Skip to content
Local Insights

Ten firms account for 46% of award dollars in TxDOT’s bonding data

Ten named prime contractors account for $22.81 billion in original awards through 117 of the dataset’s 3,294 contracts.

Body: Texas Department of Transportation
Source: TxDOT Contract Bonding dataset
Data as of Oct 23, 2026 · Retrieved Oct 26, 2026
Published 2026-10-27.

Highway illustration with the finding: ten firms account for 46.24% of original award dollars through 3.6% of awarded contracts. $22.81 billion of $49.32 billion; 117 of 3,294 contracts. As of October 23, 2026.
AI-assisted editorial illustration. The road geometry is illustrative; the comparisons below use source data.

Compare contracts with dollars

The size of the award matters. A small share of the listed contracts can represent a much larger share of their original dollar value.

Ten named prime contractors

The same ten contractor entities are highlighted in both comparisons.

Share of awarded contracts

3.6%

117 of 3,294 awarded contracts

Denominator: 3,294 distinct contract numbers. One contract counts once, even when it appears on multiple source rows.

Share of original award dollars

46.24%

$22.81B of $49.32B in original award amounts

Denominator: original award amounts in this dataset, rounded to $49.32 billion. These are not paid amounts or final costs.

Bars run from 0% to 100%, with a common baseline. The unhighlighted remainder represents the other contracts or contractors. Different denominators: these are independent comparisons, not a flow of money. Displayed values are rounded; 3.6% is 117 ÷ 3,294.

Large jobs account for much of the value

The 108 contracts with awards of at least $100 million account for 62.99% of original award dollars. They represent 3.28% of the listed contracts.

Williams Brothers Construction is the largest named contractor, with 27 contracts and about $5.99 billion in original awards—12.15% of the total.

Read the firm names literally

The dataset names 475 prime contractors. Joint ventures and single-project companies remain separate entities here. The analysis does not combine them with parent companies.

Large highway projects require substantial capacity. These figures describe the distribution of awards in this file; they do not establish misconduct, market power or whether a procurement was competitive.

Which contractors are listed?

Start with the ten largest by original award value, or search all 475 names. Source-value ranges are preserved in the downloadable ledgers.

10 of 475 named contractors shown.

Named prime contractors · original award values · Oct 23 snapshot
RankPrime contractor as namedContractsOriginal awardsDollar share
1WILLIAMS BROTHERS CONSTRUCTION CO., INC.27$5.99B12.15%
2WEBBER, LLC31$3.84B7.79%
3JAMES CONSTRUCTION GROUP, LLC22$1.83B3.70%
4PEGASUS LINK CONSTRUCTORS, LLC1$1.76B3.57%
5BALFOUR BEATTY INFRASTRUCTURE, INC.2$1.64B3.32%
6PULICE CONSTRUCTION, INC.7$1.61B3.26%
7SOUTH-POINT CONSTRUCTORS A JOINT VENTURE1$1.59B3.22%
8AUSTIN BRIDGE & ROAD SERVICES, LP14$1.53B †3.10%
9ALAMO NEX CONSTRUCTION, LLC1$1.51B3.07%
10ZACHRY CONSTRUCTION CORPORATION11$1.50B3.05%

† Some repeated source rows report different award amounts. This value is the lower sum, rounded for display; the ledger supplies both bounds. Rankings use lower sums. Top-ten membership is unchanged across the tested bounds. When opening CSV files in a spreadsheet, import contract numbers as text to preserve leading zeros; the JSON ledger retains them.

Sources, method and limits

What the figures count

This analysis covers the awarded contracts listed in TxDOT’s Contract Bonding dataset, whose source rows were last updated October 23, 2026. Let dates run from July 2011 through October 2026. It is not a single year’s spending, and the portal does not establish an exhaustive universe of all TxDOT procurement.

Award amounts are original awards. Change orders, money paid and final project costs are outside this measure. The source was downloaded October 26; its last-update date and the cover’s as-of date remain October 23.

Duplicate rows and 94 amount variants

The file contains 4,982 rows for 3,294 distinct contract numbers. Repeated project and bonding rows must not be summed as separate awards.

For 94 contracts, repeated rows contain differing award amounts. We retain the minimum and maximum for each contract instead of treating the first row as authoritative. Summing those bounds produces a total from $49,317,553,124.88 to $49,318,062,744.86. Both round to $49.32 billion.

The top ten’s sums range from $22,805,780,989.10 to $22,805,809,432.38. Their conservative share bounds are 46.24225%–46.24278%; both round to 46.24%. The uncertainty therefore does not change the cover’s rounded figures. It still matters for exact-dollar reuse.

Independent cross-check

TxDOT’s separate Recapitulation report dated October 13 lists active and pending contracts. Deduplicating its subcontractor rows yields 3,151 contracts and $44.53 billion in original bid values. The same ten named contractors rank at the top, accounting for 49.35% of that file’s original bid value.

The report has a different date, coverage and measure. Its totals are a separate cross-check, not an interchangeable denominator.

Sources and illustration

The cover is an AI-assisted illustration based on artwork supplied and selected by Charles Blain. Its road locations, dimensions and construction details are not a map or evidence of specific projects. All numerical comparisons on this page derive from the source records.

Figures may change when the source updates. This is a fixed snapshot, with no claim that the October 23 values remain current indefinitely.