Rider Levett Bucknall counts tower cranes by looking at them. Eighteen cities, twice a year, staff in the field. For Q3 2026 the count is up in 11 cities, flat in four and down in three.
The decliners are Chicago, Las Vegas and Toronto. Everything else held or grew.
Where the cranes went up
Denver is the standout, up eight cranes to 21 against the Q1 count, with 11 of the 21 in RiNo and Cherry Creek and the Auraria Campus working through a backlog. Seattle added four, concentrated in the University District, with multifamily mixed-use up eight against the February survey and, notably, zero commercial or healthcare cranes observed anywhere in the city.
Washington, D.C. rose 20% over six months to six cranes, with commercial going from none to two. Calgary added three to reach 29, on the back of 5,686 second-quarter housing starts and 22,805 units under construction. Miami saw mixed-use go from three projects to nine. Austin netted one, to 16, as Capitol Complex cranes came down and three went up on the convention center.
Toronto lost 20 cranes, down 25%, with residential falling hardest while education and transportation strengthened. Boston has erected just two tower cranes all year, both downtown mixed-use, with RLB describing the market as stagnant and developers substituting adaptive reuse and small capital projects that don’t need a tower crane. Chicago is down to five, three of them on South and West Loop residential totaling 450-plus units.
Sector-wise, gains came in commercial, education, hospitality, industrial, mixed-use, public and civic, and transportation. Federal government, healthcare and sport all declined.
The 42% that’s really five cranes
Education-dedicated cranes rose from 12 to 17 across all 18 markets. That’s a 42% increase and a net gain of five. Both descriptions are accurate; only one of them is useful.
The same applies to Denver’s 62% and Toronto’s 25%, which are moves on bases of eight and twenty cranes. And because the index is biannual, those comparisons run against Q1 2026, not the previous quarter. Any quarter-over-quarter framing of this data is wrong.
Beyond the small bases, this is proprietary and observational. RLB staff count what they can see, with no published sample frame, no seasonal adjustment and no confidence interval. The survey months aren’t uniform either: the city write-ups variously reference an August count, a February survey and Q1 2026. Q3 2026 is a label on a report, not a measurement date. RLB is a cost consultancy that sells market intelligence, and the release doubles as promotion.
RLB North America president Paul Brussow read it as sentiment converting: “The fact that 11 of 18 markets posted crane gains shows that project teams are moving off the sidelines.”
Maybe. A crane is a real object on a real site, which is the index’s strength, but a count of standing cranes is a stock, not a rate, and it tells you what started twelve months ago. Architecture billings at 47.2 are describing a different part of the pipeline, and a less comfortable one.
Among the projects named in the count: the Austin Convention Center, Bally’s Chicago casino, Ball Arena and Burnham Yard in Denver, the Hard Rock guitar tower in Las Vegas targeting late 2027, and the University of Arizona Biomedical Hub in downtown Phoenix, which is paused over federal funding uncertainty.
Note on dating: the report PDF went up on RLB’s site on 17 September; the issuer announcement came 22 September.
Source: Rider Levett Bucknall.