Construction Spending MoM

Monthly Construction Spending, also called Value of Construction Put in Place (VIP), estimates value of work done on new structures and improvements during the month. The Census Bureau, part of the Commerce Department, compiles it each month from surveys and outside sources for farms, railroads, utilities, and power. It covers private and public projects in 50 states plus the District of Columbia, including projects valued at 75000 dollars or more.

It counts work installed at sites during the month regardless of start or payment timing, at annualized rates without price adjustment. It excludes land, maintenance and repairs, machinery and equipment, and oil and gas drilling. It is not housing starts, permits, sales, or contracts, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis uses it to estimate gross domestic product.

Collection starts on the first day after the reference month and runs about 3 weeks, covering activity during the prior calendar month. Releases arrive on the first working day of each month, 2 months after the reference month, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

Each release publishes headline text with annualized and unadjusted tables, error tables, charts, and summaries. It revises the prior 2 months alongside the new preliminary estimate and refreshes seasonal factors on a regular cycle. An annual revision extends corrections further back and finalizes annual estimates with a subsequent release. An experimental subnational series for private manufacturing appears at the same time.

Total splits into private construction at around 75% and public construction at around 25%, with housing, business structures, and government projects moving on different drivers.

• Private residential: new single-family houses and townhouses, new multifamily apartments and condos, plus owner-occupied improvements like remodels and additions, not maintenance.
• Private offices, commercial, and lodging: general and financial offices, data centers, shops, warehouses, hotels, and food and auto outlets.
• Private health, education, and civic buildings: hospitals, medical and school buildings, religious, safety, amusement, and recreation structures.
• Private infrastructure and factories: transportation, communication, power, and manufacturing plants, the most volatile group, checked against annual capital spending surveys.
• Public construction: state, local, and federal projects led by highways and schools, plus water, sewage, conservation, safety, and other government-owned works.

Broad trends need time to confirm. Total activity takes about 2 months to establish direction, while detailed categories take up to 8 months. Single moves need care.

• Monthly values: record each project's value put in place. It covers materials, labor, equipment share, profit, design fees, overhead, plus interest and taxes, except for state and locally owned projects.
• Imputation: fill gaps with donor and ratio methods inside similar project groups. Missing monthly values are re-estimated until each project completes.
• Weighting: scale each project's monthly value by its final weight. The weight combines sampling weight with adjustments for outliers, design costs, and frame duplication.
• Coverage adjustments: raise private nonresidential values by 25% for undercoverage and benchmark factory data to annual capital spending surveys. Specific factors apply to government categories. Single-family costs spread over months by fixed progress patterns, while owner-occupied improvements use forecasted survey data and time-series methods.
• Seasonal adjustment and annualization: adjust each series for seasonal, trading-day, and holiday effects with X-13ARIMA-SEATS, leaving trend plus noise. Then multiply the adjusted monthly value by 12 to express it as SAAR.
• Change and uncertainty: compute month change as 100 times the change over the prior SAAR. Report each move with its 90% confidence interval. Moves spanning zero are insignificant and marked, while year change compares with the same month one year earlier.