Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
Since January 2025, we have logged 5,069 K-12 school construction projects across 37 states in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records, worth a combined $7.8 billion. The distribution is lopsided in a way generic construction spending coverage rarely surfaces: New Jersey alone accounts for 3,441 of those projects and $1.95 billion, more than double the next state by project count.
Facts at a glance
- Since January 2025, we have logged 5,069 K-12 school construction projects across 37 states in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records, worth a combined $7.8 billion. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- The distribution is lopsided in a way generic construction spending coverage rarely surfaces: New Jersey alone accounts for 3,441 of those projects and $1.95 billion, more than double the next state by project count. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- The population is the 5,069 projects logged as active since January 1, 2025, across 37 states, worth a combined $7.8 billion. (From: Method note and scope.)
- The headline results were 1,995 returned positions for Armstrong, 1,543 for Watts, and 813 for Victaulic. (From: Method note and scope.)
New Jersey leads the country on project count and on value
The state list below is the shape of the pipeline as counted. New Jersey sits at the top on both measures, and the states behind it get there with very different project sizes.
New Jersey: 3,441 projects, $1.95 billion. By far the largest K-12 pipeline in the country by project count, and the largest by value.
Texas: 807 projects, $1.69 billion.
Georgia: 163 projects, $1.13 billion.
New York: 115 projects, $716 million.
Washington: 101 projects, $455 million.
Connecticut: 13 projects, $446 million.
Rhode Island: 2 projects, $425 million.
That New Jersey share aligns with a structural difference in how the state funds school construction. New Jersey runs school facilities work through the New Jersey Schools Development Authority, a centralized state agency that manages capital projects for the state's lower wealth districts directly, in addition to the grant programs that fund construction in the rest of the state's roughly 600 districts. That centralization produces a steady, high volume stream of publicly bid work: additions, HVAC replacements, roof work, and full modernizations.
Rhode Island's two projects, both large, illustrate the opposite pattern: a small state with a small number of districts, where school construction shows up as occasional large capital commitments rather than continuous volume.
K-12 spending moves on election and legislative calendars, not market cycles
Unlike hospital or warehouse construction, K-12 school construction is funded almost entirely through local bond referendums, state facility grant programs, or state development authorities like New Jersey's. That means the pipeline moves on election and legislative calendars, not market cycles.
A bond that passes in November shows up as bid documents the following spring or summer, timed to construction seasons that avoid the school year. That produces the seasonal clustering visible in the underlying bid due date data, and it means a manufacturer tracking this sector needs to watch state facility funding cycles as closely as individual district announcements.
One school manual puts finishes, plumbing, and mechanical names into competition at once
K-12 specification sections are broad across CSI divisions compared to most commercial building types, because a school building combines classroom, kitchen, gymnasium, and mechanical plant programs under one project manual. Cited positions from the corpus show that breadth directly, division by division.
On a New Jersey school project, the manual for "Walk-in Box Replacement at PS #8, PS #11, PS #41 and Henry Snyder High School" names, in Division 09 (Finishes), the basis of design product "Armstrong, Ultima Square Lay-in #1913" (document "2ac6cbfc-c1a6-404f-9d21-067529d055e7_PD26-27-CP2-68_Project_Manual_%26_SPECS.pdf", pages 355 to 379). A finishes decision of that kind sits in the same sector as work in a dozen other divisions of the same building type.
Plumbing carries its own named positions. On "Ramey Unit School Replacement," Division 22 (Plumbing) names the basis of design product "Watts SI-742" (document "DraftVOLUME 3_COMPILED SET_updated 4-12-2022.pdf", pages 68 to 77).
Mechanical sections name products as well. On "CSD Delaware School for the Deaf: Renovation Bid Pack B," Division 23 names the basis of design product "Victaulic Style P584" (document "CHR25014-DSDBLD-specs.pdf", pages 609 to 744).
The point for a manufacturer is the spread. A school renovation can carry specification language in finishes, plumbing, and mechanical sections at once, from classroom surfaces to the plant that serves them, and each of those sections names its own products.
The useful signal is the bid package, not the referendum result
School districts, and even a centralized authority like New Jersey's SDA, publish project announcements and referendum results well before the project manual naming actual manufacturers becomes public. For a manufacturer selling into K-12 work, the useful signal is not "which district passed a bond."
It is which of the resulting bid packages actually specifies your product once the drawings and specifications are issued. That is a document level question the referendum coverage never answers.
SpecIndex's corpus tracks that transition directly, from a district's public bid or permit filing through to the specification sections and manufacturer mentions inside it.
Method note and scope
We counted K-12 school construction projects in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records. The population is the 5,069 projects logged as active since January 1, 2025, across 37 states, worth a combined $7.8 billion.
The match rule is the one the article describes: projects the corpus records as K-12 school construction projects in those public bid and permit records, with state totals taken from the same records. The window is January 1, 2025 onward.
The state figures, including New Jersey's 3,441 projects and $1.95 billion and the $7.8 billion combined value, are retained from the original publication and are dated as of the article's original September 2026 count. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and later counts will differ.
Coverage is uneven by state, and that limit matters most for the headline state. The New Jersey count reflects the sources feeding New Jersey school records into the corpus, alongside the centralized SDA stream described above. State shares in this article describe the corpus as counted, not a census of school construction in each state.
The three exhibits in the specification section were measured on October 16, 2026, with find_brand_positions queries for Armstrong, Watts, and Victaulic. The headline results were 1,995 returned positions for Armstrong, 1,543 for Watts, and 813 for Victaulic. From those returns we chose rows whose project name is a school project and that carry a citation, and we quoted the specified_product field exactly as returned, with the project name, document_title, and page span exactly as returned.