← The Caliche 100
Methodology
How the Caliche 100 is built
The Caliche 100 is built entirely from the public competitive-bid record — the bid tabulations Texas agencies publish every week. No surveys, no nominations, no pay-to-play. Here is exactly how the numbers are made.
▸ 01 · THE METRIC — DOLLARS WON
Firms are ranked by $ won: the sum of the winning (low) bid on every job a contractor took. It rewards the work a firm actually captured, not how many times it bid. We rank by volume of work won because that is the most honest, hardest-to-game measure of who is moving the most dirt in Texas.
▸ 02 · THE WINDOW — TRAILING 24 MONTHS
Only the most recent 24 months of decided bids count, anchored on the latest bid in the data. The ranking is a rolling picture of the market right now — not a lifetime-achievement list. As new bid tabs post, it updates.
▸ 03 · ELIGIBILITY — 10+ DECIDED BIDS
A firm needs at least 10 decided bids in the window to be ranked (225 firms currently clear that bar, out of 1,451 competitively-bid jobs). The threshold filters out one-off joint-venture megaprojects and keeps the list to firms that compete regularly. Firms under the bar still have a public profile — they’re just marked “not yet ranked.”
▸ 04 · ONE FIRM, ONE RECORD — DEDUPLICATION
Contractors show up on bid tabs under many spellings (“R Construction,” “R Construction Civil, LLC,” “RConstruction”). We merge those name variants into a single firm so a company’s record isn’t split across half a dozen entries. Every merge is gated by a head-to-head check — two names that ever bid as separate bidders on the same job are kept separate, because a firm doesn’t bid against itself.
▸ 05 · THE CUTS — THREE WAYS TO READ THE MARKET
- The 100 — ranked by total dollars won (the headline list).
- Sharpest Shooters — ranked by win rate (15+ bids). The selective bidders who land the highest share of what they chase.
- Risers — ranked by momentum: the biggest gain in dollars won over the last 12 months versus the 12 before it.
▸ 06 · WHY WIN RATES LOOK LOW
About 7 contractors bid the average Texas job, so most bids lose by design — the median ranked firm wins around 12% of what it bids. A low win rate isn’t a knock; it’s the game. Nobody predicts the winning price. That’s why the headline ranks by dollars won, not win percentage — selectivity and volume are different strategies, and both can top the list.
▸ 07 · SCOPE — VERTICAL CIVIL (HEAVY CIVIL IS SEPARATE)
This list covers competitively-bid vertical civil: water, sewer, MUD, municipal, paving, and site work. Highway and bridge work let by TxDOT is a fundamentally different market with its own giants — it gets its own Heavy Civil 100, coming soon, so the two aren’t mixed apples-to-oranges.
▸ 08 · WHAT IT DOESN’T CAPTURE
Honesty matters more than a tidy number, so here’s what the Caliche 100 can’t see. It counts only publicly competitively-bid work — privately-negotiated jobs, design-build, CM-at-risk, federal contracts, and subcontract work never hit a public bid tab, so they don’t count. That means a firm’s $ won here is not its total revenue: a contractor can run a huge negotiated-work book and rank modestly on this list, and vice-versa. “Won” is the apparent low (winning) bid on the public tab, not final contract value (change orders aren’t included). In the uncommon cases where an apparent low bidder goes non-responsive, withdraws, or a job is rebid, the public-record winner can differ from the final award — if your record shows a job you didn’t actually take, claim your profile to correct it. This is a ranking of the public competitive market, and only that.
▸ 09 · COMPLETENESS & CORRECTIONS
The Caliche 100 is the most complete public picture available — covering ~250 of 254 Texas counties — not a claim of perfection. Coverage gaps are individual agency portals, not whole regions, so relative rank is robust. See a number that looks wrong about your firm? Claim your profile — it’s free — to correct the record and add your wins.