Construction Spending

• Importance (A-F): This release merits a D.
• Source: The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce.
• Release Time: 10:00 ET on the first business day of the month (data for two months prior).
• Raw Data Available At: www.census.gov.

The construction spending report is broken down between residential, non-residential, and public expenditures on new construction. The monthly changes are both volatile and subject to huge revisions, so this report rarely has any market impact. Only trends extending over three months or more can be viewed as significant.

The spending figures are in both nominal and real (inflation adjusted) dollars. The real figures for residential and nonresidential spending are used by economists to forecast the investment component of quarterly GDP. The annualized percent changes between the quarterly averages of these two components match up well with residential investment and commercial structure changes in the GDP accounts.