AGC Construction Inflation Data: How to Use It in a Bid

AGC construction inflation materials data is a monthly repackaging of the Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, published by the Associated General Contractors of America as a press release plus a set of tables. It tells you two things you cannot get from your own invoice history: how fast the inputs you buy are moving across the whole industry, and how fast contractors are managing to raise bid prices against them. The gap between those two numbers is the number that actually matters, and AGC prints it every month.

Use it three ways. As a sanity check on the escalation you carry in a bid. As the index reference in an escalation clause. As the exhibit you hand an owner when you ask for one.

What it is not is a price for your material. AGC publishes national index movements for broad input categories. It cannot tell you what your branch will charge for three-quarter inch copper 90s next Tuesday. That number lives in your own purchase history, which is a separate discipline covered in material price creep.

What AGC actually publishes and how often

AGC’s economics operation puts out several distinct things, and people conflate them constantly.

The monthly PPI release. A press release the morning BLS publishes producer price indexes, translating the raw series into construction language. This is the one people mean when they say “the AGC numbers.” It reliably carries the headline index for inputs to new nonresidential construction, a set of the biggest individual movers, and the comparison against contractors’ bid prices.

The PPI and employment cost tables. AGC maintains monthly tables of producer price indexes and employment cost indexes for construction materials, building types, and subcontractor segments, all sourced from BLS. This is where you go when the press release names a category and you need the underlying number for a specific month.

The Construction Inflation Alert. A periodic publication intended to help members explain cost pressures and lead times to owners and public officials. Worth knowing that it is published irregularly rather than on a fixed schedule, so do not build a bid process that assumes a current one exists.

The Data Digest and the rest. AGC’s economics hub lists the weekly Data Digest, state fact sheets, and its sizing of the industry: roughly 919,000 establishments, 8.0 million employees, and about $2.1 trillion of structures put in place annually, on a first quarter 2023 basis.

One caution. The tables page does not enumerate individual BLS series names, so if you need a specific series ID for a contract, pull it from BLS directly rather than attributing it to AGC.

The two numbers to read first

Every monthly release gives you an input cost number and a bid price number. Read them as a pair or you will misread both.

In its May 2026 release, AGC reported the producer price index for inputs to new nonresidential construction up 1.8% for the month and 8.4% year over year, the largest annual jump since the pandemic, against contractors’ bid prices up only 3.5% year over year. Chief economist Ken Simonson noted costs were rising at roughly twice the rate of the consumer price index, which is the line to quote at an owner who tells you inflation has cooled.

The month before told the same story with smaller numbers: inputs up 1.7% for the month and 6.6% year over year, bid prices up 3.6%. AGC economist Macrina Wilkins framed that gap as a driver of project delay risk, which is the honest framing: when contractors cannot pass costs through, some of them stop bidding.

June 2026 is the useful counterexample. Inputs fell 0.5% for the month but were still 7.1% higher than a year earlier. One down month is not a trend, and an owner who saw a headline about falling construction costs needs the year-over-year line put next to it.

The pattern across those three months, on AGC’s own reporting:

Month reported	Input costs, year over year	Bid prices, year over year
April 2026	+6.6%	+3.6%
May 2026	+8.4%	+3.5%
June 2026	+7.1%	not reported in the retrievable portion

The spread is the story, and it is big enough to deserve its own post: what the gap between input costs and bid prices does to your year.

Category movers are where the bid math happens

The headline index is an average across everything a nonresidential job consumes, including services and fuel. Your bid is not average. If you are a sheet metal contractor, the aluminum and steel lines matter and the asphalt line does not.

AGC’s May 2026 release broke out year-over-year moves including diesel fuel up 105.9%, aluminum mill shapes up 48.8%, copper and brass mill shapes up 26.8%, fabricated structural steel up 15.6%, and truck transportation up 17.3%. April’s release had already flagged diesel up 13.6% in the month and 73.8% year over year, asphalt up 41.0% in the month, aluminum up 37.3%, copper and brass up 20.9%, and steel products up 13.3% year over year. Earlier in the same run, AGC reported aluminum mill shapes up 39.1%, steel mill products up 20.9%, structural metal and rebar up 20.0%, and copper and brass mill shapes up 15.1% from February 2025 to February 2026.

Set that against the full prior year for scale. For calendar 2025, AGC reported the PPI for materials and services used in nonresidential construction up 3.3% December to December, with aluminum mill shapes up 30.5%, steel mill products up 17%, copper and brass mill shapes up 11.8%, and construction equipment up 5.6%. A 3.3% year followed by an 8.4% twelve-month reading is the shape of the problem: your historical unit costs are a worse predictor than usual right now, and your last-year escalation allowance is almost certainly too small.

