← 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.

✓ Verified against the source

Every win on this list is confirmed against the bid tab the agency actually posted. We read the tabulation, confirm the low bidder by name, and only then credit the win. If a job can’t be confirmed against its document, it isn’t reported (it’s left off, never guessed). And every win links straight to the tab that proves it. It’s the only contractor ranking in Texas that shows its receipts.

▸ 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 (346 firms currently clear that bar, out of 2,806 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 5.7 contractors bid the average Texas job, so most bids lose by design — the median ranked firm wins around 15% 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.
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