Granite Construction Company

Granite Construction Company, headquartered in Watsonville, California, is a large for-profit prime contractor delivering heavy civil engineering and infrastructure construction services to federal agencies exclusively on a full-and-open competitive basis with no small business set-asides. The company operates as the subsidiary of Granite Construction Incorporated and competes across 1,073 prime awards (100% of its footprint) spanning highway and bridge construction, border infrastructure, military base improvements, and flood mitigation projects, with a combined federal potential value of $16.4 billion since 1981.

Granite's customer concentration is heavily weighted toward defense and Homeland Security. By potential value, the top five agencies account for 84% of the dollar footprint: Customs and Border Protection anchors the portfolio with 19 awards worth $9.93 billion (primarily border wall and barrier infrastructure IDIQs and delivery orders); Naval Facilities Engineering Command contributes 19 awards valued at $2.33 billion (airfield paving and military base construction); the Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento District supplies 16 awards for $590.9 million (flood mitigation and dam infrastructure); the Federal Highway Administration holds 31 awards for $526.2 million (highway and road rehabilitation); and the Army Corps of Engineers Los Angeles District provides 121 awards for $419 million. By award count, the Army (315 awards) and Navy (210 awards) dominate volume, but the dollars concentrate in CBP border work, which carries multi-billion-dollar IDIQ ceilings.

Granite holds multiple large parent vehicles. The DHS CBP Southwest Border Construction 2025–2030 IDIQ (awarded October 31, 2025) carries a $5.0 billion ceiling and has already issued a $512.3 million delivery order for border wall construction in Laredo, Texas (completing June 2027). The Border Infrastructure IDIQ (awarded July 17, 2023) carries a $4.1 billion ceiling with two task orders issued, including a $198.5 million design-build order for barrier gaps in Weslaco, Texas (completing November 2028). The Navy's Airfield Paving MACC VI (awarded April 24, 2025) provides $495 million in ceiling for airfield maintenance across naval installations through April 2027. The FHWA Idaho, Montana, and Surrounding Areas IDIQ (awarded April 30, 2025) carries $60 million in ceiling for highway and trail projects in the Northwest. Granite also holds a $1.5 million Air Force Sustainment Center BPA for road and runway materials (through October 2028) and a $1.7 million Pacific Air Forces BPA for asphalt at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska (through December 2027). Representative definitive contracts include a $24.5 million Two Medicine Road rehabilitation in Glacier National Park, Montana (FHWA, completing November 2027); a $39.6 million Corralitos Creek levee and floodwall project near Watsonville (Army Corps Sacramento District, completing November 2027); a $214.9 million Denali National Park improvements project (FHWA, completing August 2026); a $178.8 million Sacramento Weir Widening flood-mitigation design-build (Army Corps Sacramento District, completing December 2026); and an $82.3 million Fort Bliss rail yard design-build (Army Corps Fort Worth District, completing September 2027).

Year-over-year activity shows volatility: 4 awards in 2022, ramping to 11 in 2023, then dropping to 3 in 2024, recovering to 9 in 2025, with 5 awards in 2026 year-to-date. Seven awards (combined potential value $883.6 million) reach ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, creating moderate recompete exposure; the largest single recompete is the $214.9 million Denali Highway project completing August 2026.

Across SCI-reportable prime service contracts, Granite invoiced $242.6 million to the federal government from FY2023 through FY2025 ($49.6 million in FY2023, $92.8 million in FY2024, and $100.1 million in FY2025), with government-paid hourly rates ranging from a low of $11.31/hr (10th percentile) to a median of $986.98/hr and a high of $4,398.00/hr (90th percentile), reflecting the mix of direct labor on construction sites and specialist engineering and project management roles. The SCI dataset shows roughly 31.5 federal service-contract FTEs delivered in FY2025 across 3 prime contracts. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, subcontractors performed an average of 39% of contractor hours; on the $214.9 million Denali project specifically, 16 named subcontractors (including Arctic Foundations for thermosyphon systems and Alaska Testlab for materials testing and inspection) executed 53% of contractor hours in FY2024, growing from 31,770 hours and 15.3 FTEs in FY2023 to 100,390 hours and 48.1 FTEs in FY2024. On the $198.5 million CBP border design-build order, subcontractors performed 91% of contractor hours in FY2025, signaling deep subcontractual engagement on specialized design and technical services while Granite retains prime responsibility for project management and on-site construction oversight. The company's corporate structure includes six named subsidiaries—Gulf Coast Builders LLP, Hawaii-Wake MACC Constructors, Granite Manson Absher (joint venture), Granite Power Engineering Construction (joint venture), Granite-Healy Tibbitts (joint venture), and GWWH (joint venture)—reflecting regional and specialized joint-venture partnerships for large federal construction programs. Sub-award activity is minimal: two sub positions under Cherokee CRC LLC for Santa Rosa Community School design-build work in Tucson, Arizona (earthwork and water hauling), indicating that Granite operates almost exclusively as a prime rather than as a feeder subcontractor to larger primes.