Go to the underlying series when the number is load bearing

AGC quotes BLS. For anything going into a contract, quote BLS yourself. The headline series is inputs to nonresidential construction, goods, which read 166.9 in January 2026 and 177.5 in April 2026 on a preliminary basis, a move of roughly 6.4% in four months. BLS marks recent months preliminary and revises them, so pull the current value before you publish it anywhere and label it preliminary when you do.

How to turn it into a bid number without guessing

The mistake is applying the headline percentage to your whole material total. The headline covers inputs you do not buy and excludes the specific things that will hurt you.

A workable sequence:

Take your own material breakdown off the takeoff. Percentage of material dollars by category: copper, steel, aluminum, plastics, equipment, fuel exposure through delivery.
Map each category to the closest AGC or BLS line. Copper fittings and wire track copper and brass mill shapes. Ductwork tracks sheet metal and steel. PVC tracks plastics construction products. Delivery and fuel surcharges track diesel and truck transportation.
Weight the moves by your own dollar mix, not by AGC’s. A job that is 40% copper in a month when copper and brass ran up 26.8% year over year carries a very different exposure than the 8.4% headline implies.
Apply the rate over your actual exposure window, not a full year. A year-over-year figure is not what you will absorb between bid day and buyout. Divide it down to the number of months your price is genuinely at risk, then look at recent monthly readings, which have been running well above one twelfth of the annual rate.
Check it against your own invoices. Your purchase history is the only source that reflects your branch, your multiplier, and your buying volume. If your actual paid prices are moving faster than the national index, your problem is partly local and the fix is a conversation, not a contingency. That conversation runs better with a price trail attached, which is the point of negotiating with your supply house from documented history.

Steps three and five are the ones people skip, and they are the ones that make the number defensible.

Using AGC data as an escalation clause exhibit

Escalation is the second job this data does, and arguably the more valuable one. AGC has characterized price escalation and supply chain disruption as the number one issue in construction contracts, and the absence of an escalation clause as a killer clause for a GC on private vertical work.

A clause needs an index that is objective, published, and hard to argue with. Escalation adjustments are generally either index-based or cost-based on documented actual cost, and the index route is where AGC and BLS data earns its keep. ConsensusDocs 200.1, marketed as the only standard material price escalation clause, works by naming the specific impacted materials on a project and adjusting the contract price against an agreed objective market index, in both directions. ConsensusDocs commentary names BLS monthly publications as an objectively verifiable index source, and describes the common structure of a trigger threshold paired with a cap, citing a sample 3% trigger and pointing to FAR 52.216-2 as a standard 10% limit.

Two practical points. Name the narrowest index that genuinely covers your scope, not the broadest one that sounds authoritative. And know what you give up: under ConsensusDocs 200.1 the contractor gets no overhead and profit on an equitable adjustment, impacts caused by the contractor or its own subs and suppliers are excluded, and both parties carry a duty to mitigate.

Whichever route you take, keep the paper. Procore’s guidance is to retain initial quotes, bid proposals, purchase orders and invoices to support a claim. An index move proves the market moved. Your invoices prove it moved through your job. You need both, and matching them line by line is exactly the three-way match discipline that makes a claim survive scrutiny.

What AGC data cannot do for you

Be honest with yourself about the limits, because an owner’s estimator will find them.

It is national. Regional fuel, freight, and labor conditions move differently, and a national index will understate or overstate your market.

It is an index, not a price. It measures change from a base period. It says nothing about your discount off list or the multiplier your distributor applies to your category.

It lags. BLS publishes with a delay and revises preliminary months. A clause tied to a monthly index has a built-in reporting lag, and the settlement date needs to account for it.

It averages away your specifics. The headline index absorbed a 105.9% move in diesel and single-digit moves in other categories in the same month. Neither of those is your job.

And it says nothing about the two most common ways money leaks on a supply-house invoice: a price that drifted on a SKU with no notice, and a billing error nobody caught. National indexes will never surface either. Comparing what you paid on the same part number three months apart will, and if the quote and the invoice disagree, that is a quote versus invoice mismatch rather than inflation.

The distributor is not the villain in any of this. Your supply house is passing through moves in copper, aluminum, steel and diesel that it did not choose either, and its own cost structure is under the same pressure. What you are owed is notice and a price you can verify, not a frozen price.

The short version

AGC’s monthly release repackages BLS producer price indexes into construction categories. Read the input cost figure and the bid price figure as a pair.
May 2026: inputs up 8.4% year over year, bid prices up 3.5%. April: 6.6% against 3.6%. June: 7.1% year over year despite a 0.5% monthly decline.
Category movers, not the headline, drive your bid. Weight them by your own material mix.
Pull the underlying BLS series yourself for anything going into a contract, and label preliminary months as preliminary.
Use the data as an escalation exhibit: an objective published index, a named trigger and cap, the narrowest index that covers your scope.
Keep quotes, POs and invoices. The index proves the market moved. Your paper proves it hit this job.
National data will never catch a price that drifted on one SKU at one branch. Only your own purchase history does that.