SlabCalc Concrete Cost Index: professional installed concrete sidewalk cost per square foot in 26 US metros from winning bids on 1,233 public contracts (2023-2026 lettings)

Metro-level index of professional installed concrete sidewalk cost in US dollars per square foot for 26 US metropolitan areas. Built from the winning bids on 1,233 public sidewalk contracts let in 2023–2026, read line by line from the published bid tabulations of 16 public agencies: TxDOT, FDOT, IDOT, Caltrans, CDOT, NCDOT, MoDOT, ODOT (Ohio), MnDOT, WSDOT, Oregon DOT, TDOT, PennDOT, MDOT, NYC DDC and Gwinnett County. These are the unit prices contractors submitted to win public work, not survey estimates. Prices are as bid and are not inflation-adjusted. Median professional installed sidewalk cost across the 26 metros: USD 10.97 per sq ft; range USD 4.44–33.33 per sq ft. Method: for each metro, the winning unit price for the 4-inch concrete sidewalk item on every contract line of at least 300 sq ft in that metro's own agency district (5-inch in IDOT District 1, where that is the standard item; Caltrans minor concrete sidewalk is priced per cubic yard and converted at 81 sq ft per CY). The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles of those lines. bid_count is the number of distinct contracts; a metro needs at least 5 contracts to enter the index. Modelled metros, included in the file for reference but not part of the index (data_source modelled or derived): San Diego, Boston, Las Vegas and Phoenix. San Diego, Boston and Las Vegas are another metro's bid data scaled by a BLS construction-wage ratio; Phoenix is modelled from national labor and material indices. File: one row per metro and project type. The index figures are pro_per_sqft_low and pro_per_sqft_high on the sidewalk rows; the other project types and the per_sqft columns are SlabCalc model outputs derived from them. Data last updated 1 November 2026. Correction, 2026-11-01: in versions up to 1.3 the low figure (pro_per_sqft_low) on the sidewalk rows was published at 75% of the 25th-percentile winning bid, while this description called it the 25th percentile. From version 1.4 the low figure is the 25th percentile, as described. High figures, contract counts and the order of metros are unchanged; every low figure rose by a third and the median moved from USD 9.89 to USD 10.97 per sq ft. Figures from earlier versions are superseded. Correction, 2026-10-12: earlier versions included metros whose prices or bid counts were not read from agency records (St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Columbus, New York; typed-in counts for several more). Every metro was rebuilt from line-level bid tabulations; earlier figures (21 metros, 396 records, $9.63 median) are superseded.