The 10 GCs Running NYC: 31% of the Dollars on Less Than 4% of the Permits

An analysis of NYC DOB filings, January – April 2026 · May 2026

Between January 22 and April 22, 2026, the New York City Department of Buildings issued 15,812 building permits to firms operating as general contractors. The combined declared project value was $11.15 billion.

A small group of firms accounted for a disproportionate share of that activity. The ten general contractors with the highest declared project value in the window pulled 622 permits between them — about 3.9 percent of the total — and those permits represented $3.44 billion, or roughly 31 percent of the entire 90-day pipeline.

The ten with the highest permit volume pulled 991 permits — 6.3 percent — but those permits represented $2.51 billion, only about 22 percent of the dollars.

The two lists overlap in only three firms.

A note on what counts as a "GC" here

Before the lists, a clarification on the data. The NYC Department of Buildings issues a "General Contractor" license, but several firms holding that license are not running general construction. They use the GC license to pull prime-contract permits on mechanical, plumbing, or fire-protection scopes. Maric Mechanical (176 permits) and Richards Plumbing & Heating (75 permits) are obvious examples — both file under GC licenses, but their work is HVAC and plumbing prime contracts, not building construction. Welkin Mechanical falls in the same category for high-value MEP infrastructure work. Hudson Yards Construction II is a developer special-purpose vehicle for the Hudson Yards site, with Tutor Perini and Tishman serving as the operational general contractors.

These firms have been excluded from both lists below to keep the comparison apples-to-apples. The aggregate counts above already reflect that exclusion. Their absence is itself a story — across the full unfiltered data, MEP firms and developer SPVs would push true general contractors out of the rankings.

Top 10 by permit volume

Volume here is the raw count of permits issued, regardless of size. A bathroom alteration in a Brooklyn brownstone counts the same as a Hudson Yards floor fit-out.

The averages tell you what kind of firm each one is. Kale Construction at $103,000 per permit is doing kitchen remodels, small commercial alterations, and tenant fit-outs — small, high-cadence work, mostly in outer boroughs and Manhattan walkup buildings. Turner Construction at $15.3 million per permit is doing the opposite: a small number of very large projects.

Top 10 by total declared value

The shape of this list is different. Pavarini McGovern filed six permits in the entire window. Six. Those six permits total $175 million — an average of more than $29 million per project. Joy Construction filed twelve. Tishman Interiors filed twenty-seven. These firms are not in the volume rankings because their cadence is slow; they show up here because their projects are individually enormous.

What the gap actually shows

The volume list and the value list are not the same list. Three firms appear in both top tens — Structure Tone, JRM Construction Management, and Consigli Construction. The other fourteen names appear in only one ranking.

Three patterns emerge when you read the lists side by side.

The small-job specialists. Kale Construction, High Quality Construction, L&L Construction Developers, Stream Rock Construction. Average permit values cluster between $100,000 and $420,000. These firms run a high cadence of smaller alteration, fit-out, and renovation work, often spread across multiple boroughs. Several appear on borough-specific permit lists week after week. Their work is the steady residential and commercial rehabilitation that keeps trade subcontractors employed.

The mega-project specialists. Turner Construction, Pavarini McGovern, Technico Construction, Tishman Interiors, Joy Construction. Average permit values from $8.7 million to $29.2 million. Fewer, much larger projects: ground-up commercial, high-rise residential, large institutional and public-agency fit-outs. Most of these firms file only a handful of permits per quarter, because each permit represents a project that will run eighteen months or longer.

The hybrid leaders. Three firms appear in both top tens. Structure Tone is the most pronounced: 155 permits at $4.1 million average, $635 million total. JRM filed 131 permits at $2.0 million average. Consigli filed 65 at $2.2 million. These firms have the operating capacity to run large projects and the volume to keep them flowing without gaps. Hunter Roberts and FSC D&C are close adjacents — high-cadence midsize work, not quite at the volume of Structure Tone or JRM but doing similar work at meaningful scale.

A few caveats worth naming

Declared project value is the contractor's estimate at the time of permit application. It is not the actual contract amount, and it routinely understates the true cost of a project — sometimes substantially. The relative ranking is informative; the absolute numbers should be read as floors.

The work-type filter excludes sidewalk sheds, scaffolds, construction fences, antennas, solar installations, and protection-and-mechanical-methods filings. Those categories are dominated by specialty firms that file dozens or hundreds of permits per quarter and would distort the rankings.

The window is 90 days. A different window would catch different firms — particularly in the value cluster, where a single permit issuance can move a firm in or out of the top ten.

The exclusion of Maric, Richards, Welkin, and Hudson Yards Construction II is a judgment call about what "general contractor" means in operational terms. A reasonable reader could keep them in the list and discount accordingly. The data is the same either way.

Why the gap matters more than either list alone

If you read only the volume list, you would conclude that NYC construction is a long tail of small-and-medium alterations run by a handful of high-cadence general contractors. That is true.

If you read only the value list, you would conclude that NYC construction is a small set of mega-projects run by a different handful of firms. That is also true.

The pipeline is both. It is the long tail and the megaproject set, simultaneously, with three firms quietly straddling the two. The gap between the lists is the structure of the market: most contractors operate inside the volume cluster, where work is steady but margins are tight. A smaller pool operates inside the value cluster, where projects are rare and entry is gated by relationships and prequalification. The hybrid set is where both worlds meet.

Methodology

- Source: NYC DOB NOW job filings + permits feeds - Window: permits issued between 2026-01-22 and 2026-04-22 - Filter: permittee_license_type = 'GC' and work_type ∈ {General Construction, Structural, Foundation, Mechanical Systems, Full Demolition, Earth Work, Support of Excavation, Curb Cut} - Exclusions (work type): sidewalk sheds, supported and suspended scaffolds, construction fences, antennas, solar, protection-and-mechanical-methods - Exclusions (firm classification): Maric Mechanical (HVAC/sheet metal contractor), Richards Plumbing & Heating (4th-generation NYC mechanical contractor), Welkin Mechanical (heavy MEP/infrastructure contractor), Hudson Yards Construction II LLC (developer SPV — Tutor Perini and Tishman are the operational GCs on the Hudson Yards site) - Aggregated by permittee_business_name with light cleanup of obvious truncation in the source data

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