s director of economic research, warned that “real growth will prove more constrained as inflationary expectations are priced into project costs.” Planning volume is measured in dollars and dollars are inflating, so nominal momentum overstates real square footage. That’s a bigger caveat this year than usual, given what building products manufacturers are telling investors about input costs.
Second, the DMI is a three-month moving value rather than a clean single-month snapshot, and Dodge’s own release describes the $100 million-plus project count as entering planning “throughout June” in a report on the July index.
The index leads nonresidential building spending by 12 to 18 months, so 291.7 points to a firm late 2027 for anyone positioned in data centers, education and healthcare, and a thin one for firms whose backlog depends on office, warehouse, retail or hotel work. Regional GCs without mega-project credentials should read the institutional acceleration as the more useful lead, since those jobs fund on bond and appropriation cycles rather than AI capex sentiment. The kind of work showing up on projects like the Chattanooga U.S. Courthouse doesn’t move with a hyperscaler’s capital plan.
And treat the minus 16.2% as a concentration warning. The pipeline is real. It’s also narrow enough that one capex pause takes a large bite.