The Middlesex Corporation

The Middlesex Corporation is a heavy civil contractor and materials producer founded by Robert W. Pereira in 1972 and headquartered in Littleton, Massachusetts. It runs about 850 people, reports roughly $600 million in annual revenue with $4 billion under construction, and ranks around 203 on the ENR Top 400 with a top-50 placing among domestic heavy civil contractors. The firm is ENR’s number one transportation contractor in New England. Work covers bridges, highways and interchanges, aviation, rail and transit, and energy, backed by vertically integrated materials operations that produce roughly 600,000 tons of asphalt a year along with aggregates and ready mix. Middlesex holds the P-381 Multi-Mission Dry Dock No. 1 contract at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command. Offices are in Littleton, Meriden, Orlando and Tampa.

The Middlesex Corporation is really four businesses under one roof: TMC itself, Middlesex Paving LLC, Middlesex Asphalt LLC and Mass Ready Mix. That structure is why a company founded in 1972 as Middlesex Paving, Inc. can bid a billion-dollar bridge job and also sell hot mix off the plant scale.

The timeline fills in the rest. The name changed to The Middlesex Corporation in 1974. General contracting, covering heavy/highway, bridge, rail and marine work, was added in 1980. Florida work started in 1992 and the Southeast Division followed, moving from Leesburg to Orlando in 2004, where the company built its first asphalt manufacturing facility that same year and a replacement plant in 2017. The Littleton corporate offices broke ground in 1999. Middlesex University and the learning and development program started in 2016. In 2023, recognizing roughly $1 billion in backlog opportunity across its regions, the firm built out a dedicated rail division with more team members and rail-specific equipment.

Milestone contracts track that growth curve. MassDOT’s Brightman Street Bridge in Fall River came in at $218 million in 2007, CTDOT’s Fasttrack project in Hartford at $150 million in 2011, the Burns Bridge design-build in Worcester at $105 million in 2012, the Walk Bridge replacement in Norwalk at $300 million in 2015 as the company’s first CM/GC award, the MBTA Green Line Extension joint venture at $1.1 billion in 2017, and the P-381 dry dock joint venture at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard at $1.8 billion in 2021, followed by four more utility phases of the Walk Bridge program worth over $1 billion.

Current work spans the Niantic River Bridge replacement for Amtrak, South Coast Rail commuter rail expansion and on-call Red Line and Orange Line track work for the MBTA, Brightline’s Zone 2 GOAA rail infrastructure, the I-75 at Overpass Road interchange and turnpike mainline resurfacing for FDOT, air cargo expansion at Tampa Airport, and transmission and distribution work for Eversource and Liberty Utilities.

Middlesex was named a USA TODAY Top Work Place and a Top Work Place in the construction industry in 2025, and its Connecticut operations carry a Diamond STEP safety rating. The firm actively recruits Disadvantaged Business Enterprises for upcoming projects, and its preconstruction group takes estimating inquiries directly. Paving and hot mix purchases go through pavingsales@middlesexco.com.