The value of planned U.S. nonresidential construction is 29% higher than it was a year ago, according to ConstructConnect’s Expansion Index, which read 1.29 in October. It’s the 15th straight month above 1.0, the longest run since the post-COVID ramp-up of 2021 to 2023.
ConstructConnect economist Devin Bell published the October reading Oct. 14. The index compares the dollar value of “ideated” projects, meaning anything in preconstruction, against the same month a year earlier. That includes jobs with groundbreakings years out, and ConstructConnect is upfront that none of them is guaranteed to get built.
Construction pipeline growth by category
Nine of ten categories grew year over year. Commercial led at 2.23, meaning more than double last October’s planned value, and ConstructConnect credits that mostly to data centers.
Government, community and military work each rose more than 40%. Those are the categories with public budgets behind them, which makes them slower to appear and slower to disappear.
Industrial was the only category to shrink, and it also shrank in September. ConstructConnect points to an unusually high 2025 comparison, when a run of big plant announcements set the benchmark. That’s a base effect, but it lines up with what other trackers show: manufacturing outside chips has cooled.
The state readings show how megaprojects distort the data
Geography is broad. ConstructConnect counts 48 states and Washington, D.C., above 1.0 in its write-up (its summary bullets say 49 states), and 44 of them grew more than 20%. Missouri, Montana and Alaska led.
Nebraska came in 2% below a year ago. Arizona contracted by more, and Bell’s explanation is the useful one: a single megaproject can lift a state’s reading far above normal in one month and leave a hole the next year. Because the index is built on dollars, not project counts, one hyperscale campus can outweigh hundreds of schools.
That’s the same problem the Dodge Momentum Index runs into. Dodge’s September reading rose 2.4%, but commercial planning without data centers was down 14.9%. Two planning indexes with different methods are telling the same story: strip out data centers and the commercial pipeline looks a lot thinner.
What the planning pipeline means for 2027 bidding
A rising Expansion Index doesn’t put work in backlog. Plenty of the ideated value will slip, shrink or die in permitting, especially the large data center campuses that depend on power commitments utilities haven’t made yet.
Still, 15 months of growth across almost every state is hard to dismiss. For contractors outside data centers, the government and military categories look like the steadier bet, since appropriated money doesn’t evaporate when a tenant changes plans. For everyone else, the state-level readings are worth checking against your own market before treating the national number as yours.