Associated Builders and Contractors’ Construction Backlog Indicator dropped to 8.0 months in July, its lowest reading since January and down 0.8 months from both the prior month and the prior year.
The headline number is not the interesting one.
The split underneath
ABC chief economist Anirban Basu put a figure on something contractors have been describing anecdotally for a year: firms under contract on data center work reported 11.4 months of backlog. Firms without it reported 7.5.
That’s a four-month spread inside a single industry indicator, and it means the aggregate is measuring two different markets averaged together. A contractor reading 8.0 months as the state of the industry is reading a blend of a boom and a contraction.
Size matters more than usual
Contractors above $100 million in revenue reported 12.1 months of backlog. Firms under $30 million reported around 7. Both are falling, but they’re falling from very different places, and the gap tracks who can chase mission-critical work.
Data center projects favor large contractors for structural reasons: bonding capacity, self-perform electrical and mechanical scale, and the ability to staff a single job with hundreds of craft workers on a compressed schedule. Smaller firms mostly participate as subs or not at all.
Regional read
Every region declined month over month. The South stayed highest at 10.1 months, which is consistent with where the data center and manufacturing pipelines actually sit.
One caution on the data: these are ABC’s own member survey figures, self-reported by respondent contractors, and neither the sample composition nor the response rate is published. Directionally the series has been reliable. Treat the decimal places with less confidence than the direction.
For firms outside the mission-critical market, 7.5 months of backlog in August is the number to plan against, not 8.0. The difference is a quarter of pipeline.
Source: Engineering News-Record, Aug. 11, 2026, reporting ABC survey data.