August gave back almost everything July won.
Dodge Construction Network put total construction starts at a $1.34 trillion seasonally adjusted annual rate for August, down 24.8% from July. July had run 25.6% the other way on the back of a handful of megaprojects. Strip out the whiplash and the year is still up: starts are 15.2% ahead of 2025 through August, and the trailing twelve months are up 14.5%.
Where the August Drop Landed
Nonresidential building fell 32.0% to $624 billion. Nonbuilding fell 26.7% to $355 billion. Residential was the mild one at 5.2% down, to $364 billion.
Manufacturing was the wrecking ball. Starts in that category dropped 80.8% month over month, the steepest single fall on the board, after July logged an unusual cluster of billion-dollar industrial groundbreakings. Offices and data centers fell 31.3%, warehouses 13.4%, parking garages 24.9%. Highway and bridge work slid 20.8%, utilities 11.4%.
Not everything went down. Hotels rose 302.2% off a weak July. Healthcare rose 96.1%. Retail rose 26.9%. Environmental public works was flat at plus 0.4%, and single-family starts inched up 0.4% while multifamily fell 13.5%.
The Megaprojects That Did Break Ground
August wasn’t short of large jobs. It was short of July’s volume of them. The month’s biggest groundbreakings were a $3.5 billion Amazon STACK data center at Blanchard State Line in Mooringsport, Louisiana, carrying 780 MW; the first two phases of the $3.5 billion Steel River Energy Center in Wilson, Arkansas; a $3.2 billion hyperscale campus in Clarksville, Arkansas; a $2.9 billion Bronx detention facility in Mott Haven; $1.4 billion for the first phase of Bluegrass Power Generation in Jeffersonville, Ohio; $1.1 billion at 655 Madison Avenue in Manhattan; and $772 million for the 600 MW Heritage Prairie Wind project in Dwight, Illinois.
Regional Splits Were Extreme
South Central starts rose 28.8%. The Midwest was near flat at 1.1% down. Then the floor drops out: South Atlantic down 24.2%, West down 51.4%, Northeast down 52.6%. Regional monthly numbers at this scale are almost entirely a function of whether one very large project happened to close.
“After a pop in activity last month, construction starts largely normalized throughout August,” said Sarah Martin, Dodge’s director of economic research.
Reading the Numbers Honestly
The Dodge release is proprietary data with no confidence intervals, and the dollar values attached to individual projects are Dodge estimates rather than confirmed contract sums. A single month at a seasonally adjusted annual rate is a volatile number by construction.
Year to date is the figure worth pricing against. Nonresidential is up 23.4%, with commercial and industrial up 47.7% and institutional down 3.9%. Nonbuilding is up 22.2%, and electric power and utilities are up 69.9%. Over twelve months, utility and gas is up 87.8% and commercial 48.6% while single-family is down 8.6%.
That isn’t a market slowing down. It’s a market that has concentrated into power, data and industrial work, and those jobs land in lumps.