The 100 largest green contractors reported $101.9 billion in green building revenue for 2025, up 5.9% from $96.3 billion, according to Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 100 Green rankings, published Oct. 8. The firms in the bottom half of the list accounted for 5.4% of that total. A year earlier they had 7%.
Green building is growing. It’s also concentrating.
Where green contractors gained and lost revenue
ENR’s analysis shows the growth came from a short list of markets. Telecommunications work, the category that holds data centers, rose 32.9% between 2024 and 2025. Government offices grew 12.8% and airports 12.6%. The declines were steeper. Multi-unit residential fell 20%, hotels and hospitality fell 22.6%, and retail dropped 71.1% to $154.1 million.
Just over 67% of the Top 50 contractors that filed in both years reported more green revenue. In the lower half, 42.2% did. ENR also reports that median general contracting revenue fell 11.5% and is down 18.3% over two years, without giving the dollar figure. International green contracting revenue went the other way, up 44.4% to $5.4 billion.
Turner sits at No. 1. DPR is No. 3, HITT Contracting No. 6, Skanska USA No. 16, Webcor No. 26, JE Dunn No. 27 and Pinner Construction No. 62, going by the positions ENR cites in its story. The full tables are behind the magazine’s paywall, and the article doesn’t spell out how ENR defines green revenue.
Green design revenue grew nearly three times as fast
The design side had a better year. The Top 100 green design firms reported $11.8 billion, up 17.1%, and median revenue rose 22.2% to $29.9 million. Among the Top 50 that filed both years, 84.5% grew. Among the bottom 50, 51.1% did.
The same squeeze shows up here. The bottom 50 design firms hold $582 million, or 4.9% of the total. ENR says their share was 9.9% in 2020. Industrial process and manufacturing work led the gains at 54.4%, followed by hotels at 36.7% and health care at 30.4%. HOK is No. 8 on the design list, CannonDesign No. 12, Corgan No. 18 and SOM No. 24.
What green building firms told ENR about owners and data centers
The executives ENR interviewed described owners who still want performance and are less willing to pay for a plaque. Megan Hardman, a principal at Affiliated Engineers, said “there seems to be a noticeable shift away from ambitious stretch goals.” Jenni Betancourt of Dewberry said owners see the value and struggle to justify the soft costs. HITT’s Fernando Arias, who chairs a GSA advisory committee on high-performance buildings, said federal incentives for private projects may be thinner while agencies keep pursuing their own priorities.
On data centers, Swinerton’s Chris Chany told the magazine the pressure to deliver quickly is real. That’s the tension in the rankings. The sector driving green contracting revenue is the one where schedule outranks everything else.
The projects ENR highlights are the ambitious kind. Turner and JE Dunn are building the Austin Convention Center, co-designed by LMN, which the team says will be the world’s first zero-carbon convention center. That’s the team’s claim, and it hasn’t opened. Webcor is putting about 1,500 rooftop solar panels, roughly 900 kilowatts, on a terminal at San Francisco International Airport.
Certification still sorts projects by how hard they try. USGBC’s own data shows LEED Platinum projects cutting emissions 41% and entry-level ones 14%. And a smaller job can still pencil: Gilbane and Marvel recently finished a $128 million all-electric building in Brooklyn under budget.
For a mid-sized contractor, the list reads as a warning about where the green work went. Fewer than half the firms ranked 51 through 100 grew their green revenue in a year when the total rose by $5.6 billion. Retail’s green volume across all 100 contractors is now about 0.15% of the list.