How do TxDOT low bids compare with the engineer's estimate?
The low bid on a TxDOT letting came in at 90.9% of the engineer's estimate at the median, and 74.3% of the 2,072 lettings with an estimate from October 15, 2025 to October 15, 2026 were bid below it.
Source: TxDOT Bid Tab Rankings (every published letting), BidSparq
Data as of: October 18, 2026 (refreshed weekly)
Sample: 2,072 TxDOT lettings with published bid tabs, 9,643 bids from 527 contractors, lettings October 15, 2025 to October 15, 2026 (as of 2026-10-18).
License: free to cite with attribution to BidSparq
Verify this yourself: TxDOT Bid Tabulations on the Texas Open Data Portal (dataset de7b-7dna, every bid item from every TxDOT letting that published bids).
Essential statistics
- Across those lettings, low bids totalled $7.89 billion against $8.80 billion of engineer's estimates (89.7%).
- 1,540 lettings (74.3%) came in under the estimate; 532 came in at or above it.
- Maintenance: median low bid 92.5% of estimate over 1,296 lettings.
- Construction: median low bid 88.3% of estimate over 776 lettings.
Low bid as a share of the engineer's estimate, October 15, 2025 to October 15, 2026
| Low bid vs estimate | Lettings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| under 80% | 527 | 25.4% |
| 80% to 90% | 464 | 22.4% |
| 90% to 100% | 549 | 26.5% |
| 100% to 110% | 294 | 14.2% |
| 110% to 120% | 136 | 6.6% |
| over 120% | 102 | 4.9% |
What this means
The sealed engineer's estimate is TxDOT's own cost forecast, published alongside the bids. The ratio of low bid to estimate is the market's verdict on that forecast: sustained ratios above 100% signal capacity constraints or input-cost inflation, ratios well below it signal hungry bidders.
A bid tab is the tabulation TxDOT publishes after a letting: every bidder, every bid item, every unit price, next to the sealed engineer's estimate. This corpus holds every TxDOT letting that published bid tabs on data.texas.gov, loaded weekly and matched against the source month by month, so these are counts and rankings over the whole population, not a sample.
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