Forty-five days. That’s the median time between a utilities bid and a groundbreaking, according to a benchmark report TrueLook released on August 27.
Six weeks to mobilize, not six months. The middle 50% of projects fall between 31 and 60 days, which means the tail isn’t long enough to plan around either.
The barbell
The report tracks more than 3,500 public-sector infrastructure projects with 2026 bid dates across ten utility sectors and 51 states and territories. Total tracked spend is $15.42 billion.
Of that, 46 megaprojects account for $5.8 billion. They are 1.4% of the portfolio by count and 37.6% of the dollars.
The other end is where most contractors work. Fewer than one in twelve projects with a disclosed value exceeds $10 million, and only 18 nationwide top $100 million. Median project value swings sixfold by sector, from about $400,000 for sewage work to $2.5 million for electric transmission.
Geography and mix
The top ten states hold 50.3% of tracked projects. Texas alone is 14.2%, more than double the next state.
And 31% of tracked bid volume isn’t new construction at all. It’s service, maintenance and supply. Federal projects carry the highest median value at $2.05 million and the heaviest documentation burden, which is the trade every federal bidder already knows.
What to do with it
The 45-day median is the operationally useful number, and it argues for standing crew and equipment availability rather than project-specific mobilization planning. If you win, you start almost immediately, and a six-week runway doesn’t accommodate a long-lead procurement or a hiring cycle.
Worth noting the source: TrueLook makes jobsite cameras, so this is a vendor benchmark rather than an independent index. The bid-date methodology is sound enough, but the sample is public-sector projects the company could track, not the whole market.
Vertical work runs on a different clock. Cleveland Construction mobilized on Charlotte’s Beckworth Hotel conversion roughly four months after demolition started, a runway no utilities bidder working to a 45-day median would recognize.