Averages are doing a lot of hiding this quarter.
ENR’s Construction Industry Confidence Index landed at 52 for the third quarter of 2026, down two points from Q2, with the forward economic outlook index at 45, off three. Read as a single number, that’s a market cooling slightly. Read by company size, it’s two different markets. Contractors and design firms above $250 million in revenue put confidence at 63 and the economy at 54. Firms at $50 million or less put the same two questions at 41 and 37.
Where the confidence gap comes from
Twenty-two points of spread on the same question, in the same quarter, is not noise. The work that’s driving construction volume right now is concentrated in project types that small firms rarely prime: data centers, power, advanced manufacturing, large healthcare. A $40 million general contractor watching commercial and residential planning soften is looking at a different pipeline than a national builder with three gigawatt-scale campuses in backlog.
The trade split points the same way. General contractors and CMs came in at 59. Subcontractors sat at 49, design firms at 47. Designers see the front of the cycle, and what they’re seeing is thinner.
Skill shortages jumped 18 points in a quarter
The single sharpest move in the survey isn’t a confidence number at all. Sixty-seven percent of respondents named skill shortages as a constraint on their business, up 18 points from the second quarter. That is a fast change for a structural problem, and it lines up with what the same 3Q package found on wages: construction unemployment at 3.1% in August, an all-time low, with electricians at contractors above $50 million in revenue taking a median 8.8% increase.
A firm that can’t staff the work is not confident about the work, whatever its backlog says.
The surveys don’t agree, and that’s useful
CFMA’s Confindex went up 1.9% in the same period, to 109. Both indexes are self-reported executive sentiment, both are fielded to overlapping populations, and they moved in opposite directions. Anirban Basu of Sage Policy Group advises on the CFMA measure and has been consistent that the financial-management population it surveys reads risk differently than a general contractor population does.
None of these numbers measure a single project start. They measure what executives said in a form. That’s worth something, especially the 18-point skill-shortage move, and it’s worth a good deal less than the Census and BLS series they get quoted alongside.
The number to carry forward is the spread, not the level. When large and small contractors disagree by twenty-two points about the same economy, one of them is going to be wrong before the fourth quarter closes.
Source: ENR, 2026-09-23.