Total construction starts rose 25.6% in July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.79 trillion, and twenty-five separate billion-dollar-plus projects entered the pipeline in a single month. Dodge Construction Network released the figures on Aug. 20.
Nonresidential did nearly all of it
Nonresidential building starts rose 57.7% to $917 billion. Residential managed 4.9%, to $386 billion. Nonbuilding rose 2.2%, to $485 billion. Inside nonresidential the concentration is sharper still: offices and data centers more than doubled month over month, up 107.9%, and manufacturing rose 277.8%. Warehouses added 1.0%. Hotels fell 51.5% and healthcare fell 59.7%.
Three starts explain most of the jump. A $12.8 billion data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico; Micron’s $12.0 billion Fab 1 Phase 1 in Clay, New York; and a $4.0 billion Amazon and STACK data center in Benton, Louisiana. On the nonbuilding side, California High-Speed Rail booked $2.4 billion of new track and systems in Bakersfield, alongside a $2.3 billion microgrid and a $1.5 billion Transco pipeline segment in Chatham, Georgia.
The parts that fell
Highway and bridge starts dropped 16.9% in July and environmental public works fell 7.8%. Utilities rose 44.7%. That divergence deserves more attention than the headline. The same month that produced twenty-five megaprojects produced a decline in the ordinary transportation work that most contractors actually bid.
Year to date through July, total starts are up 16.9%, nonresidential up 21.9% and nonbuilding up 29.8%, while residential is down 1.7% and single family down 6.1%. Over the twelve months ending in July, total starts are up 14.4%, utility and gas up 105.6%, and single family down 11.1%.
How to read a number this volatile
Eric Gaus, Dodge’s chief economist, named the problem in the release: “Megaproject driven volatility headlines a disjointed construction market. There is strength in pockets, multifamily within residential, data centers within commercial, energy within non-building, but also verticals struggling to stabilize.”
A 25.6% monthly move on a seasonally adjusted annual rate isn’t a demand signal. It’s an accounting artifact of when a handful of enormous projects happened to cross the start threshold, and any of the three largest could have landed in June or August instead. The regional splits show the same thing: the Northeast up 117.7% and the West up 61.4%, against the Midwest down 24.6% and South Central down 9.3%. Dodge’s own regional paragraph describes those figures as covering May through July, which doesn’t match the month-over-month framing of everything else in the release.
One production note for anyone citing the original: the body of Dodge’s release carries a “July 21, 2026” dateline that appears to be carried over from the prior month, and the page’s meta description still describes June data. The July figures were published on Aug. 20.
The residential line is the steadier read and it’s flat to negative. Conversions are one of the few places multifamily supply is being added without new ground, and the economics still depend on subsidy. The Carew Tower conversion in Cincinnati carries $14.25 million in Ohio historic credits and a roughly $37 million abatement against an $18 million acquisition basis.