Associated Builders and Contractors reported Tuesday that its Construction Backlog Indicator rebounded to 8.5 months in August, up half a month from July and flat against a year ago. The more interesting line sits underneath it: roughly one in six ABC members is currently under contract on a data center, which chief economist Anirban Basu calls the highest proportion on record.
Who gained and who didn’t
Only the largest contractors saw backlog decline in August. The year-over-year gains are concentrated among the smallest firms, those under $30 million in annual revenue. That’s the reverse of the usual pattern in a soft market and worth watching for another month or two before anyone builds a thesis on it.
The data center gap is narrowing. Contractors with data center work reported 9.9 months of backlog against 8.3 months for those without, and Basu attributes the compression to more contractors winning data center work rather than to any structural change. In other words, the premium hasn’t disappeared, the population has grown.
The staffing signal is the one to read twice
ABC’s Construction Confidence Index showed sales and profit-margin readings up in August while the staffing reading fell. All three remain above 50, meaning members still expect growth over six months. But the share of contractors intending to cut staffing over the next six months rose to 12.3 percent, the highest in any month since December 2025, and ABC noted a sharp increase in unprompted mentions of labor shortages.
Those two findings pull against each other, which is the honest version of the market right now. Firms that can’t staff the work they have are not necessarily firms that plan to hire. Basu’s own framing ties the staffing read to construction job openings sitting near a two-year high.
What these numbers are and aren’t
All of it comes from a voluntary survey of ABC member contractors fielded 20 August to 4 September. That’s a self-selected, member-only panel, not a government statistic and not representative of all U.S. contractors. CBI is a stock, not a rate: 8.5 months is months of work under contract, not seasonally adjusted, not annualized, not dollars. ABC publishes no margin of error. The Confidence Index is a forward-looking diffusion index of expectations on a 0-to-100 scale, so it measures sentiment, not sales. The release gives direction only, no CCI values. “One in six” is approximate, and “highest on record” is bounded by however long ABC has asked the question, which the release doesn’t say.
Basu’s summary is the fair one: backlog rebounded from July’s cyclical low but stays below where it has been for several months, and data centers keep contractors busy while other segments soften. Campuses like Vantage’s Lighthouse build at Port Washington are where that one-in-six is actually working.