Contractors · Methodology & definitions
SERIES NOTES
Contractor lookup · how vendor totals are grouped
The contractor lookup at the top of the page comes from the New York City Record Recent Contract Awards dataset (NYC Open Data qyyg-4tf5), limited to awards in Construction categories. Many firms appear under several spellings of their name, and a single firm group can file under more than one legal entity. Where we can confirm by hand that several names belong to the same firm, they roll up under one parent total and every underlying name and its amount is listed, so nothing is hidden. Grouping is a fixed, verified list of name variants, not automated name-matching or any statistical guess; we group only on a distinctive shared identifier or an unmistakable spelling variation of the same company, and when a connection is uncertain we leave the names separate. Each amount is the value stated in the award notice, a floor rather than a running total of work performed or paid, so a group's total is a lower bound. The School Construction Authority and the Port Authority remain out of scope for naming a contractor, because those datasets carry no vendor field.
Contractor lookup · registered and paid
The award-notice figure is queried live from the City Record on each load. The registered and paid figures come from Checkbook NYC, the Comptroller's system of record, which a browser cannot call directly: it allows no cross-origin request and returns a paged XML feed. An automated job fetches and normalizes it server-side every night and writes a compact static file the lookup reads. That job reconciles each Checkbook vendor name to the same parent groups used here through the same normName() normalization the award record uses, so the three measures line up against one contractor. A group with no exact name match after normalization shows no Checkbook figure rather than a guess.
Contractor lookup · MTA & State public work
The MTA and State figures come from New York State open data on data.ny.gov: MTA Procurements (twsw-2mqa) and the State University Construction Fund contracts (cfjm-ii27), both limited to the Design and Construction/Maintenance procurement type. These datasets name the awarded contractor, so they close the contractor-naming gap that City sources leave on authority work. They are reported through the Public Authorities Reporting Information System, which re-reports every active contract each fiscal year with a growing cumulative spend, so figures here are deduplicated to one record per contract at its latest fiscal-year report; summing the raw rows would multi-count. They are a separate ledger from the City and Checkbook figures and are never added to them, because they sit on different books. A firm with no exact name match after normalization shows nothing here rather than a guess. The three measures, award-notice value, registered, and paid to date, are never summed; this is the public demand-side view of a contractor and says nothing about costs, margins, bonding capacity, or performance.
The Concrete Index is an independent personal project built on public data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any employer, and nothing here is any employer's assessment of any named company.
Market structure · what this section measures
Competitive set by wins groups NYC City Record construction award notices (winners only; no co-bidders) by award value into four bands and reports market-structure statistics, count share, dollar share, top-N share and an HHI concentration index, computed over exact normalized awardee names. In this section awardee names are used only as a deterministic grouping key and are never published, ranked, scored, or presented as a measure of any contractor's standing or creditworthiness. Award notices are deduped to one record per procurement (pin), renewals are flagged, and awards of $500M or more are excluded to match the index.
Universe and window
Source is the City Record award feed (dataset qyyg-4tf5), which is award notices by nature, filtered to category_description beginning "Construction" with contract_amount above zero and below $500M. The default window is the trailing twelve months by start_date, read as twelve fully-elapsed months: the window ends with the last complete month and never reads the partial month in progress, the same trailing-twelve the “Analysis” and “Briefing” pages use. The all-time toggle drops the date filter. The contractor lookup at the top of the page reads that same window, dedupe, renewal rule, and $500M ceiling, so the list and the analysis below it describe one set of awards. Renewals are identified by matching selection_method_description against renewal or extension, the same continuation rule the “Awarded” and “Analysis” pages use, and excluded from the set by default, with the include toggle adding them back.
Deduplication and grouping key
Award notices can repeat across a single procurement, so records are deduped to one per pin, keeping the maximum contract_amount seen for that pin. The grouping key for concentration is the awardee name normalized deterministically: trim, collapse internal whitespace, uppercase, strip trailing punctuation. This is exact normalized matching, not probabilistic. The normalized string is a key only and is never displayed.
Size bands
Small is under $1M. Mid is $1M to $10M. Large is $10M to $100M. Mega is $100M to $500M. Awards of $500M or more are excluded, the same megaproject exclusion the index uses, so a handful of outsized procurements do not swamp the dollar shares.
Concentration statistics
Within each band, awardees are aggregated by dollars on the normalized key. The top-N figure selects the N awardees with the most awards by count, then reports their combined share of the band's dollars. It is labeled "top N by count, dollar share" so the count-based selection and the dollar-based measure are not confused. HHI is the sum of squared dollar shares, scaled to a 0 to 10,000 index: below 1,500 is labeled fragmented, 1,500 to 2,500 moderate, above 2,500 concentrated. These describe the shape of demand in a band. They are not a ranking of contractors.