Does Contractor Optimism Check Out?

Sunny outlook does not extend to *other* contractors

Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two-minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here.

Contractors are extraordinarily upbeat about the near-term outlook. Just 13% of ABC members, for instance, expect their sales to decline over the next six months, according to ABC’s Construction Confidence Index (CCI). That’s a three-year low and a massive improvement from October 2025, when 23% of contractors expected their sales to decline.

This is surprising given recent construction industry data, most of which has been fairly downbeat. So surprising that we introduced a new question in our most recent ABC CCI Survey:

Do you think other contractors will see their sales decline over the next six months?

And sure enough, contractors are far less optimistic about their competitors; 46% think other contractors’ sales will be lower six months from now.

There are a few ways to look at this.

Optimistically, contractors are more informed about their own operations and have good reason to be upbeat about the near-term outlook. Maybe the doom and gloom about other contractors is due to economics newsletters that talk about how bad construction industry data has been recently.

Pessimistically, it may be difficult to think clearly about your own operations. No business owner wants to acknowledge that their sales are going to drop, but they may take a more clear-eyed view of how market conditions will affect others.

What’s Next

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at some of the other forward-looking construction industry indicators.

Next up for the newsletter is a Wednesday morning post on the jobs report and then Week in Review, our every-Friday post that covers all the economic news and data in a breezy, five minute read.

Week in Review is only for paying subscribers. If that’s not you and you want it to be, just click the subscribe button.