How do TxDOT low bids compare with the engineer's estimate?
The low bid on a TxDOT letting came in at 90.8% of the engineer's estimate at the median, and 74.8% of the 2,206 lettings with an estimate from September 3, 2025 to September 3, 2026 were bid below it.
Source: TxDOT Bid Tab Rankings (every published letting), BidSparq
Data as of: September 9, 2026 (refreshed weekly)
Sample: 2,206 TxDOT lettings with published bid tabs, 10,274 bids from 533 contractors, lettings September 3, 2025 to September 3, 2026 (as of 2026-09-09).
License: free to cite with attribution to BidSparq
Essential statistics
- Across those lettings, low bids totalled $8.60 billion against $9.74 billion of engineer's estimates (88.3%).
- 1,649 lettings (74.8%) came in under the estimate; 557 came in at or above it.
- Maintenance: median low bid 93.0% of estimate over 1,330 lettings.
- Construction: median low bid 87.4% of estimate over 876 lettings.
Low bid as a share of the engineer's estimate, September 3, 2025 to September 3, 2026
| Low bid vs estimate | Lettings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| under 80% | 571 | 25.9% |
| 80% to 90% | 495 | 22.4% |
| 90% to 100% | 583 | 26.4% |
| 100% to 110% | 313 | 14.2% |
| 110% to 120% | 134 | 6.1% |
| over 120% | 110 | 5.0% |
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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